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AFSCME Blocks Prison Privatizing Profiteers
In Minnesota, AFSCME and its correction officer members won a major victory in the fight against privatizing the state’s prisons when the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) announced it is shutting down its 1,600-bed Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton next month.
Thanks to lobbying and pressure from AFSCME members, the state is placing more offenders in state-run facilities. The prison population at Prairie was down to just 250 at the end of 2009. Those inmates are being transferred to state facilities.
Eliot Seide, AFSCME Council 5 executive director, says the union has been
pushing government to take responsibility for corrections, not pass the buck to private corporations that profit from prisons.
Tim Henderson, a corrections officer and president of AFSCME Local 2728, says the union successfully mobilized last year to block an attempt to shut down the state’s Moose Lake prison and transfer its inmates to Appleton. He says the state should not be “renting out its responsibilities.”
We’ve been at war with the privateers, and we won’t stop until Minnesota places all of its inmates in state-run corrections facilities. Our efforts are paying off. A growing number of legislators are now convinced that privateers shouldn’t profit from prisons.
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3 Comments
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The Clinton Administration, together with its Democratic Leadership Council neoliberal allies, was a strong proponent of privatizing public resources. To say the Clinton cabal and its Congressional stooges were wildly successful in that regard would be an understatement.
An example would be the privatization of military responsibilities. 40 years ago the ratio of military personnel as compared to employees working for private contractors like Blackwater, Halliburton and Kellogg, Brown and Root was sixty to one. Today in Iraq and Afghanistan the ratio is one to one !!!!!!
Private “enterprise” is making a killing. Wars make them billions of dollars thanks to no-bid contracts that further privatize our armed forces. (By the way, employees who work for private contractors are paid far more than are our men and women in uniform. Mercenaries are not bound by a military code. Reports abound about their lawless acts that have gone unpunished.)
In 2008, the head of AFSME spent millions of dollars on the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. He had the gall to refer to Obama delegates as “light weights”.
Not surprisingly, he is one of the pie cards that caved-in to the tax on certain health care benefits for workers.
He and his labor-faking co-conspirators have chosen go-along-to-get-along business-unionism over real representation of the ranks and file in our nation. The battle by AFSME in Minnesota would have been avoided if so-called labor “leaders” would have had the guts to throw down the gauntlet long ago, Alas, today’s coiffed and manicured pie cards couldn’t carry water for real working stiffs.
We workers need our own political party, and we need real leaders in the labor movement.
The chickens have come home to roost. The myth of “those wonderful Clinton years” has been exposed for what it is! Since the passage of NAFTA and WTO we’ve lost 5 million good manufacturing jobs, and millions of “hi-tech” jobs, and today working class America (with the exception of its suits and ties) is reeling.
And the response from the honchos? More privatization. In case you don’t know it, that is exactly what the new health care reform sham does. It transfers public funds into the bank accounts of investors in for-profit health care.
Wake up! The futures of our children and grandchildren are at stake!
We have the highest percentage of incarcerated citizens of any country in the world, because the system works. It is designed to criminalize the entire working class. It is also very profitable to ensure that released prisoners have no chance for a new start with a decent job. The real money is in recidivism – repeat customers for life. More severe draconian laws mean longer sentences. Prison is the new slavery where half of the black and hispanic kids go after dropping out of high school. Until we launch our own labor party we are simply sheep bleating on the way to the slaughterhouse.
well, yeah, Clinton’s chickens and the Democratic Leadership Council’s chickens came home to roost, which isn’t really a surprise.
There has been talk of a Labor Party in the US for many, many years, in one form or another, probably since the 1840′s.
We can redouble our efforts within the Democratic party, utilise the PDA (Progressive Democrats of America) organisations,
work through Democrats.com, work through the Unions or use some of the existing organisations like the Green parties that exist in all 50 states, or thew Working Families Party in New York,
or do all of the above. Or is somebody going to call a national ‘Labor convention’?
- or just keep blogging ?? – ha !