If you are wondering why things are breaking

 

Good grief. Now they are attacking public libraries!

 

‘A For-Profit Company Is Trying to Privatize as Many Public Libraries as They Can’

What libraries can do

The reason we don't privatize

It has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with profit.

Private prisons demand states maintain maximum capacity or pay fees

Falling crime rates are bad for business at privately run prisons, and a new report shows the companies that own them require them to be filled near capacity to maintain their profit margin. 

 A new report from the advocacy group In the Public Interest shows private prison companies mandate high inmate occupancy rates through their contracts with states – in some cases, up to 100 percent.

The report, “Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations,” finds three Arizona prisons must be filled to capacity under terms of its contract with Management and Training Corporation. 

If those beds aren’t filled, the state must compensate the company. 

The report found that occupancy requirements were standard language in contracts drawn up by big private prison companies. 

One of those, The Corrections Corporation of America, made an offer last year to the governors of 48 states to operate their prisons on 20-year contracts. 

That offer included a demand that those prisons remain 90 percent full for the duration of the operating agreement.

Friday frolics... and an elephant.

baby elephant in tub

‘Frack Gag’ Bans Children From Talking About Fracking, Forever

The Hallowich case shows how drilling companies can use victims’ silence to rewrite their story. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that before their settlement, the Hallowichs complained that drilling caused “burning eyes, sore throats, headaches and earaches, and contaminated their water supply.” But after the family was gagged, gas exploration company Range Resources’ spokesman Matt Pitzarella insisted “they never produced evidence of any health impacts,” and that the family wanted to move because “they had an unusual amount of activity around them.” Public records will show, once again, that fracking did not cause health problems.

When fracking and oil production creates a sink hole, who loses?  BP blames oil spill victims.

The NSA comes clean... or something.

Iran's new leader speaks of moderation and respect.

Marine life moving towards the poles.

Privatization has failed in these places.

Farmers suspicious of new Monsanto crops... I wonder why?

Speaking up against racism.

NASA finds the source of the Magellanic Stream

The Conservative March Toward a Society of Sociopaths

Celebrating sexual choice.

Fools, Fanatics, Faith, and Fungus

NRA Ridicules Congresswoman Whose Husband Was Shot and Killed in Mass Shooting

Dick Cheney, Ahmed Chalabi Contemplated Value Of Iraqi Oil To U.S., David Frum Writes

Depleted uranium, a gift of war that keeps on giving....

MUST WATCH: A Politician Loses It And Restores My Faith In Humanity

White-nose bat fungus. So now we kill off the bats and wonder why we are being inundated with insects.

Prison Profiteers Are Neo-Slaveholders and Solitary Is Their Weapon of Choice

From bones to security

The church decorated with bones.

Global warming is making plants grow around the northern latitudes.

Surviving Mengele.

Bee venom is good for something... destroying HIV cells.

A woman speaks out about how men should be taught not to rape... and gets truly ugly threats about rape.

Unknown microbes found in Antarctic ice lake.  Isn't this how the horror story begins?

The frightening buildup of hate groups in reaction to a black president and the gun control movement. (pdf)

Getting rich off of schoolchildren.

Policy Basics: Top Ten Facts about Social Security

Droning on....

The deadliest war the U.S. has ever had is the war we waged against ourselves.

Tell gun owners to get gun insurance:

Seven states – California, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Colorado – have, in the past month, introduced bills to have gun owners put their money where their mouth is: liability insurance for their firearms, codifying that responsibility if their firearms are used incorrectly – used by children who find them, by criminals who easily steal them; by people to whom they sell them without requiring a background check.

All things Richard III.  The timeline for the hunt for his grave site and the miraculous find.

Sea urchins save the world!

We aren't the greatest nation in the world.

Prisons in private hands go badly

Drone killing memo

Deliberately destroying the post office

In 2005 the then Republican controlled Congress passed bill HR22 requiring the Post Office pay $5 billion dollars a year, over a ten year period, for healthcare cost 75 years in the future. No other part of government or any other corporation in the world has to do this. The post office is the only part of government that funds itself. It funds itself my selling stamps, express mail, money orders and many other services. It does not take American taxpayer money. This bill was passed to bankrupt the postal service so it could be privatized broken into pieces and sold to the highest bidder. 

These $5 billion dollar a year payments started in 2006. In 2006 then President George W. Bush appointed four members to the five member Postal Board of Governors who selects the Postmaster General to runs the postal service. Those four members appointed by President George W. Bush were (Thurgood Marshall Jr., Mickey Barnett, James Bilbray and Louis Giuliano). Only one member Dennis Toner was appointed to the board by President Obama (usa.gov).The Postal Board of Governors selected Patrick Donahoe (usps.gov) as Postmaster General. 

Today the 2012 Republican controlled Congress, the Postal Board of Governors and Postmaster General Donahoe are at it again. They want to take all California Postal Service driving jobs from San Francisco to San Diego and give them to outside private contractors by the end of 2012. Postmaster General Donahoe claims this is being done because California postal diesel vehicles don't meet air pollution requirements. The APWU (American Postal Workers Union) offered to modify these vehicles at no cost to the Postal Service. So far, Postmaster General Donahoe has not responded to the APWU offer. This proves money is not the issue. This is another attempt to take government jobs and give them to outside private contracting companies whose main goal is making money not serving the needs of the American people.

When you privatize prisons

You'll do anything to fill your cells.

Wow...

Ann Romney: "Throw out" the American public education system.

Bring on the elitist private schools and the uneducated masses....

Arrest more people!

Prison companies are making money!

Private Prison Management Company Seeks Guaranteed 90% Occupancy From States

One sentence news

It gets better.

Finding a lost church.

Making friends under the sea.

Rachel Carson didn't kill millions of Africans.

Does eating today's type of wheat poison you?

Dumping the 'junk DNA' theory.

The way governments begin to topple.

Republicans can't afford to give women equal pay.

Come back!!  You have my car keys!

Do Democrats really support the privatization of public schools?

Artist of the weird.

Ohio Secretary of State on the mat to explain obstruction to voting.

Sometimes being rude is good.

Bobbles...

An awesome dad.

Why printers don't cancel printing right off...

The secret behind the empty chair.

Prisons for profit. Why change the system to serve justice when people are making money?

We are killing everything....

And after that, I need some animals:

Confetti News

A gay couple's take on the Chik-Fil-A rumpus.

Chris Hayes and his show UP with Chris Hayes.  One of the best ones out there.

Texts from Hillary.

What's involved with the newest Mars landing.

What has Romney NOT lied about?

Private prisons, public money.

Boiling in a vat of stupid

SCOTUS: Total Betrayal of Democracy

Kansas Board of Health Revokes License of Doctor for Not Forcing Ten-Year-Olds to Give Birth

Shocking Interglacial Shift to Hot Arctic Tied to Rapid Antarctic Ice Melt



Saudi Arabia beheads woman for 'sorcery'

 What privatizing prisons brings us... money over people. Man Dies After Prison Tries To ‘Cut Costs’ By Denying Him Care

 The Big Ag companies, poisoning workers in the fields so they can bring us poisoned food. Poisoning Workers at the Bottom of the Food Chain

 


 The United States of America... not the greatest country in the world anymore.

 

Bisphenol A exposure linked to brain tumor diagnosis.

What war does to soldiers.

Weird, wise and wonderful... and simply stupid

21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity

Dog

The dangers of privatizing things that governments do.

Solar cell breakthrough taps previously unused energy source

11 Bizarrely Wrong Beliefs Americans Have About Themselves

Throwing trash into a volcano as an experiment. I'd be freaked out.





11 facts about the Affordable Care Act

Krugman:

None of this should be happening. As in 1931, Western nations have the resources they need to avoid catastrophe, and indeed to restore prosperity — and we have the added advantage of knowing much more than our great-grandparents did about how depressions happen and how to end them. But knowledge and resources do no good if those who possess them refuse to use them. And that’s what seems to be happening. The fundamentals of the world economy aren’t, in themselves, all that scary; it’s the almost universal abdication of responsibility that fills me, and many other economists, with a growing sense of dread.

Why am I in this handbasket and why is it getting so warm?

Drowning in our own garbage.

Let the United States Holy Wars begin!  Lo, the Lord sayeth, smite them, smite them, smite them!!

Surviving the flesh eating virus, lightning, and boobs.

The dangers of for-profit schools and prisons, and why the Republicans are embracing them wholeheartedly: More bodies, more money to wring out of them, and no oversight! Such a deal! Quality of schooling and dedication to returning prisoners to society are not involved:

Leonard invokes the “numerous lawsuits” against a company called Corinthian Colleges, including one in which a former admissions officer described high-pressure, even bullying recruitment tactics at one of the company’s schools, Everest: “The ultimate goal was to essentially make [potential students] wallow in their grief,” the admission officer’s affidavit says, feel that pain of having accomplished nothing in life, and then use that pain as their “reasons” to compel the leads to schedule an in-person meeting with an Everest admissions representative. A spokesman for Corinthian denied this account of its recruiting, but, as Leonard writes, “there’s little question that an obsessive focus on constantly boosting enrollment is crucial to survival in the for-profit college world. Sky-high withdrawal rates plague the industry.”

Further down in the same article:

Chang’s series in the Times-Picayune, meanwhile, took a close look at how it is that Louisiana nearly doubled its prison population in the past twenty years, to become the state with the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the country—the highest in the world, in fact. (Adam Gopnik has written for The New Yorker about our mass-incarceration culture.) What Chang finds is a system under which the state began housing the majority of its inmates in for-profit facilities, many of them run by cash-strapped local sheriffs and some by private prison companies. Both have a financial incentive to keep the prisons full— like hotels, prisons in Louisiana don’t want any vacancies. “If the inmate count drops, sheriffs bleed money,” writes Chang. “Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars.”

Attacking schools

Across the country, education entrepreneurs are seeking to replace public school teachers with computer programs, despite the research that shows that virtual education is inferior to traditional teaching. They are getting lots of help from Tea Party politicians on a mission to privatize schools and bust unions.

Stalin never looked so good

Go and read Tengrain of Mock, Paper, Scissors.

Cheney has privatized the office of the Vice President

New York Times editorial:

Mr. Cheney is the driving force behind the Bush administration’s theory of the “unitary executive,” which holds that no one, including Congress and the courts, has the power to supervise or regulate the actions of the president. Just as he pays little attention to old-fangled notions of the separation of powers, Mr. Cheney does not overly bother himself about the bright line that should exist between his last job as chief of the energy giant Halliburton and his current one on the public payroll.

From 2001 to 2005, Mr. Cheney received “deferred salary payments” from Halliburton that far exceeded what taxpayers gave him. Mr. Cheney still holds hundreds of thousands of stock options that have ballooned by millions of dollars as Halliburton profited handsomely from the war in Iraq.

Reviewing this record — secrecy, impatience with government regulations, backroom dealings, handsome paydays — it dawned on us that Mr. Cheney is in step with the times. He has privatized the job of vice president of the United States.