A business our Industrial Authority wanted to get us into still risks bankrupting Irwin County: a private prison. Maybe we should do better due diligence around here and invest in better business ventures.
AP reported 23 April 2012, South Ga. detention center nearly sold at auction,
A privately owned detention center that houses hundreds of illegal immigrants in south Georgia is struggling with finances, and narrowly avoided being auctioned this year.
How bad is it?
Continue readingGot caught promoting laws that encourage people to kill people? Double down on laws to kill people through pollution! That’s what ALEC is doing. And look who’s apparently a member of ALEC: the Southern Company, parent of Georgia Power, and proprieter of several of the largest and dirtiest coal plants in the country.
Brian Merchant wrote for Treehugger Tuesday, Two ALEC Campaigns Exposed: One Kills Renewables, One Boosts Fracking,
After major corporations like Pepsi, Kraft, Proctor & Gamble, and Coke all ditched the rightwing group, ALEC announced that it would
abandon its drive to enact gun and voter ID laws. The group’s decision came after a couple high profile campaigns were launched decrying ALEC’s involvement in passing the ‘stand your ground’ laws.
But the group is actually stepping up its efforts in other arenas, as I noted last week. And two new reports, one from ProPublica, the other from DeSmogBlog, outline its new aims: dismantle legislation that incentivizes renewable energy generation, and preserve loopholes that allow natural gas companies to keep the chemical cocktails in their fracking fluids secret from the public.
This is the same ALEC that promotes laws like Georgia’s HB 87 that lock up more people to benefit private prison companies like CCA, which wanted to build a private prison on Lowndes County, Georgia. Traficking in human beings is not too sordid for ALEC, so poisoning people through polution doesn’t seem surprising.
Hm, let’s look at the corporate membership of ALEC, as collected by Sourcewatch’s ALEC Exposed. Why there’s The Southern Company, parent of Georgia Power! I’m frankly a little surprised Continue reading
ALEC will no doubt try to tar WCTV as “liberal media.” That will be amusing!
Troy Kinsey wrote for WCTV Monday, 
themselves as members of ALEC. Damien filer with ‘progress florida’ says its time for them to break their ties with a group that’s taking national heat over ‘Stand Your Ground’.
“This is not just about ‘shoot first’ laws; this is about everything from the so-called ‘parent trigger’ law that we saw during the last legislative session, the prison privatization schemes that we’ve seen crop up. It really covers the spectrum in terms of bad policy for people, and policy that’s really aimed at padding the pockets of the corporations that fund this organization.”
Hm, I wonder who in the Georgia statehouse are ALEC members?
-jsq
Lots of people, from Occupy Buffalo to at least one New York state representative, are tired of tax abatements doled out by ECIDA (the Erie County Industrial Development Agency, aka The Economic Development Corporation for Erie County). ECIDA thinks it knows better. Sound familiar?
Occupy Buffalo complained to ECIDA about tax abatements for luxury residential lofts that had already been completed, saying “this board is not a democratic process”. They noted the people’s representative on the ECIDA board had said it was a clear waste of taxpayer resources but was ignored, and couldn’t stop county resources being “fleeced by this board”. They added, “This experiment has gone on for long enough, and it’s time for immediate change” of “this crony corrupt process”. Occupy Buffalo demanded suspension of tax abatements by ECIDA until a public town hall meeting could be held.
Here’s the video:
Tired of tax abatements: Occupy Buffalo and NY state reps @ ECIDA 2012-02-13
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, .
Video by for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
Occupy Buffalo wrote 16 February 2012, Occupy Buffalo and the Erie County Industrial Development Agency,
Continue reading 
Don’t believe Latin American presidents (former and current) or a global commission including captains of industry or historic statesmen such as Jimmy Carter or major newspapers or Judge Napolitano or law enforcement professionals like Frank Serpico? Ask an economist who spells it out: the War on Drugs is an economic, public safety, and civil rights disaster, and legalization is needed right now.
Economist Art Carden wrote for Forbes yesterday, Let’s Be Blunt: It’s Time to End the Drug War,
April 20 is the counter-culture “holiday” on which lotsand lots of people come together to advocate marijuana legalization (or just get high). Should drugs—especially marijuana—be legal? The answer is “yes.” Immediately. Without hesitation. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200 seized in a civil asset forfeiture. The war on drugs has been a dismal failure. It’s high time to end prohibition. Even if you aren’t willing to go whole-hog and legalize all drugs, at the very least we should legalize marijuana.
OK, why?
Continue readingOcilla, about an hour north of here, took the private prison gamble, and now is scrambling to import enough prisoners to fill it.
Jim Galloway wrote for the AJC 11 April 2012, Importing illegal immigrants — into private Georgia prisons quoting Hannah Rappleye and Lisa Riordan Seville in The Nation 10 April 2012, How One Georgia Town Gambled Its Future on Immigration Detention,
Deportations have reached record levels under President Barack Obama, and demand for detention facilities has increased. Starting in 2002, ICE had funding for 19,444 beds per year, according to an ICE report. Today, ICE spends about $2 billion per year on almost twice the number of beds.
ICE’s reliance on facilities like the Irwin County Detention Center has put small rural towns at the center of one of today’s most contentious policy arguments—how to enforce immigration law. A yearlong investigation by The Nation shows how much politics has come to rule detention policy. Even as Georgia and Alabama passed harsh new immigration laws last year designed to keep out undocumented immigrants, documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that politicians from both states were lobbying hard to bring immigrant detainees in. ICE succumbed to the pressure, sending hundreds of detainees to the financially unstable facility in Georgia that promised to detain immigrants cheaply. That promise came at the expense of the health, welfare and rights to due process of some 350 immigrants detained daily in Ocilla.
Marvelous. Pass a low to eject illegal immigrants, except it really locks up a bunch of them, but not enough to keep Ocilla’s private prison full, so import a bunch of them back in as prisoners.
Aren’t you glad we didn’t accept a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia?
Ocilla and Irwin County didn’t just make that bad bet once, they doubled down on it:
Continue readingLikely new industry, private prison really cancelled, strategic planning, and trees in the median!
Here are videos of the entire March regular meeting of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority (VLCIA). Here’s the agenda.
It’s good that they approve minutes after emailing them to each other. Maybe someday we the taxpayers will get to see those minutes.
Did you know they had two executive sessions on 23 February 2012, at 10AM and 2:25 PM in addition to their retreat and regular meeting of that same day? If they’re having all these executive sessions, presumably all the material about personnel and real estate that needs to be kept confidential is in there, and the minutes of the regular meetings shouldn’t contain anything the public should not see.
For example, Continue reading
A $200 transaction can cost society $100,000 for a three-year sentence.It’s time to legalize, regulate, and tax drugs, taking tax money away from private prisons and police militarization, and freeing it up for education, health care, and rehabilitation.
George F. Will wrote 11 April 2012, Should the U.S. legalize hard drugs?
Amelioration of today’s drug problem requires Americans toWill-like, he ignores the real reasons we’re locking up so many people (corporate greed), but he does get at the consequences: Continue readingunderstand the significance of the 80-20 ratio. Twenty percent of American drinkers consume 80 percent of the alcohol sold here. The same 80-20 split obtains among users of illicit drugs.
About 3 million people — less than 1 percent of America’s population — consume 80 percent of illegal hard drugs. Drug-trafficking organizations can be most efficiently injured by changing the behavior of the 20 percent of heavy users, and we are learning how to do so. Reducing consumption by the 80 percent of casual users will not substantially reduce the northward flow of drugs or the southward flow of money.
A little reading in local histories of the area or talking to people
who were involved even a generation or two back indicates that Lowndes
County has always been a cliquish sort of place, mostly run by old boys,
for reasons that made some sense in the early days (lack of resources,
mainly), but doesn’t so much anymore in these days of I-75 and I-10,
airport, railroads that still go everywhere, Moody AFB, VSU as a regional university, technical and community colleges,
two hospitals and medical industry, TitleTown, Grand Bay WMA, Wild Adventures,
and south Georgia sunshine we can export to Atlanta and points north.
Here are a few books about the old days, all available in local libraries and possibly in local bookstores: Continue reading
“Our membership in ALEC expires this spring and for a number of reasons, including limited resources, we have made the decision not to renew.”and Intuit (Turbo Tax and Quicken) also decided to let its ALEC membership lapse.
Reasons such as petitions by numerous organizations asking companies
to ditch ALEC?
We seem to have a case of the cheese fleeing the rat ship….
(Sometimes I wish I could draw.)
Here’s another petition for corporations to ditch ALEC. Let’s not forget ColorofChange’s petition about voter suppression.
And how about ALEC board member UPS, based in Atlanta?
-jsq