wildfires and politics
POSTED BY: mal4prez
UPDATED: Sunday, August 9, 2026 14:08
VIEWED: 27581
PAGE 8 of 15
Furthemore (I put this is a different post so you can return to it after you've had your nap), if you don't understand these questions, or if you wish to be polite and respectful person, or if - heaven forbid - you just want to make communication be open and successful, you could go back and read my posts. You'll note they started short and got longer when I saw that you weren't understanding or replying to what I wrote. I figured that more explanation was needed.
Now I see that you just don't want to engage in actual two-way communication. Check. If nothing else, I am getting to know you much much better.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Finally, I'll make this simple. My previous two posts were my subtle way of suggesting that you seem to be full of shit. I think you don't read or reply to my posts because you are incapable of addressing my questions.
If I'm reading you right, you will now claim to be horribly offended and overwrought and you'll swear off continuing any interaction with me yada yada yada etc etc. (And how convenient is that for question #1-4 avoidance!) It's the common thing that righties around here do, and while you may not have an official "R" by your name, you're sure walking like a duck.
I do hope you surprise me. Neigh instead of quack.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
But as I think about it Mal4Prez - did you learn anything from your efforts besides that it was hard?
I did, and I tried to summarize it above but it's hard to explain succinctly. I'll have to be long-winded again. (Bite me Wishimay
) I learned that at first sight, the task your organization is facing may seems simple, but the more you dig the more you realize that all those twisty-turny complications are actually necessary. My experience: a college student dance group that was growing insanely, in four years it went from 5-6 too a few hundred members. The performance had become a nearly unbearable 3 hour show with 25 different dances because everyone wanted to do their own piece. And a majority of the pieces were simply horrible. The poor audience!The founder of the group (not me, and frankly she was a prime offender as far as horrible dances) was soon to leave the school. Other people would be making decisions soon, and it wouldn't be clear who was top dog. So we needed guidelines as to who set the rules, who got to choreograph, how auditions were run etc...
The challenge was to maintain what was good about the group: the freedom of opportunity. ANYBODY could be involved, so some weirdo math major could sign up and put a finished piece on stage with costumes and lights. The dances ranged from bad funk (a LOT of that *shakes head*) to jazz, ballet, modern, martial arts, and undefinable. As a place open to exploration, it was great. We wanted to keep that alive so no faction, like my own modern dance group, could took over and drown out the rest.
But we also didn't want this thing to crumble under its own weight, so that every student who'd seen a music video would stage yet another unbearably bad MTV-wanna-be-but-I-ain-t-got-no-abilities dance. All members agreed that we needed some encouragement to grow and learn and improve, not just wiggle on stage (not good wiggling, but the shield your eyes kind) for the frat boys in the audience.
I think the committee did all right, but it took several meetings and much debate over exact language. The final document was a bit of a nightmare on first read. But it had to be, to cover the necessary grounds.
That's what I learned. When I see an official document or policy that seems way too complicated, I have to remind myself that the drafters likely started with something simple, but due to real life they had to keep adding and adding until their meaning was fully spelled out. So it's possibly worth my time to try and figure out all those complications, so I can understand the full situation.
Hey, that's kind of like my posts in this thread, if only folks would bother to read them... (Oh yeah I'm having fun with this!)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
"... due to real life they had to keep adding and adding until their meaning was fully spelled out. So it's possibly worth my time to try and figure out all those complications, so I can understand the full situation."
Well, thanks for repeating. I appreciate it. It does seem to roughly mirror my own experience and observations - what distinguishes a single-issue movement for example from a fully fledged political party.
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Prisons, Privatization, Patronage
Over the past few days, The New York Times has published several terrifying reports about New Jersey’s system of halfway houses — privately run adjuncts to the regular system of prisons. The series is a model of investigative reporting, which everyone should read. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/nyregion/in-new-jersey-halfway-house
s-escapees-stream-out-as-a-penal-business-thrives.html?_r=3) But it should also be seen in context. The horrors described are part of a broader pattern in which essential functions of government are being both privatized and degraded.
First of all, about those halfway houses: In 2010, Chris Christie, the state’s governor — who has close personal ties to Community Education Centers, the largest operator of these facilities, and who once worked as a lobbyist for the firm — described the company’s operations as “representing the very best of the human spirit.” But The Times’s reports instead portray something closer to hell on earth — an understaffed, poorly run system, with a demoralized work force, from which the most dangerous individuals often escape to wreak havoc, while relatively mild offenders face terror and abuse at the hands of other inmates.
It’s a terrible story. But, as I said, you really need to see it in the broader context of a nationwide drive on the part of America’s right to privatize government functions, very much including the operation of prisons. What’s behind this drive?
You might be tempted to say that it reflects conservative belief in the magic of the marketplace, in the superiority of free-market competition over government planning. And that’s certainly the way right-wing politicians like to frame the issue.
But if you think about it even for a minute, you realize that the one thing the companies that make up the prison-industrial complex — companies like Community Education or the private-prison giant Corrections Corporation of America — are definitely not doing is competing in a free market. They are, instead, living off government contracts. There isn’t any market here, and there is, therefore, no reason to expect any magical gains in efficiency.
And, sure enough, despite many promises that prison privatization will lead to big cost savings, such savings — as a comprehensive study by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the U.S. Department of Justice, concluded — “have simply not materialized.” To the extent that private prison operators do manage to save money, they do so through “reductions in staffing patterns, fringe benefits, and other labor-related costs.”
So let’s see: Privatized prisons save money by employing fewer guards and other workers, and by paying them badly. And then we get horror stories about how these prisons are run. What a surprise!
So what’s really behind the drive to privatize prisons, and just about everything else?
One answer is that privatization can serve as a stealth form of government borrowing, in which governments avoid recording upfront expenses (or even raise money by selling existing facilities) while raising their long-run costs in ways taxpayers can’t see. We hear a lot about the hidden debts that states have incurred in the form of pension liabilities; we don’t hear much about the hidden debts now being accumulated in the form of long-term contracts with private companies hired to operate prisons, schools and more.
Another answer is that privatization is a way of getting rid of public employees, who do have a habit of unionizing and tend to lean Democratic in any case.
But the main answer, surely, is to follow the money. Never mind what privatization does or doesn’t do to state budgets; think instead of what it does for both the campaign coffers and the personal finances of politicians and their friends. As more and more government functions get privatized, states become pay-to-play paradises, in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become a quid pro quo for getting government business. Are the corporations capturi
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Yeah, it's ugly.
Some of the privatized groups trying to get into managing prisons and schools are groups like blackwater, and then you have some serious bad mojo.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
As Escapees Stream Out, a Penal Business Thrives
By SAM DOLNICK
selected excerpts
After decades of tough criminal justice policies, states have been grappling with crowded prisons that are straining budgets. In response to those pressures, New Jersey has become a leader in a national movement to save money by diverting inmates to a new kind of privately run halfway house. At the heart of the system is a company with deep connections to politicians of both parties, most notably Gov. Chris Christie. Mr. Christie, a Republican who took office in January 2010, has for years championed the company that plays a principal role in the New Jersey system, Community Education Centers.
Mr. Christie himself was registered as a lobbyist for the company in 2000 and 2001 when he was a private lawyer, according to disclosure reports that his law firm filed with the state. In early 2010, he hired the son-in-law of Community Education’s chief executive as an assistant in the governor’s office, according to state personnel records.
And as United States attorney for New Jersey and then governor, Mr. Christie has often visited the company’s halfway houses and praised its work. The company has highlighted those visits in its publicity material.
“Places like this are to be celebrated,” Mr. Christie said in a 2010 speech ... “A spotlight should be put on them as representing the very best of the human spirit,” he said. “Because as you walk through here, as I’ve done many times, what you see right before your very eyes are miracles happening.”
Community Education said it had developed a highly successful model of “community corrections” that had improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of inmates across the country. It said the rate of escapes at its halfway houses in New Jersey was “staggeringly low,” given the many people who go through the system. April, eight months after The Times undertook its investigation.
.
.
.
Many of these halfway houses are as big as prisons, with several hundred beds ... New Jersey officials have called these large facilities an innovative example of privatization and have promoted the approach all the way to the Obama White House. (But) Perhaps the most unsettling sign of the chaos within is inmates’ ease in getting out.
While these halfway houses often resemble traditional correctional institutions, they have much less security. There are no correction officers, and workers are not allowed to restrain inmates who try to leave or to locate those who do not come back from work release, the most common form of escape. The halfway houses’ only recourse is to alert the authorities.
And so the inmates flee in a steady stream: 46 last September, 39 in October, 40 in November, 38 in December, state records show.
Assemblyman Sean T. Kean, a Republican, said of the escapes, “It’s not really a problem.” “It’s a cheaper way of doing business,” he said of the system, “so that’s why it behooves us to use that option.”
The financial incentive is also clear. The state spends about $125 to $150 a day to house an inmate in a prison. The corrections, parole and other government agencies in New Jersey pay roughly $60 to $75 per inmate per day to operators of halfway houses, including Community Education, based in West Caldwell, N.J.
But as the system has grown, the percentage of New Jersey inmates convicted of violent crimes but lodged in halfway houses has been rising, to 21 percent now from 12 percent in 2006, according to state statistics. Their ranks currently include dozens of people serving time for murder, and hundreds convicted of armed robbery, assault or weapons possession — some of whom escaped.
At the same time, the state acknowledges that it has never examined whether the system helps inmates. Last year, the Christie administration commissioned a three-year study. Community Education has financed its own research that it says shows the success of its programs.
Last year, the New Jersey comptroller, Matthew Boxer, released an audit ... “As a state, we have done a p
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:Quote:
Originally posted by pizmobeach:
Looking at the US Post Office it's easy to imagine that if some of today's smartest and hungriest entrepreneurs were put in charge how much better and more profitable it could be run. With so much more retail now being done online with the associated increase in shipping... there should be a windfall.
Yanno, if one more completely ignorant right-wing talking-point comes out of your brain I think it will implode from the vacuum.
Do you think insulting people makes you some how more right? Or do you just enjoy it?
Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
The Post Office is in the state it's in b/c the right-wing Congress hobbled it with extra expenses no other business OR government agency has to support, then hobbled its ability to stabilize its finances by forbidding it from making a profit.
Right. Let's review: "forbidding it from making a profit" = failure. Does that give you any ideas on what we should try to fix it?
This may come as a shock to you but not all Profit is bad. There are even Democrats and very left leaning people who wake up every day and pursue Profit with a great deal of passion. Your favorite restaurant, artists (they don't just give their art away), the guy who used to deliver your paper, even the company that makes those all-weather pointy hats you favor - they all need to be profitable. It's not an ugly thing except in extremes, kind of like social behavior.
Scifi movie music + Firefly dialogue clips, 24 hours a day - http://www.scifiradio.com
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The problem w/ the PO, if you think about it for half a second, which you obviously haven't, is that if it's unable to collect a bit more here and there it never can build up a reserve for the unexpected. It ALWAYS ends up either at par (not often) or behind (most of the time, while it's waiting for a review to allow it to raise its rates just enough to catch up to the past). Overall, it calculates to being behind. It doesn't matter if you call it profit or a reserve, a prudent operating BUSINESS cushion is a good thing.
But capitalist profit? Where people who have capital get personally paid for NO OTHER REASON THAN having capital, at every turn of the cycle ... not a good thing.
If you REALLY REALLY want people to be getting the full value if their work - you do, don't you? - you can't allow that kind of profit.
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME