The biggest secret of politics in the United States is that a majority of the population is to the left of both major parties.

This can be amply demonstrated by comparing public opinion on a host of issues to the policies pushed by corporate and political elites. Whether it’s US aggression overseas, raising taxes on corporations and the Super Rich, expanding social services or any number of other issues, there is a vast disconnect between the people and those who purport to represent them.

This perhaps more than anything explains the widespread lack of public interest in voting. Rather than a result of apathy or ignorance, as many elite pundits arrogantly assert, public withdrawal from the electoral process is actually an informed choice. Since people often rightly view voting as a lose-lose proposition, voter turn-out in the United States is significantly lower than anywhere else in the industrialized world, plus millions who do vote do so with little enthusiasm.

On no issue is the disconnect between elites and the public more striking than health care. For decades, public opinion has favored a single payer system such as exists in every other industrialized country. Simultaneously, corporate elites and their representatives in the two major parties have been waging an unrelenting war on the people’s right to comprehensive health care. Their goals are to privatize Medicare, destroy Medicaid, and shift the cost of employment-based plans in both the public and private sectors to workers.

This disconnect is what lends the discussion about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) now before the Supreme Court such a comical tone. Amidst all the pathetic cries about Obamacare, nowhere is it mentioned that millions of those who oppose PPACA do so not because it’s a Marxist-Leninist attack on individual liberty, but because they recognize the law as a sell-out to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. President Obama did not call on those who live and work on the frontlines of the health care crisis – nurses, social workers, public health advocates, the uninsured, the insured who have been denied necessary care – to write the bill. He delegated that task to insurance industry representatives, and they have been salivating ever since at the billions in additional profits they will reap when PPACA goes into effect.

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Abby Martin Breaks the Set on Obamacare: Where Corporations Come First

The Democrats’ claim that there was no political will for a public option, let alone single payer, was Elite Speak for those of us in charge don’t care what the public wants. No one who’s paying the slightest bit of attention should have expected otherwise. Candidate Obama received $25 million from the insurance industry in 2008, after all, roughly four times as much as John McCain. And as most reasonably bright nine-year olds understand, Met Life, Pfizer and the rest of the ruling class are not in the business of financing Marxist-Leninist revolution.

Following the lead of the rest of the world is off the table in the boardrooms of the Super Rich even though the lack of a single payer system has been an important factor in the decline of US industry’s competitiveness (Swedish, Japanese and German automakers, for example, do not have to pay a dime for workers’ health insurance). Instead, the 1% has moved much production overseas while attacking the living standards of those domestic industrial workers who remain. The massive shift of the costs of employment health plans to workers has been a major piece of the unprecedented upward redistribution of wealth that’s occurred in this country over the last forty years.

Regardless of what supporters of PPACA may say, our health care system will remain wholly inadequate. Costs will remain out of reach, care will still be denied, needed services will remain at unacceptable levels or disappear altogether, women, people of color and children will be disproportionately impacted, and the overall result will be a further deterioration in living standards for the vast majority.

Momentum for single payer is far from dead, however. Like all efforts for social justice, the push for single payer received a tremendous infusion of energy from the Occupy Wall Street movement. Among other things, Occupy shone much-needed light on who it is that really owns this country. If that light continues to grow brighter, the openings for real health care reform – not to mention many other necessary social changes – increase.

Andy Piascik is a long-time activist and award-winning author. Write him at [email protected].

Photo by flickr user charlesfettinger

In 1984, a newly formed company Corrections Corporation of America acquired the United States’ very first corrections facility contract for the state of Tennessee. This was the first time in American history that a private, for-profit corporation would control and care for the nation’s incarcerated.

Over the next 28 years, the power and reach of the privatized prison system consumed over half of the country’s prison institutions and, in turn, led to a six-fold increase in prisons and inmate capacity in the U.S. The number of correctional facilities and unwarranted incarcerations in America will continue to increase so long as the corporate takeover of U.S. prisons is driven by a corporate philosophy that revolves around perpetual profits and growth.

When we consider the growth of American industry over the past ten years, we are faced with the fact it has continued to struggle to keep afloat through multiple wars and recession. Conversely, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), like many of the independent prison operators, has experienced considerable growth and profits, with most of that growth occurring over the past decade. This phenomenon is not limited to CCA either—its rival, the GEO Group, has experienced similar growth. In 2003, CCA traded near $6.00/share and it now currently sells near $34.00/share (NASDAQ).

Both companies, CCA and GEO Group reported their total revenue for 2011 at around $1.7 billion, further proving that the private corrections industry is thriving. With their success, these companies have begun to own and operate their own facilities as well. CCA now owns and operates 66 facilities; the GEO Group now has 65 in their possession.  In the recession, both companies have thrived not only on an increased demand for prison capacity, but on a corporate philosophy that places profits above anything else.

The contemporary philosophy in corporate America maintains that perpetual profits and aggressive growth is the only path to success. The current model perpetuates a survival–of-the-fittest, take-no-prisoners attitude, where the success of the corporation is paramount. With the current framework, the goal of benefiting society as a whole becomes secondary to that of the success of the corporation. “Unfortunately, we live in a world of capitalists who thrive on the great Myth of Perpetual Growth, endless growth, ad-infinitum, forever, till the end of time”.

We see this business philosophy every day at department stores as they shill the week’s hot new product. We see it every year at Black Friday when companies try to outdo the previous year’s successes. As a nation run by corporate capitalism, we assume perpetual growth is guaranteed, even though we live in a world of limited resources and consumers. The problem of this philosophy not only exists in department stores, but it also exists in the far reaches of our government as well, and can be seen in the public statements of companies like CCA that tout their constant construction of new facilities and new beds for more inmates. This corporate philosophy of perpetual growth has become a cancer, and exists in all areas public and private, affecting all facets of our society.

At the time the first contract was awarded to CCA, in 1984, there were 903 state-run correctional facilities in the United States, incarcerating a total of 395,309 inmates. In 2005 the number of prisons had doubled to 1,821 facilities and the number of inmates had grown to over 1.4 million. From 2005 until 2010 the number of inmates climbed to a staggering 2,266,832 nearly doubling the number of inmates in a five year period (U.S. Census). In addition to the unprecedented increase in prisons and inmates we have also seen an increase in unwarranted arrests and incarcerations in the United States over the past few years.

The most notable of cases has been in New York, which Mayor Bloomberg has repeatedly touted as the “safest big city in America.” He has been able to claim this due to the increase of arrests throughout the city over the past decade and with the implementation of the highly questionable “stop and frisk” policy. The Village Voice recently helped in bringing to light the truth about how New York City police departments had established an arrest quota for their officers. The officers were given the choice to either abide by these guidelines or risk losing their jobs due to non-compliance. Since this story broke, a plethora of similar  accounts have come to light, such as the recent development of the “Cash for Kids” scandal, where elected judge of Pennsylvania, Mark Ciavarella, received millions of dollars in kickbacks for child convictions to fill the beds of a private juvenile detention center owned by Mid Atlantic Youth Services Corp. Cases such as these are only a symptom of a much greater sickness within our corrections system. By continuing to allow the privatization of prisons in America, we contribute to the incremental degradation of our human rights, and further establish a totalitarian justice system which no longer upholds law, but instead does the bidding of its corporate controllers.

Some have argued though, that there is no direct relationship between the privatization of the prison system and the increased incarcerations in America. There is, of course, the possibility that this growth is due to an increase in population and other social factors that led to increased criminal activity. If that were the case, we can conclude companies like CCA and the GEO Group are merely providing the United States with a much needed service. If this logic were true though, other countries struggling with similar population growth, poverty, and social tensions would see a similar rise in their prison populations. As it stands, the U.S. leads the pack, as we incarcerate more citizens than any other country in the world. China, with the world’s highest population and most impoverished people, trails behind us.

The undeniable correlation between the time frame of the sudden increases in size of the U.S. prison system and its inmates, in addition to the creation of the private corrections companies and their government contracts, further establishes that they must be inextricably linked. If we are to take back control of our disproportionate corrections operations, we must first decouple profits from incarceration. Once corporations are not rewarded for imprisoning citizens, then we will have the social space to examine and correct the roots of criminal behavior, instead of just profiting from them.

 Written by Justin Blush for Media Roots

MEDIA ROOTS — Abby Martin speaks with firefighter Fernando Salguero on RT’s ‘Breaking the Set’ about his brush with the police, reflecting worsening trends of abuses of power by law enforcement.

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BREAKING THE SET — Abby Martin speaks with Prepper and Firefighter, Fernando Salguero, about his encounter with New Jersey police, targeting him as a threat based upon his survivalist lifestyle.

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