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private prisons
Trump Is Creating a Government of Billionaires, by Billionaires, for Billionaires
With his cabinet appointments, Trump wants to deflect our attention while he and his fellow moguls loot America.
Nov 19, 2024
What do card sharks, magicians, pickpockets, and tyrants do to hide their tricks? They deflect your attention. “Look over here!” they say, as they create a commotion that preoccupies your mind while they bamboozle you.
At first, I thought U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s gonzo nominations were intended to flood the zone—overwhelm us, demoralize us, cause us to lose our minds.
Alternatively, I thought, they had a strategic purpose: Smoke out Senate Republicans who might stand in Trump’s way on other issues—such as allying with Russian President Vladimir Putin and destroying NATO—so Trump could purge the holdouts through primary challengers and angry MAGAs.
Musk has vowed to cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. The richest man in the world explains that “we have to reduce spending to live within our means. And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship.”
But while flooding the zone and purging recalcitrant Senate Republicans may be part of it, I’ve come to think there’s a larger plan at work.
Trump wants to deflect our attention while he and his fellow billionaires loot America.
As he consolidates power, Trump is on his way to creating a government of billionaires, by billionaires, for billionaires.
Trump intuitively knows that the most powerful and insidious of all alliances is between rich oligarchs and authoritarian strongmen.
Two billionaires are leading his transition team. The richest person in the world and another billionaire will run a new department of “efficiency.” Other billionaires are waiting in the wings to be anointed to various positions.
America is now home to 813 billionaires whose cumulative wealth has grown a staggering 50% since before the pandemic.
Apologists for these mind-boggling amounts argue they’re not a zero-sum game where the rest of us must lose ground in order for billionaires to prosper. Quite the contrary, they say: The billionaires’ achievements expand the economic pie for everyone.
But the apologists overlook one important thing. Power is a zero-sum game. The more power in billionaire hands, the less power in everyone else’s. And power cannot be separated from wealth, or wealth from power.
The shameless feeding frenzy that has already begun at the troughs of Trump—planning for more tax cuts for the wealthy, regulatory rollbacks to make the wealthy and their corporations even wealthier, subsidies for the wealthy and their enterprises—constitute a zero-sum power game that will hurt average Americans.
The pending tax cuts will explode the national debt. As a result, the rest of America will have to pay more in interest payments to the holders of that debt—who, not incidentally, are wealthy Americans.
This will require that the middle and working classes either pay higher taxes or sacrifice some benefits they rely on (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act).
Meanwhile, regulatory rollbacks will make workplaces less safe, products more dangerous, our air and water more polluted, national parks less welcoming, travel more hazardous, and financial transactions riskier for average people.
Trump has tapped Elon Musk, who invested some $130 million to get Trump elected (not to mention in-kind gifts of support from X and a swing-state operation to register right-leaning voters) and former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy, to run a “Department of Government Efficiency.”
Musk calls it DOGE, named after Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency—whose value, not incidentally, has soared since Musk began using its name for his incipient department.
It now appears that DOGE won’t be an actual “Department” but a powerful advisory group outside the official government yet inside the Trump White House. It will announce—presumably posted with great fanfare on X—what Musk allies describe as “slash-and-burn business ideologies to the U.S. government.”
Musk has vowed to cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. The richest man in the world explains that “we have to reduce spending to live within our means. And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship.”
Hardship for whom? Not for Musk. Not for Trump. Not for the billionaires heading Trump’s transition team. Not for all the billionaires who will profit from the planned tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.
And not for people responding to Musk’s recent X post calling for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account…. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.”
Musk says we have to reduce spending “to live within our means?” Whose means?
Since Trump’s election victory on November 5, Musk himself has become $70 billion richer due to the rising value of his enterprises.
Why have Musk’s companies—Tesla, SpaceX, and X—risen so much in value? Because investors expect some or all of the 19 known ongoing federal investigations and lawsuits against Musk’s companies to wind down. (Lawsuits involving alleged securities law violations, workplace safety, labor and civil rights violations, violations of environmental laws, consumer fraud, and vehicle safety defects.)
Investors also expect SpaceX to become more profitable from more multibillion-dollar contracts. Musk’s xAI could also reap vast rewards as the new administration considers AI regulations.
Other billionaires who invested in Trump have also been raking it in.
Oracle founder Larry Ellison, the world’s second-richest person—a close friend of Musk’s and a former Tesla board member—is a longtime Republican donor who’s enjoying his own Trump bump. Since the election, Oracle’s share value has increased 10%, increasing Ellison’s own wealth by some $20 billion.
Venture capital billionaire Marc Andreessen, who donated at least $4.5 million to a super PAC that supported Trump, expects to cash in by having Trump ease the antitrust crackdown on Big Tech, in which Andreessen has invested heavily. Andreessen’s wish has already been partly monetized: Big Tech has reaped most of the stock market gains since Election Day.
There’s also crypto. Since the election, the price of bitcoin has surged to record levels. The crypto exchange Coinbase, a major contributor to candidates friendly to crypto, expects regulators to keep their hands off it. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has become about $4.5 billion richer since Trump’s victory, as Coinbase shares soared 67%.
Oh, there are also the private prison corporations. George Zoley, a top executive at GEO Group and another major donor to Trump, expects Trump’s reelection to drive up demand for empty beds at detention centers the company runs for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Since the election, GEO Group has had the largest surge in its stock price since 2016, after Trump was elected the first time.
GEO Group executives told Wall Street analysts on a recent earnings call that Trump’s election could help GEO Group fill as many as 18,000 empty beds at its facilities, which would generate as much as $400 million in annual business.
Venture capitalists and investors in new military technologies are now swarming around the Defense Department like bees over a vast flower bed. They also donated to Trump and expect a big quid pro quo.
The fossil fuels CEOs who plunked down millions of dollars for Trump in the expectation they’d get a fat return in the form of rollbacks of environmental regulations are also celebrating.
The list of wealthy beneficiaries from Trump’s election goes on and on.
So who will suffer the “hardship” Musk predicts?
I doubt that Musk will recommend cutting the billions of dollars in government contracts Musk’s corporations receive, or the GEO Group’s contracts for private prison space, or the military budget. Quite the contrary: Government spending on all these will increase.
If history is any guide, there is no limit to how greedy the greedy will get when the guardrails are lifted.
Instead, Musk will want to cut the enforcement of antitrust laws, securities laws, workplace safety laws, labor laws, civil rights laws, laws against consumer fraud, laws mandating vehicle safety, tax laws, and environmental laws.
And because there’s no other place to find anything close to the $2 trillion he’s promising to cut from the federal budget, I expect Musk will turn to cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Here’s where the trick comes in. We’ll all be so distracted by what Gaetz is doing at the Justice Department, Gabbard to national intelligence, and RFK Jr. to public health, that we may not notice.
After all, the next months will be filled with Trump theatrics—a major fight in the Senate over the Gaetz nomination, another fight over recess appointments, another over RFK Jr. and his plans for destroying public health.
Meanwhile, Musk and company will be recommending all sorts budget cuts that cause hardship for hardworking Americans but almost no one will notice because of the distractions.
I prefer to end this post on a hopeful note, so here goes.
There has always been a close relationship in America between wealth and power, but it has usually been thought slightly shameful—something to be hidden or elided—because it contradicts the basic tenets of democracy.
Recall the admonition credited to Justice Louis Brandeis that America has a choice: either great wealth in the hands of a few, or democracy—but we cannot have both.
Hence, American politicians typically play up their humble origins. CEOs and bankers minimize their political clout. The wealthy refrain from overt displays of power.
But in Gilded Ages—such as the one that dominated the turn of the 20th century and the one we’re now in—the ultra-rich abandon such humility. The linkages between wealth and power becomes apparent for all to see. Conspicuous consumption becomes the handmaiden of conspicuous clout.
In such times, the wealthy brag about their access to politicians, talk openly about how many tens of millions of dollars they’ve donated to campaigns and about the “return” on these “investments,” and want everyone to know how they’ve turned their affluence into influence and their influence into even more affluence.
Ultimately, these insults to democracy—delivered by the new oligarchs shamelessly, openly, and arrogantly—go too far. They invite a backlash.
If history is any guide, at some point the public will become revolted by the stench of legalized bribery. It will not abide the quid pro quos of billionaire campaign donations for tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.
The public will also become fed up with brazen billionaire propaganda delivered through billionaire ownership of key media, such as Musk’s X, right-wing radio, and Murdoch’s Fox News, New York Post, and editorial pages of the The Wall Street Journal.
More than a century ago, this sort of revulsion generated what historians refer to as the “Progressive Era.” It was responsible for pushing Teddy Roosevelt to break up the monopolies, institute the nation’s first income tax, stop corporations from funding candidates for president and Congress, and create the Food and Drug Administration.
And when the excesses finally caused the economy to collapse, another upsurge in progressivism prompted Teddy’s fifth cousin, Franklin D., to raise taxes even further on the affluent, create the 40-hour workweek with time-and-a-half for overtime, force corporations to negotiate with unions, institute unemployment insurance, create a minimum wage, and establish Social Security.
If history is any guide, there is no limit to how greedy the greedy will get when the guardrails are lifted. So Gilded Age excesses are almost guaranteed.
And when the corruption and ensuing hardship become so blatant that they offend the values of the majority of Americans, that majority will once again demand systematic reforms that bring us closer to those values.
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Trump's Planned Immigrant Purge Sends Stagnant Private Prison Stocks Soaring
"The GEO Group was built for this unique moment... and the opportunity that it will bring," said the firm's chair.
Nov 08, 2024
The chairperson of a leading U.S. private prison corporation on Thursday gushed over the "unprecedented opportunity" presented by the prospect of Republican President-elect Donald Trump delivering on his campaign promise to begin the mass deportation of unauthorized immigrants on his first day in office.
As
Common Dreamsreported Thursday, Trump's campaign confirmed that "the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrants" ever is set to start immediately after the former president returns to the White House on January 20.
GEO Group stock surged more than 56% from the close of trading on Tuesday, Election Day, to Friday's closing bell. Competitor CoreCivic shares skyrocketed 57% over the same period. By contrast, GEO Group stock saw just a 21% rise in the three months preceding Election Day. CoreCivic inched up just 11% over the same period.
"The GEO Group was built for this unique moment in our company's [and] country's history, and the opportunity that it will bring," GEO Group founder and chairperson George Zoley said during a Thursday earnings call call in which he hailed the "unprecedented opportunity" ahead, according to a company statement and coverage by HuffPost.
"While our third-quarter results were below our expectations due to lower-than-expected revenues in our electronic monitoring and supervision services segment, we believe we have several potential sources of upside to our current quarterly run rate, with possible future growth opportunities across our diversified services platform," Zoley continued.
"We have 18,000 available beds across contracted and idle secure services facilities, which if fully activated, would provide significant potential upside to our financial performance," he noted. "We also believe we have the necessary resources to materially scale up the service levels in our [Intensive Supervision Appearance Program] and air and ground transportation contracts."
Zoley added that "as we evaluate and pursue future growth opportunities, we remain focused on the disciplined allocation of capital to further reduce our debt, deleverage our balance sheet, and position our company to evaluate options to return capital to shareholders in the future."
According to a study published last month by the American Immigration Council, deporting the estimated 13.3 million people in the U.S. without authorization in one massive sweep would cost around $315 billion, while expelling 1 million undocumented immigrants per year would cost nearly $1 trillion cumulatively over a decade.
On Thursday, Trump insisted "there is no price tag" on his deportation plan. He dismissed concerns that such an operation would require the use of concentration camps like the mass detention centers—which one Trump official euphemistically compared with "summer camp"—of his first administration.
The private prison industry has also thrived during the Biden administration, which is on pace to match the 1.5 million people deported during Trump's previous presidency. Although President Joe Biden signed an executive order "on reforming our incarceration system to eliminate the use of privately operated criminal detention facilities" early during his tenure, the directive did not apply to detainees in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.
The number of immigrants detained by the Biden administration doubled between 2021 and 2023. In July 2023, more than 90% of immigrants detained by ICE each day were locked up in private facilities. In January 2020, the last month of Trump's first term, 81% of daily detainees were held in private lockups.
In 2022 a bipartisan U.S. Senate probe corroborated allegations of staff abuse against migrants jailed at facilities owned by LaSalle, a private prison company that
claims to be "run with family values." Whistleblowers and others have also revealed abuses from torture and medical neglect to sexual assault of children and forced sterilizations at privately run immigration detention centers.
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Actions Across US Urge Biden to End 'Cruel' Immigration Detention and Deportations
"Our tax dollars need to be used to strengthen our families and communities and uphold our human rights, not for the militarization of our beloved borderlands," said one activist.
Sep 15, 2023
A coalition of over 80 advocacy groups on Friday co-sponsored demonstrations in eight U.S. states and Washington, D.C. as part of a national day of action demanding the Biden administration close all federal immigration detention centers, release all migrants in custody, and end deportations.
Throughout his campaign, President Joe Biden "pledged to create an immigration system that is just and humane, including ending for-profit immigration detention," the coalition—which is organizing under the Defund Hate and Communities Not Cages banners—said in a statement.
"Our community is enraged and ready to push the Biden administration to fulfill his broken promises."
"However, after taking office, enforcement, detention, and surveillance have only increased and in July 2023, over 90% of detained immigrants are incarcerated in facilities owned and operated by private prison corporations that rake in billions of dollars in revenue," the groups continued.
Noting that at least 11 people have died during U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention during Biden's tenure, the coalition said that "the negligent death of 8-year-old Anadith Tanay Reyes Álvarez in CBP custody further highlights an immigration enforcement system beyond compassion and beyond repair."
"Our community is enraged and ready to push the Biden administration to fulfill his broken promises," the campaign added.
The activists are urging the Biden administration to:
- Shut down federal immigration detention centers;
- Defund ICE and CBP by cutting their funding in Biden's fiscal year 2025 budget request; and
- Freeing everyone detained in federal immigration custody.
"We join our colleagues here in D.C. and around the country to demand the Biden administration to move away from the cruel imprisonment of immigrants, release those in ICE custody, end immigration detention, and halt all deportations immediately," Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, said in a statement.
Protecting the civil liberties of those seeking a better life in the United States is a core tenant of our nation's democracy," Jozef added. "Throwing vulnerable people into prisons is deplorable—and often deadly."
Jovanny Hernandez, co-chair of the Southern Border Communities Coalition and an organizer for the New Mexico Dream Team,asserted that "it is our constitutional and human right for everyone to live free of inhumane treatment. Yet while the United States presents itself as a beacon of these human rights on the global stage, we continue to witness the violation of our rights at the southern border."
"Our tax dollars need to be used to strengthen our families and communities and uphold our human rights, not for the militarization of our beloved borderlands and the targeting, detention, and deportation of our families, neighbors, and newcomers seeking protection," Hernandez added.
Luba Cortes, immigrant defense coordinator at Make the Road New York, said: "ICE has a horrifying track record of mistreating immigrants—denying them access to legal counsel, denying them freedom, and severing them from their families. Despite this, our government continues to funnel billions of dollars into these detention centers."
"People should be able to navigate their immigration cases with dignity and respect and in the comfort of their homes, not from behind bars in a jail cell," Cortes argued. "It is time to hold this administration accountable. President Biden and Congress must stop wasting public money by unnecessarily punishing immigrants in these horrid facilities and instead focus on reinvesting resources into our communities."
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