

Who Wants Keep the War on Drugs Going and Put You in Debtor’s Prison? - bchjam
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/06/matt-stoller-who-wants-keep-the-war-on-drugs-going-and-put-you-in-debtors-prison.html

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api
This is a perfect example of why we can't have nice things: better energy
systems, better laws, better public services, better social policy, better
schools, regulations that are both simpler and more effective...

Everything has a vested interest behind it, and those vested interests are a
bit like ticks. They burrow in, suck, and they're damn hard to pick out. They
go by many names: special interest groups, contractors, corporations,
political action committees, government alphabet agencies with funding tied to
pet mandates, public sector unions, and politicians who only care about
getting re-elected. Some play the left side of the political divide, some play
the right, and some play both and don't care. They're all just parasites.

Unions and contractors are sort of the yin-yang of the whole thing. I recall
reading about the California marijuana legalization proposal... the major
opponents were being backed by the private prison industry and police unions.

Sometimes I think our society needs some sort of jubilee: fire everyone,
dissolve every corporation, cancel every debt, end every politicians' term,
and start over. Otherwise complexity and special interests just accumulate
until we collapse from sclerosis and corruption. We're already teetering...

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russell
It's worse than the article says. In CA the prison guards union is one of
richest and most powerful organizations is the state. Combine that with the
propensity of conservative social engineers to throw anyone who doesnt fit in
their mold to the wolves or into jail and you get the mess that we have today.

Apologies for the rant, but these things make me cranky.

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dasht
I think of social infrastructure like the prison system (including the private
prison system) as like a gigantic potential well. As we build out more and
more of the tools of a totalitarian fascist state embarking on a genocidal
project -- we become more and more likely to fall into that potential well and
actually become exactly such a state.

