Private prison lobbyists raising money for Hillary

[Admiral Loinpresser]

Last week, Clinton and other candidates revealed a number of lobbyists who are serving as “bundlers” for their campaigns. Bundlers collect contributions on behalf of a campaign, and are often rewarded with special favors, such as access to the candidate.

Richard Sullivan, of the lobbying firm Capitol Counsel, is a bundler for the Clinton campaign, bringing in $44,859 in contributions in a few short months. Sullivan is also a registered lobbyist for the Geo Group, a company that operates a number of jails, including immigrant detention centers, for profit.

...Hillary Clinton has a complicated history with incarceration. As first lady, she championed efforts to get tough on crime. “We need more police, we need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders,” Clinton said in 1994. “The ‘three strikes and you’re out’ for violent offenders has to be part of the plan. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets,” she added.

In recent months, Clinton has tacked left in some ways, and now calls for alternatives to incarceration and for greater police accountability. And while Clinton has backed a path to citizenship for undocumented people in America, she recently signaled a willingness to crack down on so-called “sanctuary cities,” a move that could lead to more immigrant detentions.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/23/private-prison-lobbyists-raising-cash-hillary-clinton/

[JaneyVee]

1. Who voted for that 1994 crime bill?

[Admiral Loinpresser]

5. I assume you mean Bernie.

I will take your word that he did, because I have found your research to be very good. I have no explanation for that. I hope there was some mitigating reason, like an amendment that made it less harmful to PoC and low SES people in general. If not, I would be disappointed, since Bernie has been very consistent in voting against regressive legislation. At least I consider it to be so, based on my limited understanding.

Would agree with my characterization of it as regressive legislation?

[Thinkingabout]

2. Again?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251478380

on July 28

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251471392

July 23

[Admiral Loinpresser]

3. Sorry for the duplication.

Just saw this article for the first time this morning.

[Divernan]

6. Don't apologize. An important issue & many DUers didn't see it earlier

and both those earlier threads dropped out of sight in less than 2 days. So your post is well timed to get this important information out to all those who check out DU on weekends. Those 2 earlier posts were weekday posts.

There is no rule against duplications except in Latest Breaking News.

[Admiral Loinpresser]

8. Sorry for apologizing. ;-) n/t

[Divernan]

4. Clinton bundler protected private prisons from FOIA requests

The OP link includes the fact that one of Hillary's bundlers lobbied to successfully defeat efforts to compel private prisons to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests! Such requests would typically be filed when a prisoner dies in custody and the family doubts the official explanation - if they are even given an explanation. Some young, heretofore healthy family member was in prison for a victimless crime (drug possession, for example) and inexplicably "committed suicide" and the family wants to see medical records and autopsy results? An older prisoner dies and family wants to find out how long a cancer went untreated? Tough shit for families because corporate profiteers can ignore the FOIA.

This is so antithetical to democracy and human rights that it beggars description!

Such secrecy is common in regard to prisoners in North Korea's slave labor camps.

Promoting a veritable Gulag Archipelago right here in the good ole U.S. of A.

You know, we (the United States of America) used to be a lot better than that!
And under President Bernie Sanders, the United States of America could make a good beginning at regaining the moral values and standards for which the world once admired us.

Fully five Clinton bundlers work for the lobbying and law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison company in America, paid Akin Gump $240,000 in lobbying fees last year. The firm also serves as a law firm for the prison giant, representing the company in court.

Akin Gump lobbyist and Clinton bundler Brian Popper disclosed that he previously helped CCA defeat efforts to compel private prisons to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests.

For younger DUers, here's the deal with the Gulag Archipelago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eleven years in the Gulag, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, gave the term its international repute with the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973. The author likened the scattered camps to "a chain of islands" and as an eyewitness described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death.[3] Many scholars concur with this view,[4][5] though some argue that the Gulag was less substantial than it is often presented,[6] although during much of its history mortality was high.[3]

In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates (colloquially referred to as simply "camps&quot and 423 labor colonies in the USSR.[6] Today's major industrial cities of the Russian Arctic, such as Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Magadan, were originally camps built by prisoners and run by ex-prisoners.[7]

Unlike the concentration camp system of Nazi Germany, the Gulag did not have death camps, in the sense of deliberate "death-inducing camps" established to murder a whole segment of the population.[8] Rather, Gulag camps could be described as "locations which had different degrees of death inducement [in the form of starvation, disease, etc.] at different times".[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag

By her bundlers shall ye know her - and should she make it to the Oval Office, expect to see these fascists high up in administrative posts..

[Cheese Sandwich]

20. It sounds bad when you put it like that

[Thinkingabout]

7. Bookmarking.

[Divernan]

10. If you have something to say, now's the time.

I can't help but notice you've taken to posting the cryptic comment "Bookmarking" or "Bookmarking, again" on threads I've posted on which support Bernie &/or are critical of Hillary. and I am sincerely unclear why you do this or what it means. So please clear up my confusion and explain what the terse phrases "bookmarking" or "bookmarking, again" mean to you.

For example, I occasionally bookmark a thread because it contains valuable links - in other words, I like it. I might say, "Great thread. Bookmarked"; or "K&R bookmarked"; or "Bookmarked to read later" as a compliment/thank you to the OP. In the instant thread you have expressed displeasure because the topic has been posted before, but provide no substantive debate, discussion or comments on the topic itself. So what is the value to you of bookmarking the thread?

Are your bookmarks the internet equivalent of Dickens' character, Madame Defarge and her knitting in A Tale of Two Cities? Even on a literal level, Madame Defarge’s knitting constitutes a whole network of symbols. Into her needlework she stitches a registry or list of names (one might say, bookmarks), of all those condemned in the name of a new republic. I sincerely hope that is not the case. Because that would contribute nothing to the political debate and it implies some future "payback" which even in the volatile primary season is out of place on DU.

[Thinkingabout]

11. Bookmarking for future reference

[NorthCarolina]

9. The Private Prison Industry is of course going to financially support the candidate

that supports their business model, so Clinton is a no-brainer for them. I don't expect to see them bundling cash for Bernie any time soon.

[George II]

13. Why aren't they financially supporting Sanders too? His vote supports their business model

[Cheese Sandwich]

14. Unlikely since he has said all along private prisons should be outlawed.

[George II]

15. But he voted for the legislation that enabled them.

[Cheese Sandwich]

16. Oh you mean the one with the Violence Against Women Act attached to it?

Who the heck in their right mind is going to vote against that?

[beam me up scottie]

17. +1

Nicely done.

[George II]

18. From you, I didn't expect this to be added:

[L0oniX]

12. K & R

[oasis]

19. There are 17 potential GOP opponents waiting to take Hillary on in the GE.

I don't see any off them squawking about this. As much as I am against federal, state and municipal privatization, I'm not ready to latch on to another candidate based solely on that.

[Divernan]

21. GOP's saving their attacks for the general election, of course!

Don't be naive! Or is this a trial balloon for the latest anti-Bernie meme? The GOP candidates are all busy attacking each other, but they are all "ready for Hillary" in the sense that she is one they most want to run against, the Dem. candidate most likely to draw out masses of GOP voters to the polls in November, ensuring their win of the presidency and all the GOP congressional candidates down ticket.

Yesterday I was surfing the web looking at bumper stickers for Bernie, and of course that search brought up stickers for Clinton as well. One major site, Cafe Press, had 28 pages of Sanders sticker selections - none of them negative. Then I searched the site for Hillary stickers. On the first page alone, 13 anti-Hillary stickers, and I was gobsmacked at the loathing and hatred and obscene language attacking her. That's all lying in wait for the general election if she's the Dem. candidate.

The stickers don't attack her on the current issues (TPP, fracking, privatized prisons, Wall Street connections, etc.) for which she is criticized here on DU - they go after her personally and all the way back from her actions in the State Dept. to the various White House scandals of the 90's. They make the anti-Hillary comments on DU sound like love letters.

In the 2008 primary, I never saw a single Hillary bumper sticker, although I saw a fair number of Obama stickers (and had one on my car).

In anticipation of attacks on Cafe Press, here's the deal on that company:

History
CafePress, Inc. was founded as a privately owned company in 1999 by Fred Durham and Maheesh Jain. As of February 2006, the site hosts over 2.6 million online shops with over 200 million products. As of March 2011, CafePress.com has more than 13 million members and over 325 million products are available on the site. In July 2008, CafePress acquired the specialist photographic art printing business imagekind.,[3] and in September 2010 acquired photo-to-canvas company Canvas On Demand to their platform of brands.

In June 2011, CafePress filed with the SEC to raise up to $80 million in an initial public offering. On March 29, 2012, CafePress debuted at $19/share on the NASDAQ under ticker symbol PRSS. The stock hit an intra-day high of $22.69/share. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CafePress

[oasis]

22. I have never posted anything negative about Bernie or MO'M.

If I express my beliefs about Hillary advancing to the GE, of course, you can draw your own conclusions about what happened in the primary.

Bumper stickers: conservatives and right wing whackos, have had their vehicles adorned with sticker anti liberal slogans for ages. Their ferocity is unmatched. When I lived in California during the sixties, a liberal sticker on your car would almost guarantee some level of vandalism.

My eyes were first opened to the venom when I was exiting a sporting event in L.A. the year Johnson ran against Goldwater. A uniformed LA bike cop snatched a Johnson campaign straw hat from off a white man who was accompanied by his wife returning to his car.

I displayed a McGovern sticker on my Toyota in '72. Got pulled over twice within 3 weeks. The sticker came off. No more stickers while I resided in Cali.

In 2004, while living in the BLUE aloha state of Hawaii, a nasty note was placed on my wife's windshield in response to her Kerry for President sticker.

Hillary is the most hated woman by right wingers, with the possible exception of Jane Fonda.
Supporters keep that in mind and campaign for her accordingly.

Bernie doesn't raise the pulse of those on the right. Bernie stickers, Nader stickers or Save the Whale stickers would draw equal reaction.