Thread: Obama administration: Uses Prison Labor to Advance “Green” Agenda

Thursday, 21 June 2012 17:11 Obama Admin. Uses Prison Labor to Advance “Green” Agenda

Written by Brian Koenig

The Obama administration is utilizing the U.S. prison system to help bolster its green-energy agenda, while boosting foreign companies and funneling cash into the hands of Obama’s largest campaign donors, according to a startling new report by the Washington Free Beacon.

Federal Prison Industries, more commonly known as UNICOR, is a wholly owned corporation of the U.S. government that uses penal labor from the Federal Bureau of Prisons to produce various products and services. Established in 1934, the organization was designed as a voluntary vocational-training program for federal prisoners, but has recently gone into business providing green-energy technology to federal agencies.
Federal inmates in Oregon and New York are earning between $.23 and $1.15 per hour building solar panels, which are then sold to a range of government agencies. In rationalizing the program, administration officials say it provides federal agencies with an opportunity to buy solar panels from domestic manufacturers. UNICOR emphasizes this rationale on its website, asserting that its panels “are domestically sourced and produced, meeting the requirements of the Buy American Act, Trade Agreement Act, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”
However, in 2009 UNICOR entered into a $219-million contract with a Taiwanese company that supplies the solar cells used to build the panels. It’s the typical maneuver to work around the “Buy American” rhetoric, Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) charged, because products built using foreign parts are still considered “American-made” as long as they are physically assembled in the United States. “It’s yet another outrage on what is happening with our tax dollars,” Huizenga said in an interview with the Beacon.
One of the more evident problems is that the effort produces virtually no benefit to the private sector, as the parts are foreign-made, and everything is assembled by prison inmates. And if that’s not enough, the law requires that government agencies buy the products from, ironically, the government agency itself.
Officials contend that the effort “prepar[es] inmates for the green economy” and that it “reduces the recidivism rate among prisoners.” However, as the Beacon affirms, a 2011 report by the Congressional Research Service debunks those claims, asserting that they are “not conclusive.”
Further yet, UNICOR has an extensive history of undercutting private enterprise. For example, a military clothing manufacturer with a long history of selling to the Defense Department was recently undercut by UNICOR for a $45-million contract. The company’s CEO, Steven Eisen, said he had to lay off about 100 workers after losing the contract. “Our government screams, howls and yells how the rest of the world is using prisoners or slave labor to manufacture items, and here we take the items right out of the mouths of people who need it,” he charged.
Such practices have become so widespread that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) intervened to prevent UNICOR from pirating business from the private sector in his home state.
UNICOR oftentimes partners with private businesses to install the solar panels and assist government agencies in implementing other energy-efficient measures. One prominent beneficiary is Constellation Energy, an energy-efficient supplier that was recently acquired by the Exelon Corporation, a Chicago-based utility company intimately tied to the Obama administration.
Only weeks after the two companies merged, Constellation was awarded a 20-year contract to supply renewable energy to 10 State Department buildings, as well as a segment of the White House campus. In what was called a “first-of-its-kind federal contract,” the effort will help “contribute to President Obama's executive order to reduce federal-wide greenhouse gas emissions 28 percent by 2020,” according to a press release from the company.
Constellation has secured a market that the bankrupt solar firm Solyndra sought to tap before it filed for bankruptcy late last year, despite raking in a half-billion-dollar, taxpayer-backed loan guarantee from the federal government. Like Solyndra, Constellation collected hundreds of millions of dollars from Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus package.
The firm’s new parent company, Exelon, has become one of the most politically connected companies in the country, and has been a prominent investor in Obama’s campaign endeavors. Company employees, including many top executives, have doled out more than $240,000 to the President since 2007. “Chicago-based Exelon stands out as one of the best patrons throughout Obama’s political career,” Politico recently reported. “Its employees make up the largest group of donors this cycle from the energy and natural resource sector.”
Exelon was the President’s fourth-largest campaign donor during his 2006 Senate run, funneling more than $73,000 to Obama’s campaign. Frank Clark, a retired CEO of another Exelon subsidiary, was an advisor to Obama before his 2008 presidential campaign. The Beacon reported further:
Exelon board member John Rogers has bundled more than $500,000 for the president this cycle, as he did in 2008, and has personally contributed at least $100,000 to the pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities Action. Rogers, who played on the Princeton basketball team with Obama’s brother-in-law, Craig Robinson, recently attended the wedding of senior White House adviser Valeria Jarrett’s daughter in Chicago.
The connections extend well beyond the large campaign contributions of top executives. Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod is a former consultant to the company. Former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel helped broker the $8.2-billion merger between PECO Energy and Unicom that led to the firm’s creation in 2000. It was the biggest deal of Emanuel’s two-year career as an investment banker in Chicago, during which he pocketed more than $16.2 million, according to congressional disclosure forms.
All in all, the intimate relationship between the green-energy industry and the Obama White House has been prolific, and UNICOR has been a driving force in forging these two parties together. “Why are we going to use taxpayer dollars to purchase materials that are literally taking business away from the private sector?” Rep. Huizenga asked. “And let’s be honest, let’s pull the pin on the hand grenade. If this was Chinese prison labor, we’d be rejecting every single one of these imports.”

Photo: AP Images

Obama Admin. Uses Prison Labor to Advance “Green� Agenda

Related: http://www.alipac.us/f19/private-pri...upancy-259952/

Happy Independence Day from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation! (Photo: A female inmate works on an American flag while working in the Prison Industries Authority Fabrics program at the Central California Women's Facility on Thursday, April 5, 2012 in Chowchilla, Calif. Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle / SF)

Made in USA by Prison Labor!!!

Bleeding Cash GREEDY CORPORATIS...TS are counting on, and taking advantage of folks' apathy & disdains for prisoners & for "illegal" immigrants to overlook the fact that jobs traditionally performed by skilled workers are taken away from them to be outsourced to cheap prison labor.

Prisoners are exploited by corporations, paid more or less 40 cts/hour, more often less than more, sometimes paid nothing at all, in lieu of the minimum $7.50/hour that corporations would have to pay to law abiding citizens. The difference, quite clearly, contributes to major corporate profits, while folks outside walls are still unemployed and continue to lose their jobs.

When you consider the major corporations that employ prison labor (furniture factories, Microsoft, Boing, IBM, Starbuck, Victoria secret, BP, Sodexo, medical supplies, road signs, military supplies, etc.) you quickly realize that moving jobs back to mainstream America would surely help diminish unemployment figures!!!

So, the higher the incarceration rates, the more outsourcing of jobs to prisons, the higher the unemployment rate, and the more dramatic the race to the bottom for skilled workers.

In the end, here is how the bleeding of the people's cash occurs: 1) incarceration costs paid with our tax money (translated into profits for private prisons and corporations) + 2) unemployment benefits also paid with our tax money for people, whose jobs were outsourced to prisons.

I also believe that the loss of women's rights and the criminalization of women's sexuality is related to for-profit incarceration. One day, a friend of mine raised the following issues on miscarriages, contraception, personhood, etc.: "How could an initiative be on multiple states agenda so suddenly - so out of the blue? What is being swept under the rug by the media?" That's when I understood the connection: The private prison industry is obviously lobbying for more customers! Which other industry or institution would benefit from criminalizing abortion and contraception, you think???

The rationale that some industry creates "jobs" in towns economically deprived, and is therefore justified is morally reprehensible. Hitler's death camps created a lot of civilian jobs also. A job based on locking folks up for economic gains has no justification. It's called human trafficking!!! Don't get fooled by the "it creates jobs" nonsense. Factories, instead of prisons, could also be built in such towns. Instead, factories are investing in prisons to exploit prison labor, instead of paying decent wages to free citizens outside of prisons.

A "job" that results in taking people's freedom away, just so someone can have a "job", a private prison turn a profit, and corporations exploit prison labor, is not a "job"---it's a violent assault on society.

“There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.” Montesquieu

Remember! Germans did not want to know about their Concentration Camps, very much like today's Americans do not want to know about their own Labor Camps, or else they justify their existence for them to cultivate the illusion of a good conscience.

Quote: "In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted… and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie…. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously…even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds…" ~ A. Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 1, ch. X

We are faced with a very serious situation, folks!!!

~Monique D'hooghe

Related: http://www.alipac.us/f19/private-prison-company-demand-90%25-occupancy-260906/index2.html#post1292736

Buying Prisons Is Big Business For Corporate Slave Traders

Breaking News | April 26, 2012

(Glen Ford) The nation’s largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America, is on a buying spree. With a war chest of $250 million, the corporation, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, this month sent letters to 48 states, offering to buy their prisons outright. To ensure their profitability, the corporation insists that it be guaranteed that the prisons be kept at least 90 percent full. Plus, the corporate jailers demand a 20-year management contract, on top of the profits they expect to extract by spending less money per prisoner.

For the last two years, the number of inmates held in state prisons has declined slightly, largely because the states are short on money. Crime, of course, has declined dramatically in the last 20 years, but that has never dampened the states’ appetites for warehousing ever more Black and brown bodies, and the federal prison system is still growing. However, the Corrections Corporation of America believes the economic crisis has created an historic opportunity to become the landlord, as well as the manager, of a big chunk of the American prison gulag.


The attempted prison grab is also defensive in nature. If private companies can gain both ownership and management of enough prisons, they can set the prices without open-bid competition for prison services, creating a guaranteed cost-plus monopoly like that which exists between the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.

“If private companies are allowed to own the deeds to prisons, they are a big step closer to owning the people inside them.”

But, for a better analogy, we must go back to the American slave system, a thoroughly capitalist enterprise that reduced human beings to units of labor and sale. The Corrections Corporation of America’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission read very much like the documents of a slave-trader.

Investors are warned that profits would go down if the demand for prisoners declines. That is, if the world’s largest police state shrinks, so does the corporate bottom line.

Dangers to profitability include “relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws.” The corporation spells it out: “any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.” At the Corrections Corporation of America, human freedom is a dirty word.

But, there is something even more horrifying than the moral turpitude of the prison capitalists. If private companies are allowed to own the deeds to prisons, they are a big step closer to owning the people inside them.

Many of the same politicians that created the system of mass Black incarceration over the past 40 years, would gladly hand over to private parties all responsibility for the human rights of inmates.

The question of inmates’ rights is hardly raised in the debate over prison privatization. This is a dialogue steeped in slavery and racial oppression. Just as the old slave markets were abolished, so must the Black American Gulag be dismantled – with no compensation to those who traffic in human beings.

Source

Buying Prisons Is A Big Business For Corporate Slave Traders :

Factory owners: Federal prisoners stealing our business

By Emily Jane Fox @CNNMoney
August 14, 2012: 11:34 AM ET


American Apparel Inc., which manufactures Army uniforms in Alabama, has laid off 150 workers as a result of going head-to-head with Unicor for government contracts.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Just hearing the word Unicor is enough to make Kurt Wilson see red.

Unicor is a government-run enterprise that employs over 13,000 inmates -- at wages as low as 23 cents an hour -- to make goods for the Pentagon and other federal agencies.

With some exceptions, Unicor gets first dibs on federal contracts over private companies as long as its bid is comparable in price, quantity and delivery. In other words: If Unicor wants a contract, it gets it.

And that makes Wilson and other small business owners angry.

Wilson has been competing with Unicor for 20 years. He's an executive at American Apparel Inc., an Alabama company that makes military uniforms. (It is not affiliated with the international retailer of the same name.) He has gone head-to-head with Unicor on just about every product his company makes -- and said he has laid off 150 people over the years as a result.

"We pay employees $9 on average," Wilson said. "They get full medical insurance, 401(k) plans and paid vacation. Yet we're competing against a federal program that doesn't pay any of that."

Unicor, also known as Federal Prison Industries, is part of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. It has been preparing inmates for jobs after they get out since 1934.

The program has 83 factories and makes goods in seven industries -- apparel being the biggest ticket. Unicor made over $900 million in revenue last year and faces more heat from businesses and lawmakers as the economy takes a toll on small manufacturers.

Related: Can the U.S. handle a manufacturing comeback?

In Olive Hill, Ky., apparel factory Ashland Sales and Service, Co. has been making windbreakers for the Air Force for 14 years, says Michael Mansh, who runs the factory. Last February, when he learned that Unicor was eyeing the contract, he reached out to Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell.
McConnell, one of the top Republicans on Capitol Hill, issued a public statement urging Unicor to back off. The next day, it did.

With 100 employees, Mansh said Ashland is Olive Hill's largest employer. And he said losing the Air Force contract would have shut the factory down.

"That's 100 people buying groceries. We use trucking companies in the town, buy parts and light bulbs there every day," he said. "That's all lost when prisons take away contracts."

Unicor is not required to pay its workers minimum wage and instead pays inmates 23 cents to $1.15 an hour. It doesn't have health insurance costs. It also doesn't shell out federal, state or local taxes.

Related: Fiscal cliff threatens small businesses

Advocates for private sector companies are loudly campaigning for reform of Unicor's preferential status.

Unemployment has been over 8% for nearly four years "and there's a federal program tanking our industry," said Kurt Courtney, director of government relations at the American Apparel and Footwear Association. "The only way for workers to get jobs back is to go to prison. There's got to be a better way to do this."

In 2008, Congress amended the law to limit Unicor's advantage for certain kinds of Pentagon contracts. Now a bill in the House supported by 28 lawmakers from both parties would go further and require Unicor to compete across the board. The bill also provides alternative ways for training inmates, who would instead work for charities, religious organizations, local governments or school districts.

"We know that in the recovery, many new jobs are coming out of small businesses," said Rep. Bill Huizenga, a Michigan Republican who introduced the bill. "It makes no sense to strangle them in the cradle."

Huizenga expects a similar bill to be introduced in the Senate in the coming months.

Unicor doesn't agree with the criticism. According to spokeswoman Julie Rozier, inmates working for Unicor are 24% less likely to reoffend and 14% more likely to be employed long-term upon release. She also noted that over 40% of Unicor's supplies were purchased from small businesses in 2011.

She cited the unique costs associated with operating within a prison. For example, Unicor employs more supervisors than a private sector firm would, and security lockdowns disrupt production.

Businesses aren't buying it. John Palatiello, president of the Business Coalition for Fair Competition, said his organization of businesses and taxpayer groups is sympathetic to Unicor's goals. But they shouldn't be accomplished at the expense of small businesses.

"Who is being punished here?" he said. "The inmates who have committed a crime against society, or the employees of private companies who play by the rules?"
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Factory owners: Federal prisoners stealing our business - Aug. 14, 2012

Related: American Prison Labor Means Longer Unemployment Lines

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