Sometimes corruption can become so systemic that it's no longer viewed as corruption.
Take the lobbying group funded by Koch Industries and other predatory corporations. Called ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), it successfully masquerades as a "non-partisan, individual public-private membership association of state legislators." ALEC is really a wrecking ball trying to destroy whatever part of the government its members can't loot.
Only in a world of rampant corruption could a group like ALEC draft a resolution and call it a "model" when it enshrines corporations' pay-to-play rights -- rights to no-bid government contracts, political appointments, special access and influence over lawmaking. And only in a world where we've become oblivious to corruption would it even be possible to present such a "model resolution" as a "resolution in opposition to pay-to-play legislation."
The world has started to catch on to ALEC, thanks in large part to the Center for Media and Democracy's ALEC Exposed efforts. The world is also starting to catch on to the corrupting influence of corporations who pay for politicians' campaigns in order to play with taxpayers' money. Earlier this week, the Teamsters Union called out a politician eager to let ALEC-linked corporations plunder his state's coffers. The Teamsters filed an ethics complaint against Florida Gov. Rick Scott for accepting $30,000 for his inauguration from two giant prison companies likely to bid on a $300 million annual contract with the state.
GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America, the two prison companies, have strong ties to ALEC. They have funded and participated in the group's Criminal Justice Task Forces. Corrections Corporation of America lobbied hard and successfully for Arizona's "show-me-your-papers" immigration law as a way to fill Arizona's private prisons with inmates. (The good news here is that the bill's sponsor, Sen. Russell Pearce, is facing a recall.) Wrote Mike Elk and Bob Sloan in The Nation,
Somewhat more familiar is ALEC’s instrumental role in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws... ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Times investigation last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees.
ALEC also has strong ties to dozens of Florida lawmakers, who actually charge their constituents for travel to ALEC conferences. CCA and GEO have also contributed directly to legislators. Reports the Miami Herald,
Since 2001, the Florida GOP has received more than $1.5 million from the two largest prison contractors and their affiliates, records show. More than $1 million of that has come from the GEO Group of Boca Raton — formerly known as Wackenhut — which manages two of the state's private prisons.
Scott, unsurprisingly, is linked to Charles and David Koch. In July, Scott left Florida secretly to attend an invitation-only conference sponsored by the brothers. Scott would love to privatize Florida's prisons. Earlier this year, Florida lawmakers passed legislation to put prisons in 18 counties out to bid. Scott happily signed the bill into law, while making the fatuous claim that privatizing prisons would save the state money.
What privatizing prisons is intended to do is to give CCA or GEO Group a fat contract, which is probably why Scott is in such a rush to award put it out to bid.
Florida's past experiments with privatizing prisons haven't gone so well. Again, the Miami Herald:
While the benefits of prison privatization may be hard to see, the problems have been obvious: Over the years, the arrangement has been marred by mismanagement by state monitors , lax contracts, overbilling by prison contractors, a corruption investigation, and a legal loophole that allowed sexual misconduct in private facilities to go unpunished.
And already the privatization efforts are over budget -- by $25 million. Scott has said he won't go ahead with the prison privatization if it doesn't save the state money. By making that claim he pretends that the financial incentives are with the taxpayers. They're not. They're with the corporations that funnel their money through ALEC, and ALEC isn't going away any time soon.