Fairer With More Balance
Since I gave the government of New Zealand grief for selling out to a corporation, I must include this US example from NPR:
NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry.
The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.
It wasn’t about security or crime or immigration – it was about corporate profits. The corporations will build them and then figure out how to force people to use them. Our tax dollars at work – not building infrastructure, teaching children, or otherwise improving the lives of the people, but enriching corporations.
2 comments
They’d better have damned good lawyers, because immigration is pretty much exclusively in the federal domain, and that law is bound to be unconstitutional. Maybe I’m wrong, but I have a hard time imagining even the Roberts Court ruling that states can do crap like that.
The 14th Amendment, Section 1 reads “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Any ‘baggers reading this, please note that the last two clauses apply to “any person,” not just to citizens… Arizona cannot unilaterally decide to deny that equal protection of the laws to anyone.
And if Arizona gets away with it, it seems unlikely to me that Mexico will let it pass without a response…
This is why the Hedgemony worked so hard to keep “enemy combatants” out of US territory after they were captured, because once in the US they have rights.
If they were interested in the “rule of law”, the DoJ would just arrest the government of Arizona for a violation of section 241 of Title 18 of the US Code – a conspiracy to deny civil rights, and any law enforcement officer who acted based on the bogus law under section 242 for acting “under color of office” to do the same.
It is blatantly unConstituational, and Arizona knew it when it was enacted.