The Nation

Detainees inside a holding cell at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington. The facility is operated by The GEO Group Inc. under contract from US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and houses people whose immigration status is in question or who are waiting for deportation or deportation hearings. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

Earlier this year, one of the largest private prison corporations in the country sent out a statement to reporters claiming that it would not lobby in any way over the immigration reform debate. A new disclosure shows that the company, the Boca Raton–based Geo Group, has in fact paid an “elite team of federal lobbyists” to influence the comprehensive immigration reform legislation making its way through Congress.

The Geo Group currently manages several immigrant detention facilities for the federal government, and has faced questions about its role in shaping policies that may lead to more incarceration. In February and March, Pablo Paez, the Geo Group’s vice president of corporate relations, told media outlets, including the Financial Times and The Nation, that his firm would steer clear of immigration reform politics. See statement below (emphasis added):

“The GEO Group has never directly or indirectly lobbied to influence immigration policy. We have not discussed any immigration reform related matters with any members of Congress, and we will not participate in the current immigration reform debate.”

Geo Group’s quarterly lobbying disclosure tells a different story. A disclosure filed in April shows that the company turned to Navigators Global to lobby both houses of Congress on “issues related to comprehensive immigration reform.” Navigators Global, a corporate government affairs firm founded by several Republican aides, has been retained by the Geo Group since 2011, though previous lobbying disclosures show the firm primarily worked on federal appropriations. The latest disclosure, however, shows that their scope of work on Capitol Hill shifted in the first three months of this year to include the immigration bill, which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in May. See screenshot of the disclosure below:

The private prison industry has developed close ties to leading members of Congress, including those in the so-called Gang of Eight leading the immigration reform discussions. Senator Marco Rubio, who is perhaps the most visible Republican on the issue, has received generous campaign donations from the industry, including from Geo Group.

The new disclosure suggests an even greater bind to the company because Cesar Conda, Rubio’s chief of staff, was the founding partner of Navigators Global. As we reported, he has continued to receive payments from the firm through a stock buy-out agreement reached after Conda entered work for Rubio.

Demands for an “enforcement-first” approach to immigration reform could dramatically benefit private prison operators. Conservative lawmakers have called for new criminal penalties for immigrants, mandates to local law enforcement to check the status of those suspected of being undocumented, and an expansion of current guidelines classifying undocumented immigrants as “criminal aliens”—all policies that could lead to more people being detained in private prisons, thus more profit for the industry. It’s no wonder Geo Group is now directly lobbying on the bill.

UPDATE: On June 6, a spokesman from Geo Group emailed me to say: "Contrary to the assertions made in your story, our statement as well as the disclosure itself stipulate that our company’s discussions with lawmakers have been related to the Federal Government’s existing Alternatives to Detention program." But as the lobbying report filed on April 18, 2013 clearly indicates, the Geo Group's lobbying firm told the federal government that they had lobbied for both "issues related to alternatives to detention within ICE" and "issues related to comprehensive immigration reform." So either the organization's disclosure to the federal government is inaccurate, or the spokesman's most recent claim is inaccurate. But they cannot both be true.

London. (Flickr/CC, 2.0)

Alarmed about “the number of companies recruiting young people to work for nothing,” British tax officials are forcing nine companies to pay more than $300,000 in back wages to unpaid interns. The action by Her Majesty’s Revenue, reported on the front page of The Times of London on Monday, cited the firms for “breaching minimum wage legislation.” Under British law, a position that has “set hours and set duties” is a job subject to the laws establishing minimum wages.

“Unpaid internships can provide valuable opportunities” to young people seeking to get a foot on the career ladder, Michelle Wyer, assistant director of the government’s national minimum wage team, told The Times. “However, we are clear that employing unpaid interns instead of workers to avoid the national minimum wage is wrong.”

The government has established a “pay and work rights helpline” where interns can register complaints anonymously. Each of today’s actions resulted from a complaint filed by an intern.

The firms fined for minimum wage violations included Arcadia, Britain’s largest privately held retailer. Arcadia owns Topshop and other well-known British stores.

Ben Lyons, co-founder of the group Intern Aware, told The Times that British tax officials “have only scratched the surface of Britain’s unpaid intern problem.” The government, he said, “needs to name and shame companies that refuse to pay their interns and use its powers to prosecute the worst offenders.”

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Several of Britain’s leading universities are now refusing to advertise unpaid internships because of what The Times called “growing concern over the exploitation of graduates.” Those joining the boycott include Oxford, York, Leeds, Liverpool, Essex, Sussex and Nottingham.

More information on the British campaign can be found online at www.InternAware.org.

Sometimes, Jessica Valenti writes, you've got to feed the trolls.

Frank Lautenberg speaks on Hurricane Sandy, December 5, 2012. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Frank Lautenberg, the son of a Paterson, New Jersey, silk mill worker and the last World War II veteran serving in the US Senate, took his cues from another political time: a time when liberals were bold and unapologetic, a time when it was understood that government could and should do great things.

One of the few members of Congress who could remember listening to Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the radio and going to college on the initial GI Bill, Lautenberg served five terms in the US Senate as a champion of great big infrastructure investments—especially for Amtrak and urban public transportation—great big environmental regulations, great big consumer protections and great big investigations of wrongdoing by Wall Street.

It can fairly be said that the New Jersey senator, who died Monday at age 89, kept the New Deal flame lit. Indeed, one of his last major pieces of legislation proposed to renew one of FDR’s greatest legacies: the Works Progress Administration, which provided public-works employment for millions of Americans during the Great Depression that defined Lautenberg’s youth.

When he introduced his “21st Century WPA Act” two years ago, Lautenberg declared, “Our economy will not recover and our nation will not move forward until we put jobs first. Establishing a 21st Century Works Progress Administration would immediately put Americans to work rebuilding our nation and strengthening our communities. Across the country, we continue to benefit from projects completed under President Roosevelt’s WPA, which employed more than three million Americans during a time of great need. A 21st Century WPA would tackle our nation’s job crisis head-on and accelerate our economic recovery.”

A self-made millionaire who paid his own way into politics at age 58, Lautenberg never forgot that government programs lifted him out of poverty. And he refused to bend to the austerity fantasies of official Washington. Indeed, he attacked them with gusto, especially after returning to the Senate in 2003 following a bizarre turn of political events in the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency.

First elected to the Senate in 1982, Lautenberg retired in 2000, saying he was sick of the money chase required to fund big-budget campaigns. Two years later, New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli, a more centrist Democrat with whom Lautenberg had frequently sparred, was hit with a corruption scandal in the midst of the 2002 campaign. Torricelli had to quit, creating a circumstance where it looked as if the Republicans would take the seat virtually by default. But Lautenberg elbowed his way into the race, fought in the courts for a place on the ballot and was easily reelected to the Senate at age 78.

While other Democrats were still trying to figure out how to take on the Bush administration, Lautenberg arrived ready for a fight—calling for investigations into the Bush-Cheney White House and launching blistering attacks on political cronyism. Democracy for America's Jim Dean recalls that the new senator was "vigorously opposing the war in Iraq when far too many Democrats in Washington stood silent."

Lautrenberg was, as well, an ardent foe of the social-conservative policies of the administration—and of Democrats who were willing to compromise with the White House. Unabashedly pro-choice and pro–LGBT rights, Lautenberg was a leading champion of gun control who, when his long battle with cancer and related ailments took a turn for the worse this spring, said that one of his biggest regrets was missing the debates over new gun-control legislation because “my victories over the gun lobby are among my proudest accomplishments.” The senator was, as well, a fierce defender of affirmative action—earning the admiration of the NAACP, along with a 100 percent rating for his votes. And, as Senator Bernie Sanders noted, "He was also one of the great environmental champions in Congress."

Lautenberg’s liberalism was robust. Unlike many members of the Democratic Caucus, his commitment to the ideology was of the broad-spectrum variety. Yes, Lautenberg was one of the most committed social liberals in the Senate. But like his old friend Paul Wellstone, Lautenberg was equally committed to economic liberalism.

The New Jersey senator sided with organized labor and earned top ratings from the Drum Major Institute for his battles on behalf of working families. A businessman who never forgot that his dad sweated in the silk mills and died young, Lautenberg fought for minimum-wage hikes, factory safety and fair trade—a commitment that led him to break with the Clinton administration to oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement. But his biggest fight was for a renewal of the New Deal commitment of government to invest in job creation.

Lautenberg really did believe in putting the government to work on the task of putting people to work. His legislative record was packed with proposals for infrastructure investment and jobs programs—including the recent American Infrastructure Investment Fund Act of 2013, with its plan for a $5 billion fund to incentivize private, state and regional investments in transportation projects around the country by providing eligible products with financial assistance.

Even after he announced that he would retire in 2015, at the end of his current term (which will now be filled by an interim senator appointed by Republican Governor Chris Christie), Lautenberg kept that New Deal flame lit. Barely a week before his death, the senator was one of the first members of Congress to respond to the bridge collapse of the Interstate 5 in Washington State.

“The bridge collapse in Washington State is simply unacceptable. Families in America should not have to worry that the bridges they cross are unstable,” he said. “Far too many bridges across the country and in my home state of New Jersey are aging and in urgent need of repair. This scary bridge collapse shows why the Senate should act quickly to pass my bill to strengthen America’s crumbling infrastructure, create jobs and boost our economy.”

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Frank Lautenberg, who made his fortune in the private sector before ever considering a political career, had no patience with those who would limit the ability of government to respond to the physical crisis of a bridge collapsing or the human crisis of widespread unemployment. Like FDR, he understood the power of government to renew the economy.

To a greater extent than all but a few in Congress, he kept alive the New Deal faith that Roosevelt articulated in one of those “fireside chats” Lautenberg listened to as child growing up poor in mill towns of north Jersey: “To those who say that our expenditures for Public Works and other means for recovery are a waste that we cannot afford, I answer that no country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources,” FDR said. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order. Some people try to tell me that we must make up our minds that for the future we shall permanently have millions of unemployed just as other countries have had them for over a decade. What may be necessary for those countries is not my responsibility to determine. But as for this country, I stand or fall by my refusal to accept as a necessary condition of our future a permanent army of unemployed.”

John Nichols is the author (with Robert W. McChesney) of the upcoming book Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America. Center for Media and Democracy executive director Lisa Graves says: "The billionaires are buying our media and our elections. They're spinning our democracy into a dollarocracy. John Nichols and Bob McChesney expose the culprits who steered America into the quagmire of big money and provide us with the tools to free ourselves and our republic from the corporate kleptocrats."

Where have the seven seas gone? Read Lewis Lapham’s essay.

US and Chinese national flags are hung outside a hotel during a US presidential election event. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

All-important talks between the United States and China will happen this weekend, when President Obama meets President Xi in California. So, naturally, the China-bashers are out in full force, including the usual suspects at the AFL-CIO.

But there’s lot of promising news. The Obama administration seems willing to go into the talks with China on the basis of cooperation, even suggesting that it wants to smooth military-to-military ties between the two great powers. Reportedly, the United States and China will establish a committee to look into the reports of China’s hacking and cyberwarfare targeting of US government and corporate targets (and presumably, America’s own robust cyberwarfare capabilities), and China is saying that it’s willing to consider joining the Trans Pacific Partnership, an Obama-inspired trade bloc that has often been described as anti-Beijing. As The Wall Street Journal reports:

China signaled a possible softening on a key point of contention with the U.S. ahead of a meeting between the two countries’ presidents, suggesting it might be willing to join U.S.-led talks to strike an Asia-Pacific free-trade agreement.

With so many critical things at stake in the Obama-Xi summit, why then are pigs getting in the way? By pigs, I mean literally pigs—that is, the report that a Chinese company wants to buy the top US pork producer for $4.7 billion. In the past, anti-Chinese hysteria has blocked China’s purchase of other companies, but Smithfield Foods has little to do with national security. True, some Chinese companies have a poor-to-middling record when it comes to food safety, but operating in the United States the Chinese firm involved, Shuanghui International, will have to abide by American rules, including the FDA’s.

In a New York Times op-ed, Thea Lee of the AFL-CIO warns oddly that the idea of a Chinese company owning American pigs is “inextricably intertwined” with American national security. And, she says, you just can’t trust those huge, state-owned Chinese firms:

State-owned enterprises, for example, have both motivations and financial advantages that set them apart from commercial companies. They may be driven by long-term national government goals (like acquisition of market power or exclusive access to natural resources) that would lead to short-term actions not driven by profit.

Needless to say, Karl Marx would be turning over in his London cemetery if he finds out that the biggest American labor organization is slamming “state-owned enterprises” and condemning firms that are “not driven by profit.” But, sadly for Lee’s comments, Shuanghui International is not a state-owned firm. It’s capitalist to the core, with input from Goldman Sachs. As the Times reports elsewhere:

Behind the bid was a group of savvy investors and global deal makers who hold a substantial stake in the Chinese company: Goldman Sachs, CDH Investments, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund and New Horizon Capital, a private equity firm co-founded by the son of the former Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao.

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The group controls nearly half the shares of Shuanghui International, much of which was acquired about seven years ago by helping privatize a company that had been run as a state-owned meat processor.

Naturally, I’m no fan of big capitalist companies’ controlling our food supply, but so they do. Whether they’re American-owned or Chinese-owned doesn’t matter much. But that shouldn’t be fodder for the China-bashers.

Good US-China relations are critically important in dealing with crises around the world, from North Korea’s belligerency to Iran’s nuclear program, and it will be the big issues, not piggies, that dominate the Obama-Xi talks. Biggest of all is how the United States will respond to the emergence of China as a regional, East Asia behemoth and, eventually, as a world power. There is lots of talk about China’s military growth, but cooler heads realize that for decades to come the United States will remain far, far ahead of China in military technology and power—although China will increasingly be able to flex its muscles in disputes over the South China Sea, for instance.

The real, hard nut to crack will be US-Taiwan relations, and the continuing—but foolish—American efforts to bolster Taiwan’s military power. Face it, Washington: first Hong Kong, then Taiwan.

Read more on US-China relations from Bob Dreyfuss.