Last Ditch

by 99 Seats

Watch this.

The other day, Isaac posted a long video as well. If you haven't watched that, watch it.

Then read this.

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 [The illegal immigration law] 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.

I don't generally like large scale pronouncements and hyperbole, but there is a fundamental rot creeping in our country. Read this and look at this interactive map. It doesn't have the Koch brothers on it. These are the "elites" who will shortly be running at least one branch of our government.

I know a lot of liberals and Democrats are discouraged. The last two years have been brutal. And the Democrats in office have given us virtually no reason to give them more time in office to squander, compromise, vacillate, and piss away. I think that Lawrence Lessig has it pretty right in his video: it's not about our congresspeople. It's about the system. Until we can change the system, there's not much we can do. Right now, though, that "not much" is a lot. Things can get a lot worse, really quickly, in actual terms of human misery. An industry built on human misery wrote a law, got it passed and is likely to keep it on the books. Whatever we can do to halt that tide, we should do.

It's Friday. I'm going to D.C. for the Rally to Restore Sanity tomorrow. Halloween's Sunday, All Saints' Day on Monday. Election Day is Tuesday. There isn't a lot of time left. But there are things you can do, easy things. Share these videos and stories. Talk to people. Make sure you vote. If you can, volunteer, phone bank, do whatever you can. Do something. Let's get through this...and then let's talk about fixing the system.