Those numbers are deceptive. For example, they lump the entire $9.2M spent by Boeing into the "defense" category. Boeing is a pretty diverse aerospace and services company. They sell to many more areas of the government than the DOD and have many more interests in government policy beyond acquisitions programs. Dumping all of their lobbying efforts into "defense" unfairly distorts the category, especially since that number alone represents 1/6 of it.
That's pretty significant - once you factor in their other revenue from private industry plus sales to foreign countries. So if you were going to categorize Boeing as anything in the context of the US gov alone, defense seems appropriate.
Additionally, even cutting that number in half (for the sake of accuracy) only reduces the total defense aerospace category by $4.6 million ($38m -> $33.4m total) which doesn't make those numbers drastically different, or that link much less persuasive.
> Boeing got 40% of their revenue from the DoD in 2007 according to WikiInvest and that probably hasn't changed much today:
The total revenue for for the entire Defense, Space, and Security portion of their business was only 30% of the company's total revenue, per their most recent 10-K filing. Further, reviewing previous filings it appears revenue for this segment has been flat for the past decade while revenue for their commercial aircraft operations has more than doubled.
Furthermore, I have no idea how that site arrived at the portion of revenue specifically from the DOD, as Defense, Space, and Security has a number of other government customers. All the sourcing information there is vague and generic.
> That's pretty significant - once you factor in their other revenue from private industry plus sales to foreign countries. So if you were going to categorize Boeing as anything in the context of the US gov alone, defense seems appropriate.
So, a company becomes a defense company just because most of it's government revenue comes from the DOD? It's not about "the context of the US gov alone", it's about the context of its government business with respect to its total business.
> Additionally, even cutting that number in half (for the sake of accuracy) only reduces the total defense aerospace category by $4.6 million ($38m -> $33.4m total) which doesn't make those numbers drastically different, or that link much less persuasive.
First, I would call cutting the total of the defense lobbying number by nearly 10% significant. Second, that is just an example. How many other Boeings are on that list? How much are they inflating that apparently simplistic analysis?
While I don't know the answer to your question, I have always had a similar reaction to seeing actual numbers involved in lobbying. It usually went like this: someone would seem outraged at how much money a representative had received from "the oil and gas industry". Then I'd look at the numbers and think to myself, "There's no way that amount of money could buy what people are claiming that it bought."
that is so sad all the stats in the link you posted. hopefully with the rise of the internet and everyone becoming connected we can raise awareness and not let things like that happen anymore.
So, it's perfectly fine to personally enrich yourself by:
A) Working as a prison guard/admin (in which your job security/salary increase with incarceration);
B) Hiring released convicts (in which your model becomes increasingly profitable as more of the labor force is branded as less hireable due to greater incarceration);
C) Supplying goods to prisons (in which your specialization at the problems of delivery to prisons becomes more valuable with greater incarceration)
D) Lobbying for tough-on-crime laws due to the above incentives, as e.g. CO interest groups have done [1]
But running the prison itself? "That's too much, man!"
Frankly, the anti-private prison movement is, IMHO, very confused. Numerous groups financially profit from the prison system even when they're publicly run, and such prisons produce the same egregious incentives to encourage more incarceration. (See the three-strikes lobbying.)
It seems like a way to exploit anti-market, anti-profit bias to get the masses enraged at an enormous red herring -- which, by the way, is still only 6-16% [2].
We do need prisons. Some people are too dangerous to be allowed in society, and this will likely always be the case. So they must be guarded. (Technically, you're also guarding everyone else from them.) If it's immoral to work as a prison guard, it's also immoral to work as a policeman, or a firefighter, or a street cleaner - as your job becomes more secure when there are more criminals, or house fires, or litterers. Patent nonsense.
Hiring released convicts is also a good thing, in general - people go to prison, pay their debt to society, and come out. They need jobs, now.
And a person is going to need a bed sheet, a tooth brush, and toilet paper whether they're in prison or free.
D, I agree with, is wrong. And especially when done by the folks who do C.
There is a big difference between profiting from people versus profiting indirectly through supplies that a public prison uses.
The incentives are totally backwards. The state should be encouraging people to not be in prison, but instead we have monetary incentives in place for putting more people in prison and keeping them there.
Not true -- the incentives are the same, and we see how they have led CO orgs at public prisons to lobby for longer sentences, exactly the danger that's somehow unique to private prisons. And I explained how the same incentives exist for all the other private orgs that specialize in servicing prisons.
I haven't heard a single argument from anyone about how it's even slightly moral or good for anyone other than the private prisons to use them. There is nothing better about them - I hope they all go bankrupt.
Have a look into the Barrier Fund (was the Vice Fund), and clones: http://vicefund.com
> The Barrier Fund will concentrate its net assets in industries that have significant barriers to entry including the alcoholic beverages, tobacco, gaming and defense/aerospace industries.
Private schools are for profit. They are generally regarded as the best education you can get for K-12 schooling (at least where I live in the US). Same goes for many of the colleges in the US (actually, wait, isn't that the difference between a college and a university?). For profit schools pretty much kick ass.
I think the exception comes when the government contracts a business to run a school. This is a very different arrangement and is prone to all of the horrors that come along with the government signing contracts for various services. Once the contract is in place, given how slow the government is to act, all one needs to do is comply with the contract enough to not lose it outright.
This is far more false than true. Most private schools are, in fact, not-for-profit. All of the house-hold private university names, except for University of Phoenix, are all not-for-profit. Harvard, Yale, etc. are all not-for-profit.
> They are generally regarded as the best education you can get for K-12 schooling
The only for profit K-12 schools I know of are basically web-based GED prep courses. Not exactly the "best education you can get", but it'll get you that McDonalds gig.
This isn't even true of not-for-profit private schools. There are plenty of public schools, e.g. in wealthy suburbs, that are far higher quality than your average Catholic private school, for example.
> actually, wait, isn't that the difference between a college and a university?
No, not at all. The only difference is that a university a) has multiple colleges and b) offers graduate degrees.
Colleges and universities can be private for-profit, private not-for-profit, or public.
> For profit schools pretty much kick ass
Sorry to burst your bubble, but in higher education, for-profit universities are usually bottom of the barrel in terms of both prestige and quality.
No worries bursting my bubble, I learned a bunch, so that was cool. I'll have to take a look at the private K-12 schools in my area. I assumed they were going to the benefit of whoever owned the schools.
As a former K-12 private schooler, the one I went to was non-profit. It eventually went out of business due to being run a little bit too non-profit even though it existed for 20 years. I really enjoyed my time there and was sad to see it go out of business.
Many private schools are not profitable institutions by a long shot. They could use a little bit more profit motive sometimes.
Many private schools are either:
* some religious institution, like a catholic school
* some really old private school that has kept on going because it's where all the rich kids go to with a relatively large endowment.
* opening with a specific charter in mind, like a sudbury school
A lot of charters are private, for-profit schools, but you are correct that private schools are mostly non profit (IIRC most private K-12 schools are religious nonprofits.)
that is any interesting connection. the for profit prisons seem to be worse than the govt run counterparts, but for profit schools seem to vary on the effectiveness with their govt counterparts. i would guess there would be some inverse corelation btwn the avg age of the student and overall effectivness of the school - my experience is that the private schools for highschool and younger seem to do better, while college for profit seem to do worse.
K-12 public schools in the us are a variant of prison / house arrest. They even make up this crime of truancy if kids miss more than 3 days of school in a quarter.
The problem with engineering our way to a utopia, or at least, a humane government and economy, is determining who gets to write the specs that the engineers implement. It basically the same problem of deciding who should govern us, and how much of our own autonomy we should delegate to them. We're still going to have the same problems with a technocracy, that we already have with representative democracy.
I mean.... I do plan on looking at the 10-K to form an objective opinion about it
There's really almost no scenario where I'm going to say "yeah I don't want to be in a position to make a downpayment on a house by analyzing and pursuing that profitable scenario"
International terrorism makes great money for the military complex, when a good customer uses it as an excuse for an invasion. And then employment goes up, people focus away from the domestic problems, politicians get their kickbacks without sacrificing an election, you've heard this story a million times...
You might want to rephrase. I assume you're saying, the perversity goes well beyond prisons, including the companies that profit from war and paranoia generally. But as your comment stands, its hard to tell.
CCA is spending about a million dollars on lobbying per year lately. That's down from a few years back when they were at 2-4M. If you're up for it, you can dig around and try to figure out what/who they're buying here: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000021940...
I honestly don't understand the incentive part. Can you spell it out?
If the prison company was also in charge of sentencing people to prisons, I would get it. But as long as they merely implement the sentences the court system decides, what are the perverse incentives?
Private prisons are compensated based on the number of prisoners they house, not on the recidivism rate. Private prison companies then further lobby for harsher sentences.
Not to mention they're legally required to attempt increasing profits (maximizing shareholder value) forever. If the supply of prisoners is fixed, how else can that be done other than creating worse and worse prisons?
which proves the only point that was being made? Does your mind frequently attempt to lessen the blow by noticing the blow does in fact exist but is small?
If I unknowingly had money invested in private prisons I would gladly cop the loss on the chin and spend a few moments reviewing investment policies my fund uses.
I wonder if there is a market for a "moral fund." Meaning a normal diversified fund but they avoid certain markets and industries. I'd pay a slightly higher fee for that.
So there is a fairly significant bounce back starting at ~12:40. My best guess would be profit taking from shorters? I wonder if there would be any way to know who shorted this, it seems like the perfect type of thing for some inside trading in DC to take place.
Short interest on CXW was only 8.8%. Probably just digesting the news, realizing this was panic selling and states still held the vast, vast majority of private prisons.
https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ACXW