Another multinational corporation profits from Australia's abuse of children and young people

The corporate takeover of Australia's human and community services continues.

Another multinational corporation is set to profit from Australia's immigration detention system and its abuse of children and young people.

The Gillard Government has signed a new contract worth $29 million with the US based Maximus Solutions to care for  unaccompanied minors held in Australia's immigration detention gulags. The contract was previously held by Life Without Barriers, an Australian not- for- profit organization.

The figure is the nominal amount of a new contract between the Department of Immigration and Citizenship and the US based Maximus Solutions to provide ``care and support'' to teenage asylum-seekers who arrive by boat without a parent or a guardian. 

The extract below is from Paige Taylor's report in the Australian (July 12 2012)
 
There are currently 168 such teens, mostly boys, living under guard in ``alternative places of detention'' at Darwin airport, on Christmas Island and at a camp in the West Australian northern goldfields town of Leonora.

 
In the costly context of Australia's immigration detention network, the department finds the $29m contract represents good value.

 
It is a tiny sliver of the size of the five-year contract between the Immigration Department and Serco for the management of Australia's immigration detention centres on Christmas Island and the mainland; in July last year, that agreement, due to expire in 2014, was valued at $1,032,827,276.

 
The contract is one of the measures the federal government has in place to meet its obligations towards unaccompanied minors.

 
``As a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Australian government takes its obligations towards unaccompanied minors very seriously,'' the Immigration Department states on its website.

 
Immigration Minister Chris Bowen is the legal guardian of all unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Australia; as of last Friday, there were a total of 310 -- almost half, 142, had been placed in community housing under the care of the Red Cross while the rest were still in detention. ``The contract is for care and support services to unaccompanied minors in the detention network,'' a spokesman for the department said yesterday.

 
``It is also for `independent observer' services on Christmas Island and in mainland Australia.''

Maximus Solutions is a subsidiary of the US based Maximus Inc.

Maximus Inc is a US based multinational corporation that works in the health and human services industries in US, Canada, UK and Australia. It wins Government contracts to provide services previously delivered by Governments or not-for-profit organizations. With a motto Helping Government serve the People Maximus employs 8800 people worldwide.

Maximus is embroiled in controversy wherever it goes. Maximus settled with the US Government over corporate fraud allegations after it (the Government) bought a lawsuit against Maximus for falsifying $30.5 million of Medicare claims.  The Department of Justice statement on the settlement is here.

Maximus was also found to have doubled billed for services in New Jersey.

Maximus makes heavy use of lobbyists and payments to politicians and political parties. Maximus was reputed to have won a $72 million contract after it donated funds to current Presidential candidate Matt Romney when he was Massachusetts Governor.

In the UK Maximus and other other corporate providers have massively increased sanctions imposed on  welfare recipients have developed grassroots campaigns targeting a range of corporations, including Maximus, accusing them of profiteering and exploitation of people on welfare.

Here in Australia journalist Elisabeth Wynhausen has investigated Max Employment's provision of employment support services on behalf of the Australia Government in 84 sites and 71 outreach locations.

Corporate power, corporate criminality and secret lobbying: Goldman Sachs

It has not been a good couple of weeks for Goldman Sachs.

A report by a bipartisan US Senate Committee  into US investment banks has recommended criminal charges be bought against Goldman Sachs . Goldman Sachs and other Wall St firms were described by the Senate Report  as a "financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest, and wrongdoing." 

Goldman Sachs, the nation's fifth-largest bank by assets, systematically misled clients, sold them financial instruments it knew to be junk, bet against them and profited off of their losses, according to a Senate report released this week.

The report, the product of a two-year investigation, paints the firm as Exhibit A of Wall Street's evolution from a place that raises and deploys capital to worthy businesses into a vulturous creature that preys on unwitting investors.

Goldman's conduct in the two years leading up to the near-implosion of the financial system show a firm dedicated to "sticking it to their own clients," said Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who chairs the panel that produced the report. "Goldman gained at the expense of their clients, and used abusive practices to do it."

In the UK a  report published  by SpinWatch UK  exposes  Goldman Sachs political and financial lobbying muscle in the UK and Brussels (The European Parliament).

The report, entitled, Doing God’s Work: How Goldman Sachs Rigs the Game details Goldman Sachs’ secret lobbying activities in the UK and Brussels and links to politicians. It exposes:

• The extensive links between Goldman Sachs and the Conservative Party;
•   Political donations totalling £8.5million to British politicians in the past decade from Goldman and ex-Goldman people;
•    Goldman Sachs’ immense lobbying machine in Brussels, including active membership of over a dozen financial sector lobby groups;
•    Extensive meetings between Goldman Sachs and Conservative MEPs including: 9 meetings in six months with a key MEP on the Parliament’s Economics and Monetary Committee; and a total of 36 meetings between just four Tory MEPs and Goldman Sachs, its lobby groups or PR companies acting on their behalf;
•   The bank’s lobbying campaign to undermine political reform on derivatives and alternative investment funds including: private dinners and unminuted "after office hours” meetings, high-level conferences and targeted campaigns to Commission officials, MEPs and their assistants;
•   How Goldman Sach’s lobbyists tried to undermine amendments in a key report on derivatives, seen as “financial weapons of mass destruction”; 
•   The bank’s lobbying enabled them to gamble on food futures and drive up prices.

Report author, journalist Andy Rowell said: “A year ago, David Cameron said that lobbying was the next big scandal waiting to happen. This report shows that banks like Goldman Sachs – who are intricately connected to the Tories – continue to lobby to get what they want."

Rowell continued: "The entire regulatory process - and the lobbying activity that surrounds it - has to become significantly more transparent and accountable. If it is allowed to be captured by bankers, the next financial crisis will only be a matter of time.”

Challenging corporate power requires challenging economic orthodoxy

"We need to develop a new way of conceiving the economic process. In calling for an end to economics, I am not suggesting that we should dismiss everything that economists have learned about the economy. Some economic insights are useful. Our goal should be to build up an understanding of the economy in a context that transcends the narrow context of economic theory that characterizes modern economic theory. In doing so, we may lay the groundwork for an economy that transcends our outmoded capitalist way of life." 

Michael Perelman Railroading Economics

Stephen Marglin calls it the "dismal science". Michael Perelman writes about the ideological straitjacket of modern economics. James Galbraith describes contemporary economics in terms of a god that failed, a governing creed whose fallacies have been exposed by events of recent years.  In his book Economia Australian Geoff Davies writes that we have all become so accustomed to the current economic regime that we fail to see how absurd it is. He is right.

Contemporary economics provides the intellectual justification for corporate power. If we are to expose and challenge corporate power then we must also expose the fallacies at the heart of contemporary economics and economic theory. With that goal in mind I am currently reading the books pictured, all of which present a radical and sustained critique of contemporary economics. They challenge the idea that market and market forces are a solution to our social, environmental and economic problems.

These books don't just expose discredited contemporary economic orthodoxies, they also document the destructive effects of those orthodoxies in the real world (rather than the theories of economists and business leaders). These authors more importantly set an  alternative and radical economic agenda for the future.

The books pictured include:

  

Stephen Margeli (2008) The Dismal Science

Michael Perelman (2006) Railroading Economics

James Galbraith (2008)  The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and why Liberals Should to

Geoff Davies (2004) Economia: New Economic systems to empower people and support the living world

James Gustav Speth (2008) The Bridge at the End of the World

Barry Lynn (2009) Cornered:The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Dynamics of Destruction

The corporate enclosure of sport

John Pilger on the corporate enclosure of sport.

"The pursuit of profit in sport seems unrelenting............................Corporate sport has enriched Rupert Murdoch, corrupted cricket and much of football, subverted numerous other play and appropriated the Olympics and similar spectacles. Its language is that of business schools, PR companies, consultancies and banks. Its “philosophy” is that everything is for sale and monopoly rules.