Louisiana is the world's prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana's incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran's, seven times China's and 10 times Germany's.

The hidden engine behind the state's well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt.

Several homegrown private prison companies command a slice of the market. But in a uniquely Louisiana twist, most prison entrepreneurs are rural sheriffs, who hold tremendous sway in remote parishes like Madison, Avoyelles, East Carroll and Concordia. A good portion of Louisiana law enforcement is financed with dollars legally skimmed off the top of prison operations.

If the inmate count dips, sheriffs bleed money. Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars.

[…]

One in 86 adult Louisianians is doing time, nearly double the national average. Among black men from New Orleans, one in 14 is behind bars; one in seven is either in prison, on parole or on probation. Crime rates in Louisiana are relatively high, but that does not begin to explain the state's No. 1 ranking, year after year, in the percentage of residents it locks up.

[…]

Today, wardens make daily rounds of calls to other sheriffs' prisons in search of convicts to fill their beds. Urban areas such as New Orleans and Baton Rouge have an excess of sentenced criminals, while prisons in remote parishes must import inmates to survive.

The more empty beds, the more an operation sinks into the red. With maximum occupancy and a thrifty touch with expenses, a sheriff can divert the profits to his law enforcement arm, outfitting his deputies with new squad cars, guns and laptops. Inmates spend months or years in 80-man dormitories with nothing to do and few educational opportunities before being released into society with $10 and a bus ticket.

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Also see this other article by the same author:

What is good for the sheriff can be bad, even tragic, for the inmate. Local prisons, which generally keep those with sentences of fewer than 10 years, are bare-bones operations without the array of educational and vocational programs that are standard at state prisons. Inmates caught up in the wardens' daily bartering can be transferred arbitrarily, sometimes losing chances at a GED certificate or a work-release job when they land at another facility. Plumbers and auto mechanics are valuable commodities, given up by one warden as a favor to another.

An awkward dance:

That little German nudge, just short of a shove, is priceless.

via The Daily Beast's Andrew Sullivan

The American Prospect's Jamelle Bouie presents a convincing argument: Romney may be a pandering etch-a-sketch flip-flopper without true core convictions, but his malleable nature means something very specific in the wider political context of a Republican Party that is dominated by the Tea Party movement, and that might very well take control of Congress in the Fall. We're not in Kansas Massachusetts anymore, and thus we cannot expect a moderate nor a socially conscious President Romney:

What drove the quick embrace of the former Massachusetts governor? It wasn't love; conservatives aren't thrilled with Romney, even as they prepare to support him. But they aren't objecting to a marriage of convenience. Grover Norquist, founder of the anti-tax Americans for Tax Reform, explained Romney's acceptability in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. 'We just need a president who can sign the legislation that the Republican House and Senate pass,' he said. 'We don't need someone to think. We need someone with enough digits on one hand to hold a pen.'

Romney's appeal is that he can win a general election. The right has controlled the Republican Party for years, and all it needs is a titular leader to implement its policies. If conservatives could elect a corpse, they would, but because the Constitution requires a warm body, they'll make do with Romney. What they want is a front man for their ideas, and throughout his campaign, Romney has been happy to oblige. His domestic-policy proposals are perfectly attuned to right-wing orthodoxy: 'Repeal Obama-care.' 'Repeal Dodd-Frank.' 'Eliminate Title X family--planning programs benefiting groups like Planned Parenthood.' 'Return federal programs to the states.'

Bouie goes on to crunch the numbers of the policies championed by Romney and the Right, especially in the context of what they would actually do for the deficit/national debt and how all of them mean substantially slashing social services while doing f-all to "create jobs". Excerpt:

To meet all of Romney's fiscal goals—and a balanced budget—policymakers would have to make the most draconian cuts in the nation's history. Over eight years, they would have to slash $10 trillion from the non-defense discretionary budget, or a whopping 81 percent.

This would pay for Romney's large tax cuts for the rich—with a little left over—but the cost to ordinary Americans would be catastrophic. Pell grants? Gone. Aid to needy families? Gone. Medicaid? Gone. Environmental protection? Gone. Food stamps? Gone. Unemployment insurance? Gone. Under Romney, the federal government would return to the skeletal state of the pre–New Deal era. What's more, we could say goodbye to an economic recovery. The shock from these measures would cost the economy more than four million jobs through 2014.

I recommend you read the whole thing.

Also consider this follow-up by Mother Jones' Adam Serwer: "Would Mitt Romney Be the Most Right-Wing President Ever?"

In terms of figuring out what you're actually voting for, it makes more sense to think about yourself as voting for a party rather than a candidate. That candidate will pursue the party's agenda within whatever objective structural constraints exist, meaning even if Barack Obama were the closet radical so many conservatives think he is, his policy agenda would still have been subject to the whims of Democratic centrists in the Senate.

If Mitt Romney wins, he'll likely be facing fewer of those constraints. The Democratic Party is a coalition of liberals and moderates. The Republican Party is currently dominated by conservatives. Obama had to tailor his policy preferences to appeal Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson to beat Republican filibusters, but it's unlikely Democrats will be able to act with the same ideological discipline that Republicans have displayed over the past few years.

Even so, Romney seems uniquely suited to fitting the "warm body" standard—that all Republicans need is a president ready to rubber-stamp whatever Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) comes up with—that Bouie refers to at the beginning of his piece. The best explanation I've seen for the two Romneys (The moderate Massachussetts governor and the conservative standard-bearer) comes from Reason's Peter Suderman, who compares Romney to a business consultant who views his task as "presenting the customer with a slicker, better packaged, but fundamentally unchanged version of itself." When the client was liberal Massachussetts, Romney was a moderate. As the leader of the post-Tea Party GOP, he will as conservative as his clients need him to be.

While I do not agree with reinstating Glass-Steagall wholesale, putting a legal wall between commercial banks and investment banks is probably the only solution to the problem of how to break up the Too-Big-To-Fail banks short of nationalizing them.

Q: You think had it [the Volcker rule] been in place, we wouldn't be talking about this?

WARREN: Well, I'm going to put it this way. The Volcker Rule would help. We don't know exactly the nature of these trades. But if the question is is the Volcker rule enough, or do we need more, look, I'm somebody who believes we really should have boring banking. That banking should be — the part that's about savings accounts and checking accounts and our money system — should be separated from the kind of risk-taking that Wall Street traders want to take. That was originally what the Glass-Steagall Act was about, it was repealed in 1999. There was an effort to get it into Dodd-Frank in the 2010 bill. That effort failed. I think we really do need that kind of separation. We need to go back to boring banking. The people who want to take risks need to take risks with their own money and do it somewhere else.

Via ThinkProgress

In this video from MoveOn.org, Robert Reich explains that the problem with America isn't what people do in their bedrooms but what they've been doing in boardrooms.

via The Nation

Warren, who initially called for Dimon's resignation from the NY Fed on Saturday, renewed her call Sunday after Dimon's appearance on 'Meet the Press,' a news item on her website announced. Warren asks Dimon resign in order to 'demonstrate to the American people that Wall Street will take responsibility for its risky gambles.'

Warren also took the opportunity to restate her goal of a well-regulated financial industry. 'We need to stop the cycle of bankers taking on risky activities, getting bailed out by the taxpayers, then using their army of lobbyists to water down regulations,' Warren said. 'We need a tough cop on the beat so that no one steals your purse on Main Street or your pension on Wall Street.'

[Link: livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com...]

From the May 11 edition of Fox News' On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, via Media Matters for America

The logic is simple. If by leveraging housing stock — using the stock as collateral — the process of mortgage securitisation encouraged subprime lending to people who (arguably) couldn't afford them, could leveraging commodities in the same way be encouraging equally uncouth lending practices?

Leave the massive commodity operators aside for a minute — though, that's not to say they are not being impacted — and consider smaller corporate entities that utilise commodities in their daily manufacturing processes.

It's always been common practice for commodity inventory to be financed by banks by being pledged as security for the loans in question.

The problem comes if such enterprises, instead of using the inventory for general business purposes, are encouraged to stockpile for the sole purpose of liquidity provision and the opportunity to punt on the underlying commodities themselves. It's a process which arguably artificially pumps up demand for the underlying inventory.

Bundle all those loans together, meanwhile — ideally into a product that can be sold to buyside investors seeking exposure to commodities — and suddenly you've got a direct source of funding for an ever-more speculative game.

When it comes to the larger players, meanwhile, this arguably transcends 'trade finance' even further — especially if it involves the setting up of a large number of special purpose vehicles to accomplish the process.

Read the whole thing…