A Timely Update: For-Profit Private Prison Operator CoreCivic

The City of Mesa seems to be operating in stark contract at odds - doing the exact opposite - as an investment group that seeks to direct capital towards social justice and sustainability and away from For-Profit Private Prison corporation CoreCivic.

The current issue here is seeking approval from the Mesa City Council to approve a new $3.6M contract award for detention facilities. The first controversial contract was awarded in 2017.

On the national level, in the State of California, the outcome of a legal case produced these comments from Tim Cushing published on Techdirt last Thursday, April 15, 2021. That was the same day the contract award item was on the Consent Agenda to be heard and discussed during a Study Session.

Private Prison Company On The Hook For Legal Fees After Suing Investment Group For Saying It Was Doing Stuff It Was Actually Doing

Thu, Apr 15th 2021 3:48pm— Tim Cushing

Techdirt. |

Private prison company CoreCivic has just learned a civics lesson. [I'll show myself out.] Possibly a very expensive one.

Last March, it sued [PDF] Candide Group, an investment firm that "directs capital away from an extractive global economy towards investments dedicated to social justice and sustainability." CoreCivic was one company Candide reps wanted money directed away from, citing its participation in separating parents from children at our nation's borders. (But really only the Southern border if we're honest.) Candide also claimed CoreCivic lobbies for harsher sentencing and tougher immigration laws since both of those would naturally provide more business for CoreCivic.

CoreCivic's libel lawsuit said these two "falsehoods" were spread throughout the web via sites like Forbes and multiple social media platforms. It denied both assertions and said they were stated with a reckless disregard for the truth. Candide responded with an anti-SLAPP motion [PDF], which pointed out that not only could CoreCivic not prove the statements were false but also that it had filed its lawsuit past the one-year statute of limitations.

The motion worked. After some back and forth discussion about the merits of the arguments, the court disposed of CoreCivic's lawsuit with a very short dismissal [PDF] in November. The order doesn't say much but it says enough to indicate just how weak CoreCivic's allegations were. . .

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CoreCivic didn't like being publicly criticized, especially by an entity that could shift investors' money elsewhere. That these actions may have damaged CoreCivic's future profitability isn't really relevant -- at least not when its allegations of libel couldn't be sustained.

Whatever money is now leaking from CoreCivic is going to be (mildly) compounded by its inability to recognize largely truthful statements as protected speech, rather than the defamation it clearly desires them to be. . .

CoreCivic sued because it didn't like being criticized for doing things it was actually doing.

> A suit like this is designed to silence critics and deter others from making similar statements.

If a defendant bleeds long enough, an eventual victory is ultimately meaningless. The damage has been done and the threat remains."

Filed Under: anti-slapp, border, defamation, detention centers, prisons, private prisons, separated families, slapp, statute of limitations
Companies: candide, corecivic

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Compassion: Private For-Profit Prisons | Mesa City Council Seeking Approval on $3.6M Contract with Core Civic

The issue is back on-the-table this month and back in the news > RELATED CONTENT ON THIS BLOG FROM. 2017 19 May 2017 WATCH THIS Mesa ...

The controversial topic of human rights, combined with evolving public sentiment and policy views on criminal justice reform, expose privately operated criminal detention facilities operators to ongoing social and governance risks, . .

Biden Order Hits Private U.S. Prisons’ Credit Ratings

By Davide Scigliuzzo

Bloomberg.com |

‎March‎ ‎24‎, ‎2021‎ ‎9‎:‎27 Updated on ‎March‎ ‎24‎, ‎2021‎ ‎16‎:‎15

For years, private U.S. prison companies have faced scrutiny from social justice advocates, politicians and investors. Now that the Biden administration is severing the federal government’s ties, the industry’s creditworthiness is taking a hit.

Geo Group Inc. and CoreCivic Inc. -- the nation’s largest operators of private detention facilities -- citing growing questions about the outlook for the companies’ profits and concerns over their ability to refinance debt. A few hours later, Moody’s Investors Service took similar actions on both companies.

The review was prompted by President Joe Biden’s executive order in January that instructed the Department of Justice not to renew contracts with private prisons. These deals accounted for about 27% of Geo’s revenue and 24% of CoreCivic’

Both companies have seen their financing options dwindle in recent years, after major investment banks pledged to cut ties with private prison operators and as money managers face increased pressure to incorporate environmental, social and governance criteria into their investment selection.

Weird Year In Finance....O Yeah Baby ! (Lifted from The Verge)

Remarkable

Dogecoin is on a run, has escaped the yard, and is headed to the moon

0 New, 37 comments

When do you call the top?

By Elizabeth Lopatto@mslopatto Apr 16, 2021, 12:00pm EDT

 

Oh, super, Dogecoin is spiking. The joke currency, which as recently as January 27th was worth less than a cent, hit 47 cents this morning, according to Robinhood’s tracker. As I type this, the market cap is more than $51 billion.

The currency is based on an au-courant-as-of-2013 meme of a Shiba Inu, and was intended to satirize bitcoin. Well, kids, the joke’s over. It’s now a top-10 cryptocurrency.

Weird year for finance, honestly . . .

There was the Gamestonk thing which made GameStop stock so valuable, a member of the board of directors had to step down so that he could sell shares without restrictions. (Noted investor David Einhorn accused Elon Musk of pouring “jet fuel” on the January rally; a hedge fund called the top of the January rally based on the Musk tweet and raked in the dough.) Keith “Roaring Kitty” Gill stands to make millions, which he will presumably use to buy fancier headbands. NFT mania seized the world, after artist Beeple — aka Mike Winkelmann — sold an NFT of Everydays: The First 5,000 Days for $69 million. Coinbase went public earlier this week, and closed its first day of trading worth more than the company behind the Nasdaq, the exchange it trades on.

Doge Barking at the Moon pic.twitter.com/QFB81D7zOL

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 15, 2021

Last night, Musk — a shitposter with a hobby of being CEO of Tesla and SpaceX — tweeted “Doge Barking at the Moon.” For those of you fortunate enough to have avoided internet-related brainworms: a bunch of people probably thought this was a reference to a phrase used by internet traders, “to the moon.” Musk, who is known for coming to memes late, has called dogecoin his favorite cryptocurrency. In February, he called it “The People’s Crypto.”

Look, it’s not my fault that the interest rate is zero percent — that was always gonna make shit weird, because there’s almost nowhere safe to park your money without losing some of it to inflation. That means a lot more money is sloshing around than usual, which is fueling everything from SPACs to Gamestonk.

What worries me is that we could be locked into zero interest rate policy world for as long as five years, which is an awfully long time for memes to mess with actual money.

As long as there’s this much money sloshing around, anything goes.

Anyway, if you are a hedge fund that called the top on Dogecoin based on an Elon Musk tweet, let me know — I’d love to interview you and find out how that call went.

Next Up In Tech

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• Camera footage from wolf’s collar reveals a very good boy
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Cute It's Not > Robo Cop Dog

Signs of a Sci-Fi Dystopia possibly deployed  to somewhere near you:

New Yorkers freak out as NYPD deploys Digidog, despite city’s project to ban ‘weaponized robots’    

Image Credit: © Facebook / Marie Mckinstry

RT International | 10:13 GMT, Apr 16, 2021

 

"A $75,000 robot dog seen leaving a Manhattan housing project has outraged city residents who heard less than a month ago that the pricey Boston Dynamics bots would be banned from being used as weapons.    

The dog was seen exiting the housing project on Monday with a group of human police officers, who acted almost subservient to the shiny blue metal creature while escorting it out of the Kips Bay building. While the New York Police Department insisted the faux-canine had not played an “active role” in the operation, which allegedly involved removing an armed man from an apartment belonging to a woman and her baby, its appearance seemed to cast a spell over the assembled residents

The NYPD insisted that it “has been using robots since the 1970s to save lives in hostage situations & hazmat incidents,” so it wants Digidog to serve these particular purposes.

However, New York City Council member Ben Kallos hinted he didn’t trust Digidog’s capabilities to remain at “bark” level when it was oh so tempting to “bite.” The councilmember put forward a measure singling out the hair-raising cop-bot called the ‘No Killer Robots Act’, clearly aimed at the use of Boston Dynamics’ toys.

A previous resolution passed last June – the ‘Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act’, aimed at keeping citizens informed about what kind of disturbing capabilities the city’s preposterously well-funded police department would be rolling out in the near future. 

“No one wants a future where our city looks and feels like a ‘Black Mirror’ episode,” Kallos said, referencing the increasingly nonfictional killer K-9s from the Netflix show’s episode ‘Metal Head’, said to be inspired by Boston Dynamics’ creations. The No Killer Robots Act bans the city from not only using weaponized robots, but threatening to do so. Additionally, using bots in a way “likely to cause death or serious injury” is off-limits – an action this week’s appearance at the housing project likely violated, as one can hear shocked onlookers making nervous jokes about Star Wars character R2-D2 and presumably sighing with relief as they observe the device is not after them.

“All of our buyers, without exception, must agree that Spot will not be used to harm or intimidate people or animals, as a weapon or configured to hold a weapon,” Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter said in the past.

Still, the dog is equipped with AI, meaning it has the possibility (however slim its developers claim) of going rogue, and features up-to-the-minute tracking technology including cameras and sensors. All that’s needed to turn it into a killer weapon is a few modifications. Given the NYPD’s resources, one can imagine that they could easily afford to outfit a few of these into ruthless creatures.

Even some of those who didn’t seem to fear the potentially deadly pooch were upset because of what they insisted was a ludicrous amount of money to spend on something so clearly designed to terrorize a populace already beside itself with anger and fear over police violence.

And a few mayoral candidates took it as an opportunity to grandstand, with Democratic candidate Scott Stringer declaring “as mayor, we will invest in people, not police dogs.”

© Autonomous Nonprofit Organization “TV-Novosti”, 2005–2021. All rights reserved.

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Also on rt.com ‘You have 15 seconds to comply’: NYPD says new robotic cop dog will ‘save lives’ as netizens warn of sci-fi dystopia      

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From The Verge > Google Time Lapse. . .It's about Zooming Out

In plain sight: “Timelapse and Google Earth sits at the nexus of science, technology, public-private partnerships, and the next generation as we think about both climate change and climate action,” Moore said.

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The feature announced Thursday offers a 3D time lapse of the Earth’s geological changes, allowing you to look at the changes in the Earth in more detail.

Google has also released 800 time-lapse videos of different areas around the planet as free downloads. The company aims for them to be used by teachers, nonprofits, policymakers, and others to show how the geography of Earth has changed over time.

Google Earth’s historical 3D time lapses show the ravages of climate change

0 New, 9 comments

The new feature will be available Thursday

By Jay Peters@jaypeters Apr 15, 2021, 9:00am EDT

Google Earth is getting a new 3D time-lapse feature that lets you observe how Earth has changed from 1984 to 2020, allowing you to see just how much the devastating effects of climate change have already shaped the geography of the planet.

“It’s best for a landscape view of our world,” Rebecca Moore, director of Google Earth, Google Earth Engine, and Google Earth Outreach, said in a call with reporters this week. “It’s not about zooming in. It’s about zooming out. It’s about taking the big step back. We need to see how our only home is doing.”

The feature (which Google calls “Timelapse,” one word) will be available in Google Earth starting Thursday. To access it, launch Google Earth and then click or tap on the Voyager tab (which has an icon that looks like a ship’s wheel). You can search for a place of interest or check out one of Google’s five “guided tours” about forest change, urban growth, warming temperatures, mining and renewable energy sources, and “the Earth’s fragile beauty.”

To get an idea of what the feature lets you see, check out this time lapse GIF of the changing shores of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, from Google:

Or this GIF of the Columbia Glacier’s retreat:

To create the 3D time-lapse imagery for Google Earth, the company says it used more than 24 million satellite images taken from 1984 to 2020 to create one 4.4 terapixel-sized video mosaic. (To give you a sense of the scale there, one terapixel is 1 million megapixels.) The company worked with NASA, the US Geological Survey (USGS), the European Commission, and the European Space Agency (ESA) to collect the data used in the time lapses.

“Timelapse and Google Earth sits at the nexus of science, technology, public-private partnerships, and the next generation as we think about both climate change and climate action,” Moore said.

This isn’t the Google Earth team’s first time-lapse feature. In May 2013, the team released a time-lapse feature displaying 2D images of Earth from 1984 to 2012, and it made a big update to that in November 2016. The feature announced Thursday, however, offers a 3D time lapse of the Earth’s geological changes, allowing you to look at the changes in the Earth in more detail.

Google has also released 800 time-lapse videos of different areas around the planet as free downloads. The company aims for them to be used by teachers, nonprofits, policymakers, and others to show how the geography of Earth has changed over time.

Exploring Timelapse in Google Earth

A Conversation with Peter Thiel and Niall Ferguson

Re/Generation > Reach Out and Get Plugged Into More Resources for Equitable and Inclusive Community Development

Retrieved from INBOX >

RAIL CDC is excited to show off

The Faces of RAIL

Over the course of the next few weeks, chances are you will be seeing some of the RAIL CDC staff visiting you at your business. We wanted to take this opportunity to reach out and introduce some of the people you'll be meeting.  In addition to this, RAIL CDC has recently brought on a team of professional consultants in a variety of different fields to help your business succeed. Their expertise ranges from things like accounting to marketing, to business consulting. The best part about this team? Their work is available to you FREE of charge! If you're interested in any of the services you see below, reach out to see how you can get plugged in!

The RAIL Team

Ryan Winkle Executive Director

Augie Gastelum Project Manager/Lead Consultant (Business)

Jacob Martinez Corridor Specialist/Digital Marketing Consultant

Our Consultants

Shannon Hayes Business Consultant

Earnest Sears Business Consultant

Kevin Frost Digital Marketing

With more consultants coming soon!

What is RAIL CDC doing these days?

RAIL CDC Accomplishments in 2020 (shortlist) ● Won the 2020 Recognition of Resilience for Equity award from ASU’s Knowledge of Exchange for Resilience  ● Awarded small businesses in two light rail corridors with $40,000 worth of grants with the partnership of LISC and US Bank ● Helped 67 small businesses complete and submit the application for rental and utility assistance through the Mesa CARES Re-emergence program. We helped gather more than $619,750 (amount based on average dollars awarded per business) in rental and utility assistance to the small business community that otherwise would not have been able to benefit from the program due to technology barriers. ● Partnered with the City of Tempe to reach out to 175 small businesses to inform them of the Small Business grant. ● 23 small businesses received technical assistance to fill out the Small Business grants provided by LISC. 20 small businesses in our light rail corridor have received funding of $20,000 ● Helped over 27 small businesses not only apply for the Paycheck Protectio Program, but obtain more than $176,040 to help them survive the storm that is COVID-19. ● Assisted over 100 small businesses to access Grant funding access of $3.9 million dollars in Mesa and in Tempe

Many thanks to our staff, volunteers, and partners. An investment in RAIL CDC is an investment in the small businesses & neighborhoods in our community.