TOXIC CABAL

Ch 7 - A question of roofies

CHAPTER SEVEN

One man's remorse is another man's reminiscence. --  Gerald Horton Bath

James idly picked up the remote as his teenage son left the room. He knew he should probably venture forth from his study and see whether his wife needed any help entertaining her weekend guests. But first, he was going to take a quick look at CNBSeen to check whether he might get a fresh chuckle or two out of some new absurdity on the Internet stocks meltdown front.

Instead, he clicked on just in time to discover a gorgeous brunette on the verge of launching into a special report. Slugged into the on-air space to the right of her was a projection of the words: ‘WoeLiFe Scandal Exclusive.’

What fresh tart is this? he asked himself, paraphrasing one of Dorothy Parker’s immortal lines.

“This is Kelly Hevan, with a special excusive on the Work Like a Felon scandal,” the reporter helpfully began. “Dubbed the WoeLiFe scandal by this very network, it is ongoing even now in desolate counties across Western Texas. Over the next half hour, we’ll tell you how and why it happened. We’ll also delve behind the scenes, pulling back the curtain to reveal the corporations and personalities involved.”

A succession of headshots slugged with the names and titles of government functionaries and corporate executives began to appear alongside her as she continued.

“Does this list include Independent presidential candidate ‘Uncle Sam’ Saxon? We’ll give you our expert analysis. First, though, you need to understand the dynamics. Just as many Nasdaq and Dow Jones stocks experienced a huge run-up over the past decade, so too did prison populations. As you can see, this was an even longer but oddly similar move.”

The screen off to her side now showed a graph. Like many a Nasdaq stock graph until quite recently, it showed a strong up line for several years, followed by an even sharper move upward in the late 1990s.

“As you can see,” Kelly continued, “our prison population more than tripled from 1972 to 1990, surging to 1 million souls. In just the past ten years it has doubled again, to 2 million unfortunates.”

A series of corporate logos now came and went off to her side.

“Private companies began profiting from this dynamic in a big way in the 1980s, through a perverse-sounding process called ‘convict leasing.’ This legal wrinkle allows them to build and run facilities, pay prisoners chump change for doing manufacturing work, charge them a dollar or more per minute for phone calls, and otherwise game our nation’s and states’ penal systems. Leaders in the space include Reducing Recidivists Co., trading under the ticker symbol REDU, and GPS Lockdown, trading as LOSE.”

The cameraman now fixated on a close-up of Kelly, an apparently brilliant young woman whose visage was also worthy of focused attention.

“The current problem seems to have occurred as competing companies started building facilities on spec. Unfortunately, or fortunately, if you happen to not to have the protections available to the upper classes, the number of fresh folks being thrown into the slammer did not keep pace with the growth in accommodations.”

The camera panned out again, this time to show a series of isolated prison complexes sited in the midst of expanses of barren nothingness.

“Reports recently started emerging of so-called ‘staffing’ drive-bys, in which unmarked vans pull up to places where illegals gather to find day jobs, and instead find themselves forced into captivity. Between impressions that the vans might be operating under government authority and a profound desire not to get caught in the grinder, such incidents were usually unreported.”