Four national banks have cut ties with the Nashville-based CoreCivic, a private prison and detention center company, reportedly because of political pressure from leftist politicians, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren.
CoreCivic officials told The Tennessee Star that Ocasio-Cortez, Warren, and others are outright lying about their company and how they handle illegal immigrants.
And, because of that, the company has reportedly lost business with banks including SunTrust, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo.
According to The American Spectator’s website, Ocasio-Cortez and Warren “have exploited the illegal immigrant crisis to stir public sentiment against the private detention industry.”
As a part of this, as reported, Ocasio-Cortez made bold claims about the conditions at one facility that housed illegal aliens — claims that people in authority have since discredited.
“CoreCivic’s ordeal — the company is not affiliated with the facility that Ocasio-Cortez visited and does not operate facilities on behalf of U.S. Customs and Border Protection,” The Spectator reported.
Firms are now accountable for the problems of their competitors, according to The Spectator.
“These sudden, on-the-fly decisions indicate a worrying susceptibility of financial institutions to cow-tow to political pressure — the kind created by the sensationalist dust-clouds kicked up by Ocasio-Cortez. Financial institutions are expected to be relatively staid, predictable, and impartial,” The Spectator went on to say.
“These actions suggest that banks bend to activists that seek to transform cultural and economic institutions into participants in a crusade against supposed social injustices.”
CoreCivic spokeswoman Amanda Gilchrist told The Star in an emailed statement it’s not just CoreCivic that gets hurt by all this.
“The most disappointing aspect of these politicized banking decisions, disingenuous activist efforts and no-solution proposals from politicians is the people who they ultimately hurt. It hurts the American people because important policies are being discussed, made or avoided based on misinformation rather than an open and honest dialogue on the challenges at hand,” Gilchrist wrote.
“It hurts migrants because it limits the ability of our government to partner with the private sector to provide safe, humane housing and critical services while they receive the legal due process they’re entitled to. It hurts the incarcerated who should never be in the overcrowded, dangerous conditions we help alleviate and who will be better equipped for success with the wide variety of reentry programming we provide.”
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “CoreCivic Facility” by CoreCivic.
[…] The Tennessee Star reported, officials with these four banks are upset with all private prison industries and ended their […]
I don’t think private prisons have a worse record than government-run prisons. The riots in major government-run prisons have caused serious loss of life and damage to government property. The threat to the general public is the same regardless of who is operating the prison. The most significant aspect of this situation is that everything in our culture is becoming politicized. This is prelude to dictatorship, when every issue becomes a political one and there is no place for personal freedom. It presages the end of the free enterprise system, when businesses feel it necessary to consider and respond to a political agenda. As large sectors of the economy become national in scope, so does their impact on local events increase. This adds to the push for everything to become national and reduces the opportunity and ability for decisions to be local.
Glad for AOC in this particular instance!!!
So Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s movement has damaged Core Civic, eh? Oh, how my heart bleeds for greedy prison-privatizer, Core Civic. The more damage she can do to the prison privatization business, the better off our country will be! We tried prison privatization a hundred years ago called convict-leasing. It didn’t work. Tennessee got rid of convict-leasing after a major coal miner’s rebellion in the early 1890’s forced the state to take over all prison labor thereafter. By the 1920’s, places like Alabama had to do likewise. Privatized prisons not only endanger inmates; they endanger guards/staff; and the general public who has to live next to one of these sites.
So your comparing Core Civic to convict leasing during the reconstruction period 1865 to 1885 in TN and AL? That’s a little twisted, don’t you think?
DITTO!