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the multi-national anti immigration industry and their billionaire profits
#1
12-05-2011, 09:22 PM
Senior Member
Joined in Aug 2010
533 posts
i foudn this from the other guardian article but its got alot of info worth reading, the site may have it a bit easier to read with better formatting
http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/07/...naire-profits/
In the name of safety: the multi-national anti immigration industry and their billionaire profits
I am a Non Western, South American immigrant in a society that is increasingly determined to get rid of those like me. Media constantly reminds me that we are practically non human...
Nick Buckles, the chief executive of G4S, would not discuss the company. But last year he told analysts how its “justice” business in the Netherlands blossomed in one week after the 2002 assassination of a politician with an anti-immigrant and law-and-order agenda.
“There’s nothing like a political crisis to stimulate a bit of change,” Mr. Buckles said.
That’s what undocumented immigrants are: a bit of political change. Except that the security guards working for the company that Mr. Buckles represents had a big degree of responsibility for the gruesome death of eleven asylum seekers who were awaiting deportation in a detention center at Schiphol Airport in The Netherlands on Thursday, October 27thof 2005. Apparently, the kind of change Mr. Buckles aims for does not include preserving the wellbeing of people whose only crime was to seek an opportunity to better their lives. When detainees raised the alarm and cried for help, when flames were taking over the detention center, the guards working for Mr. Buckles’ corporation ignored them. They were left to die. Nine men and two women. Their bodies now an “opportunity for corporate growth”.
In Rotterdam, also in The Netherlands, G4S ran the infamous detention boats, which the European Parliament qualified as “inhuman” and not suitable for housing people who had committed no crime.
But this is not a situation unique to The Netherlands; in the US, UK or Australia, many of the immigrants awaiting deportation are also in Mr. Buckles’ hands. Alternatively, they could be detained in camps run by G4S competitors GEO or Serco. In the US alone, GEO controls 7,000 of 32,000 detention beds. (Incidentally, the more I read and write about Mr. Buckles, the more I can totally picture him as competitor to The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns).
... operations in 125 different nations. G4S is also is the world’s largest security company measured by revenues and, with over 625,000 employees it is the world’s second-largest private sector employer (after Wal-Mart Stores).
...
G4S is the world’s leading international security solutions group.
From risk assessment to delivery, we work in partnership with governments, businesses and other organizations to provide integrated solutions to security challenges. Our heritage goes back over a century and, with more than 595,000 employees, we are the second largest private employer in the world.
We protect rock stars and sports stars, people and property,... advising on stadium building plans to crowd control ; delivering pay packets to ensuring ATMs have enough cash to meet your shopping needs; delivering cash to bank branches and retail outlets to managing the flow of cash for central banks and major retailers; ensuring travelers have a safe and pleasant experience in ports and airports around the world to secure detention and escorting of people who are not lawfully entitled to remain in a country;
In more ways than you might realize, G4S is securing your world.
In more ways than you might realize, G4S is securing your world. That is, unless you are an undocumented immigrant awaiting deportation. Those poor souls? Those could not be in more dangerous hands. Because, you see, the detention centers for undocumented immigrants operated by G4S have not just been responsible for the deaths in The Netherlands that I mentioned above but for many more violent casualties in several other detention centers as well. From the New York Times article:
G4S, an Anglo-Danish security conglomerate with more than 600,000 employees in 125 countries, was faulted for lethal neglect and abusive use of solitary confinement in Australia. By the middle of the past decade, after refugee children had sewed their lips together during hunger strikes in camps like Woomera and Curtin, and government commissions discovered that Australian citizens and legal residents were being wrongly detained and deported, protests pushed the Liberal Party government to dismantle some aspects of the system.
More chilling cases of detainee neglect, abuse and eventual death:
In 2007, Western Australia’s Human Rights Commission found that G4S drivers had ignored the cries of detainees locked in a scorching van, leaving them so dehydrated that one drank his own urine. The company was ordered to pay $500,000 for inhumane treatment, but three of the five victims already had been deported. Immigration officials, relying on company misinformation, had dismissed their complaints without investigation, the commission found.
There was a public outcry when an Aboriginal man died in another G4S van in similar circumstances the next year. A coroner ruled in 2009 that G4S, the drivers and the government shared the blame. The company was later awarded a $70 million, five-year prisoner transport contract in another state, Victoria, without competition.
Women are forced to give birth in the detention camps, behind barbed wire. Their babies forced to grow in such suffocating environment. Traumatized and battered, some of these children will severely self harm. From a report by The Age on one of the incidents that involved a G4S operated camp:
Fifty asylum seekers at the Woomera detention centre had sewn their lips together as part of an ongoing hunger strike, a detainee said today.
Child 3 – 15-years-old, detained June 2001, transferred to Adelaide 27 January 2002
Case management plan (December 2001): ‘[Child] is a very quiet young man and is always polite and well mannered. He tends to follow the other UAMs in which ever direction they take. [He] has been involved in one minor disturbance.’
On 23 January FAYS noted that the child reported that ‘he had sewn his own lips and is on a hunger strike that is in its 8th day’; ...
In the US, G4S is also in charge of a very profitable contract:
In the US, G4S Wackenhut has a contract to provide ‘guard and transportation’ services on behalf of the Customs and Border Protection Agency. The contract covers the entire length of the south-west US–Mexican border and involves the provision of over 100 secure buses and other vehicles, their crews and over 575 G4S armed security personnel.
To put it in layman terms: G4S deports all undocumented immigrants forced to leave through the Mexican border.
In the US, there seems to be a growing awareness of G4S role in the criminalization of immigrants, though. A group of activists recently organized a protest:
On Wednesday, June 29th, a group of autonomously organized Tucson community members entered the offices of international private security firm G4S. Organized under the banner Direct Action for Freedom of Movement, the action was meant to demonstrate our opposition to the company’s profiteering off of criminalization of immigrant communities and the expansion of the prison-industrial complex, as well as its’ role in the proliferation of policies such as Arizona’s SB1070 through its’ membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The action was also taken in solidarity with six individuals who locked down at the Border Patrol headquarters in Tucson last summer who were in court at the time of yesterday’s action.
Unfurling banners reading “Prison Profiteers Destroy Communities”, “Take Direct Action to End Border Militarization”, and “Direct Action for Freedom of Movement”, the group attempted to deliver a letter to company representatives before asking for ten seconds of silence to remember those who have been separated from families, died in desert or been locked in cages as a result of militarization and criminalization. After G4S employees refused the accept the letter or honor the ten seconds of silence, the protesters commenced ten minutes of noise, with chants including “No Borders, No Nations, Stop Deportations”.
In the UK, at Heathrow Airport, G4S security guards have been accused of causing the death of an Angolan deportee...“They’re going to kill me.” He estimated that the three security guards were on top of Mubenga for 45 minutes”.
The inaugural flight to Afghanistan should have been a showcase for a multinational company vying for the lucrative contract to deport foreign nationals on behalf of the British government.
The plane heading to Kabul on 26 January 2004 had been chartered by a company that would go on to become part of the world’s largest private security firm – G4S. Its cargo included refused asylum seekers in handcuffs. A number had their legs bound with tape and had been placed in the first-class cabin.[…]
... G4S employees spent several years raising concerns about the potentially lethal methods being used on refused asylum seekers.
The most disturbing technique involved bending deportees over in their seats and placing their head between their legs. The procedure became known within the company as “carpet karaoke” because it would force detainees, struggling for breath, to shout downwards toward the floor.[…]
However, they [the whistleblowers] now accuse G4S managers of presiding over a “macho” corporate culture that ostracized staff who showed compassion towards detainees or questioned the safety of their treatment.... “Russian roulette with detainees’ lives”.
Macho culture, playing Russian roulette with detainees’ lives”, rampant abuse, “carpet karaoke”. Where have we heard similar rhetoric before? Because none of these allegations sound totally novel, right? Oh yes. In case you weren’t aware, the “illegal alien” profit machine is in the hands of the same corporation that used to run the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. That’s right, the corporate tentacles of G4S are in charge of managing a whole variety of “non humans” to be subjected to unspeakable acts of violence.
Evidently, G4S track record of detainee safety in Australia...government was forced to cancel the contracts. Instead, new ones were awarded to Serco, whose care of immigrants seems to follow the same sickening pattern:
At the detention center Serco runs in Villawood, immigrants spoke of long, open-ended detentions making them crazy. Alwy Fadhel, 33, an Indonesian Christian who said he needed asylum from Islamic persecution, had long black hair coming out in clumps after being held for more than three years, in and out of solitary confinement.
“We talk to ourselves,” Mr. Fadhel said. “We talk to the mirror; we talk to the wall.”
Naomi Leong, a shy 9-year-old, was born in the detention camp. For more than three years, at a cost of about $380,000, she and her mother were held behind its barbed wire. Psychiatrists said Naomi was growing up mute, banging her head against the walls while her mother, Virginia Leong, a Malaysian citizen accused of trying to use a false passport, sank into depression.
The Guardian has called Serco “probably the biggest company you’ve never heard of”. It is reassuring to know that Serco’s CEO, Christopher Rajendran Hyman, claims to be driven by God. Curious, considering that in the facilities run by his company, self-harm by detainees rose twelvefold over the past year alone.
Following their CEO’s inspiration, perhaps, Serco has trained their security guards to follow the dictates of some yet to be known “compassionate god”? From a statement released on September 13 by The Darwin Asylum Seeker Support and Advocacy Network:
An Afghan Hazara has been on the roof of South 1 compound for two days and has been on a hunger strike for a number of days before that.
Before getting onto the roof and as a form of protest, he drank a bottle of shampoo to make himself ill.
Since he got onto the roof, SERCO guards have been directed not to provide or offer him food or water on medical advice that he should be able to survive for a couple days on the roof without food or water.
As a result of this directive, the guard was in tears and highly concerned as to the man’s welfare. The man is lying in the Darwin sun without any shelter and was moving very little. He remains on the roof.
It is often said that the world changed on 9/11. Ever since we have seen a seemingly unstoppable growth in xenophobia, racism and anti immigrant rhetoric. I often wondered why the Western world seemed to have shifted almost at once. Why ostensibly disparate nations like the US, The Netherlands, France or Australia (just to name a few), all seemed to have gotten on board with the anti immigrant sentiment at once. Why, within a short period of time, media seemed inundated with these stories of threats, fear and unrestrained menace. However, the same media that quickly exposes the threats of lawless, uncontrolled immigration rarely addresses the profiteers behind these trends. Every detainee is a point in the profit margins of these corporations. Every battered immigrant body forced to live in these conditions represents an extra income for these multi-national businesses. Nothing is gratuitous, as Mr. Buckles so poignantly said, “There’s nothing like a political crisis to stimulate a bit of change”. Especially if said crisis can create monstrous profits off the backs of undocumented migrants who sometimes lose their lives under the care of these corporations.
vid on similar competitor serco
http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/07/...naire-profits/
In the name of safety: the multi-national anti immigration industry and their billionaire profits
I am a Non Western, South American immigrant in a society that is increasingly determined to get rid of those like me. Media constantly reminds me that we are practically non human...
Nick Buckles, the chief executive of G4S, would not discuss the company. But last year he told analysts how its “justice” business in the Netherlands blossomed in one week after the 2002 assassination of a politician with an anti-immigrant and law-and-order agenda.
“There’s nothing like a political crisis to stimulate a bit of change,” Mr. Buckles said.
That’s what undocumented immigrants are: a bit of political change. Except that the security guards working for the company that Mr. Buckles represents had a big degree of responsibility for the gruesome death of eleven asylum seekers who were awaiting deportation in a detention center at Schiphol Airport in The Netherlands on Thursday, October 27thof 2005. Apparently, the kind of change Mr. Buckles aims for does not include preserving the wellbeing of people whose only crime was to seek an opportunity to better their lives. When detainees raised the alarm and cried for help, when flames were taking over the detention center, the guards working for Mr. Buckles’ corporation ignored them. They were left to die. Nine men and two women. Their bodies now an “opportunity for corporate growth”.
In Rotterdam, also in The Netherlands, G4S ran the infamous detention boats, which the European Parliament qualified as “inhuman” and not suitable for housing people who had committed no crime.
But this is not a situation unique to The Netherlands; in the US, UK or Australia, many of the immigrants awaiting deportation are also in Mr. Buckles’ hands. Alternatively, they could be detained in camps run by G4S competitors GEO or Serco. In the US alone, GEO controls 7,000 of 32,000 detention beds. (Incidentally, the more I read and write about Mr. Buckles, the more I can totally picture him as competitor to The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns).
... operations in 125 different nations. G4S is also is the world’s largest security company measured by revenues and, with over 625,000 employees it is the world’s second-largest private sector employer (after Wal-Mart Stores).
...
G4S is the world’s leading international security solutions group.
From risk assessment to delivery, we work in partnership with governments, businesses and other organizations to provide integrated solutions to security challenges. Our heritage goes back over a century and, with more than 595,000 employees, we are the second largest private employer in the world.
We protect rock stars and sports stars, people and property,... advising on stadium building plans to crowd control ; delivering pay packets to ensuring ATMs have enough cash to meet your shopping needs; delivering cash to bank branches and retail outlets to managing the flow of cash for central banks and major retailers; ensuring travelers have a safe and pleasant experience in ports and airports around the world to secure detention and escorting of people who are not lawfully entitled to remain in a country;
In more ways than you might realize, G4S is securing your world.
In more ways than you might realize, G4S is securing your world. That is, unless you are an undocumented immigrant awaiting deportation. Those poor souls? Those could not be in more dangerous hands. Because, you see, the detention centers for undocumented immigrants operated by G4S have not just been responsible for the deaths in The Netherlands that I mentioned above but for many more violent casualties in several other detention centers as well. From the New York Times article:
G4S, an Anglo-Danish security conglomerate with more than 600,000 employees in 125 countries, was faulted for lethal neglect and abusive use of solitary confinement in Australia. By the middle of the past decade, after refugee children had sewed their lips together during hunger strikes in camps like Woomera and Curtin, and government commissions discovered that Australian citizens and legal residents were being wrongly detained and deported, protests pushed the Liberal Party government to dismantle some aspects of the system.
More chilling cases of detainee neglect, abuse and eventual death:
In 2007, Western Australia’s Human Rights Commission found that G4S drivers had ignored the cries of detainees locked in a scorching van, leaving them so dehydrated that one drank his own urine. The company was ordered to pay $500,000 for inhumane treatment, but three of the five victims already had been deported. Immigration officials, relying on company misinformation, had dismissed their complaints without investigation, the commission found.
There was a public outcry when an Aboriginal man died in another G4S van in similar circumstances the next year. A coroner ruled in 2009 that G4S, the drivers and the government shared the blame. The company was later awarded a $70 million, five-year prisoner transport contract in another state, Victoria, without competition.
Women are forced to give birth in the detention camps, behind barbed wire. Their babies forced to grow in such suffocating environment. Traumatized and battered, some of these children will severely self harm. From a report by The Age on one of the incidents that involved a G4S operated camp:
Fifty asylum seekers at the Woomera detention centre had sewn their lips together as part of an ongoing hunger strike, a detainee said today.
Child 3 – 15-years-old, detained June 2001, transferred to Adelaide 27 January 2002
Case management plan (December 2001): ‘[Child] is a very quiet young man and is always polite and well mannered. He tends to follow the other UAMs in which ever direction they take. [He] has been involved in one minor disturbance.’
On 23 January FAYS noted that the child reported that ‘he had sewn his own lips and is on a hunger strike that is in its 8th day’; ...
In the US, G4S is also in charge of a very profitable contract:
In the US, G4S Wackenhut has a contract to provide ‘guard and transportation’ services on behalf of the Customs and Border Protection Agency. The contract covers the entire length of the south-west US–Mexican border and involves the provision of over 100 secure buses and other vehicles, their crews and over 575 G4S armed security personnel.
To put it in layman terms: G4S deports all undocumented immigrants forced to leave through the Mexican border.
In the US, there seems to be a growing awareness of G4S role in the criminalization of immigrants, though. A group of activists recently organized a protest:
On Wednesday, June 29th, a group of autonomously organized Tucson community members entered the offices of international private security firm G4S. Organized under the banner Direct Action for Freedom of Movement, the action was meant to demonstrate our opposition to the company’s profiteering off of criminalization of immigrant communities and the expansion of the prison-industrial complex, as well as its’ role in the proliferation of policies such as Arizona’s SB1070 through its’ membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The action was also taken in solidarity with six individuals who locked down at the Border Patrol headquarters in Tucson last summer who were in court at the time of yesterday’s action.
Unfurling banners reading “Prison Profiteers Destroy Communities”, “Take Direct Action to End Border Militarization”, and “Direct Action for Freedom of Movement”, the group attempted to deliver a letter to company representatives before asking for ten seconds of silence to remember those who have been separated from families, died in desert or been locked in cages as a result of militarization and criminalization. After G4S employees refused the accept the letter or honor the ten seconds of silence, the protesters commenced ten minutes of noise, with chants including “No Borders, No Nations, Stop Deportations”.
In the UK, at Heathrow Airport, G4S security guards have been accused of causing the death of an Angolan deportee...“They’re going to kill me.” He estimated that the three security guards were on top of Mubenga for 45 minutes”.
The inaugural flight to Afghanistan should have been a showcase for a multinational company vying for the lucrative contract to deport foreign nationals on behalf of the British government.
The plane heading to Kabul on 26 January 2004 had been chartered by a company that would go on to become part of the world’s largest private security firm – G4S. Its cargo included refused asylum seekers in handcuffs. A number had their legs bound with tape and had been placed in the first-class cabin.[…]
... G4S employees spent several years raising concerns about the potentially lethal methods being used on refused asylum seekers.
The most disturbing technique involved bending deportees over in their seats and placing their head between their legs. The procedure became known within the company as “carpet karaoke” because it would force detainees, struggling for breath, to shout downwards toward the floor.[…]
However, they [the whistleblowers] now accuse G4S managers of presiding over a “macho” corporate culture that ostracized staff who showed compassion towards detainees or questioned the safety of their treatment.... “Russian roulette with detainees’ lives”.
Macho culture, playing Russian roulette with detainees’ lives”, rampant abuse, “carpet karaoke”. Where have we heard similar rhetoric before? Because none of these allegations sound totally novel, right? Oh yes. In case you weren’t aware, the “illegal alien” profit machine is in the hands of the same corporation that used to run the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. That’s right, the corporate tentacles of G4S are in charge of managing a whole variety of “non humans” to be subjected to unspeakable acts of violence.
Evidently, G4S track record of detainee safety in Australia...government was forced to cancel the contracts. Instead, new ones were awarded to Serco, whose care of immigrants seems to follow the same sickening pattern:
At the detention center Serco runs in Villawood, immigrants spoke of long, open-ended detentions making them crazy. Alwy Fadhel, 33, an Indonesian Christian who said he needed asylum from Islamic persecution, had long black hair coming out in clumps after being held for more than three years, in and out of solitary confinement.
“We talk to ourselves,” Mr. Fadhel said. “We talk to the mirror; we talk to the wall.”
Naomi Leong, a shy 9-year-old, was born in the detention camp. For more than three years, at a cost of about $380,000, she and her mother were held behind its barbed wire. Psychiatrists said Naomi was growing up mute, banging her head against the walls while her mother, Virginia Leong, a Malaysian citizen accused of trying to use a false passport, sank into depression.
The Guardian has called Serco “probably the biggest company you’ve never heard of”. It is reassuring to know that Serco’s CEO, Christopher Rajendran Hyman, claims to be driven by God. Curious, considering that in the facilities run by his company, self-harm by detainees rose twelvefold over the past year alone.
Following their CEO’s inspiration, perhaps, Serco has trained their security guards to follow the dictates of some yet to be known “compassionate god”? From a statement released on September 13 by The Darwin Asylum Seeker Support and Advocacy Network:
An Afghan Hazara has been on the roof of South 1 compound for two days and has been on a hunger strike for a number of days before that.
Before getting onto the roof and as a form of protest, he drank a bottle of shampoo to make himself ill.
Since he got onto the roof, SERCO guards have been directed not to provide or offer him food or water on medical advice that he should be able to survive for a couple days on the roof without food or water.
As a result of this directive, the guard was in tears and highly concerned as to the man’s welfare. The man is lying in the Darwin sun without any shelter and was moving very little. He remains on the roof.
It is often said that the world changed on 9/11. Ever since we have seen a seemingly unstoppable growth in xenophobia, racism and anti immigrant rhetoric. I often wondered why the Western world seemed to have shifted almost at once. Why ostensibly disparate nations like the US, The Netherlands, France or Australia (just to name a few), all seemed to have gotten on board with the anti immigrant sentiment at once. Why, within a short period of time, media seemed inundated with these stories of threats, fear and unrestrained menace. However, the same media that quickly exposes the threats of lawless, uncontrolled immigration rarely addresses the profiteers behind these trends. Every detainee is a point in the profit margins of these corporations. Every battered immigrant body forced to live in these conditions represents an extra income for these multi-national businesses. Nothing is gratuitous, as Mr. Buckles so poignantly said, “There’s nothing like a political crisis to stimulate a bit of change”. Especially if said crisis can create monstrous profits off the backs of undocumented migrants who sometimes lose their lives under the care of these corporations.
vid on similar competitor serco
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