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Matt Stoller: Who Wants Keep the War on Drugs Going AND Put You in Debtor’s Prison? Matt Stoller is a current fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. His Twitter feed is @matthewstoller. More than a third of all states allow debtors “who can’t or won’t pay their debts” to be jailed. In 2010, according to the Wall Street Journal, judges have issued 5,000 such warrants. What is behind the increased pressure to incarcerate people with debts? Consider a different example that has nothing to do with debts. Welcome to the for-profit prison industry. Privatized prisons are marketed to international investors as “social infrastructure”, and they are part of a wave of privatization washing over the globe. Here’s the 2010 10k of the Corrections Corporation of America (PDF), the largest operator of private prisons in the country. CCA offers an assessment of risks to the company, which include ending the war on drugs or curbing the incarceration of undocumented immigrants.

But there are more risks. And in this business, state and local budgetary problems aren’t a bug, they are a feature. The Rise of Infographics collected by @themadray | Designerscouch #thecritiquenetwork. The Best Investment You Can Make - Umair Haque. It’s the burning question many of you have been hurling at me recently: “So instead of idly waiting around for the so-called mysteriously reluctant non-recovering recovery, what should we do to survive this never-ending raging crisis?” Here’s a tiny suggestion. The “best” investment you can make isn’t gold. It’s the people you love, the dreams you have, and living a life that matters. Now, some among you will probably roll your eyes and snicker: “Hey, bro, want fries with that hopelessly naive idealism?” But you’re probably willing to entertain the idea that maybe the great systems of human organization, whether political, social, or economic, aren’t creating a meaningful prosperity as well as they could.

And cynicism’s the surest path to mediocrity. So allow me to explain. If we all invest in gold, the price of gold skyrockets. Here’s what I’m not suggesting: that you impoverish yourself financially to enrich yourself spiritually, intellectually, relationally, and emotionally. How China's Public Officials Stole $120 Billion and Fled. This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global-news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English.

The article below was originally published in the Economic Observer. Just how many corrupt Chinese government officials have fled overseas? How much money have they stashed away? And how did they manage to transfer abroad such colossal sums? Last week, the People's Bank of China published a report that looked at corruption monitoring and how corrupt officials transfer assets overseas. The People's Bank of China report stresses that until now, nobody has been able to provide an authoritative figure of the exact sum pilfered, and the figure of $120 billion is still only an estimate. The number of corrupt officials fleeing China reflects the government's serious attitude about the crackdown on corruption. It takes considerable time for an official to gain a large sum of money by corrupt means and then organize to smuggle it out of the country.