hello i'm john berman in washington d.c. and here is what's coming up tonight on the big picture founder and producer of the latino activists cite tommy org actual cover yarrow joins me for our first half hour for conversations with great minds discuss his mission and bringing awareness to latino issues the unholy alliance between the prison industrial complex the republican party and alec leaving get into his take on herman cain's immigration electric fence so-called joke and it looks like president obama will deliver on his promise all the troops stationed in iraq will be home for the holidays so how will the republicans criticize him for the second option. for tonight's conversations in the great minds i'm joined by axel copy out o.

is the founder and producer of and mike when tommy dot org and news and activism site focused on issues of importance to the latino community he also runs the spanish language opinion site net before the politico dot com and is part of the brave new films brave new foundation team for the past decade axl has used the visual and film campaigns to advocate on a variety of campaign issues ranging from nuclear disarmament and environmental protection to immigration and human rights to particular emphasis on latin american affairs and he's played into role in several lecture old teams both in the united states and in mexico he's also served as the media and relation and community relations director for the peace education fund and peace action west is a graduate in political science and international relations as well as law and study and visual arts studies at the university of california in san diego and received his master's degree in international law and the protection of human rights from the university of in the netherlands axel joins us now from our studios

in los angeles actually welcome. hi thank you thank you for having me on today thank you for joining us it's an honor to have you with us what's your story your personal story how did you become an act of us what brought you to this moment in time. my personal story i'm originally from mexico from northern part of mexico and sonora i was born and raised my first ten years there but i really am what you would consider a cross border child the new kind of generation that lived in both sides of the border and grew up in both sides of the border my dad's american my mom is is from mexico and i always went back and forth and i saw a lot of the issues that we're fighting for right now particularly within the latino community i saw a growing up i saw while working in restaurants going through college well. work at

home and seeing friends and family migrated from doing work in arizona even when i was living there and going to high school there in just seeing a lot of my fellow students and students in classroom and part of the soccer team for example and maybe in to a certain extent intact and affected by the issues that we're fighting for today so that's i think would at least for me how it started there was a connection both on what i was living what i was seeing and particularly what we could do about it i started seeing that there were opportunities to create change to create and make an impact by really creating strong and powerful visuals and strong and powerful messages that resonated not only with my environment but with the community at large and i think that bad was a huge part of how i got involved in the first place and and more recently as you

got into these campaigns you just show up and say hi i want to participate or. you can you came out of college into. and yeah what happened was once i graduated from from college and i was active all through. through college. and then doing the graduate work particularly in human rights i started you know getting very involved with different issues when i got here in los angeles particularly and i got involved with an organization called brave new foundation and brave new films. to work closely with robert greenwald who really important actions that he was doing particularly through film and i decided mediately the impact that could be done in so year later of working with him and with the organization we kind of gathered and you would call the latino

intelligentsia with asian or group of folks and individuals that realized that we could use those same tools we can use that same kind of impact that was being had and we can adapt it to would we see in our own environments and kind of create a marriage between the latino community and a lot of the issues that we're already advocating within very good foundation and so what happened was that we decided to create a community a community called when i mean for latino is by latinas the really public in general and that would use video and strong documentary campaigns along with it with powerful social media and create a community that was ready to mobilize into action two years ago this is this is what happened to me means tell me your story and count me in and we use visuals and we used particular campaigns an issue to promote the activism not only from ourselves but also the community that we're involved with we started with

a couple campaigns and then suddenly arizona hit last year as he turned seventy and we knew that we had the opportunity to cap cause an important impact we created campaign called do i look illegal and it was really a campaign awareness but also of fighting back against what we were seeing in. that's a trend in arizona that later spread out through other states and that immediately when when pretty strongly across online and on the ground we were able to mobilize for example place fifteen thousand t. shirts across the country with people wearing the signage still i lowkey legal and then posting on their twitter side posted on facebook mobilized on their local marches going to their local store with the shirts capturing images and video and then sending us all that information and then we were able to repose dabbing create a larger campaign and as we develop more and more we started growing more and we

were able to incorporate a lot more issues not only immigration but economic issues corporate greed issues that were impacted directly and especially getting feedback from our supporters and that's spectacular and thanks for correcting my pronunciation it's one of your problem one of your main got a little accident of the yeah it's. it's not my native language one of your main campaigns is to bring attention to the corrections corporation of america c c a here's a clip one of the little piece of one of the videos you produced to educate others about this issue show to our viewers. this mention of migrants is a multibillion dollar industry one in which immigrants are treated like alright i'm there for sale to the highest bidder who benefits the profits corrections corporation of america or c.c.a. the g.a.o. group and the management and training corporation combined over two hundred the

silly things in the nation with over one hundred fifty thousand bed spaces for a whole pocket of closed try filling in the dollars per year private prisons for profit like a hotel the more occupants they go it the more money comes out. and it is still like you're still in crawlers real estate or hamburgers private prisons rely on anti immigrant laws that guarantee them access to fresh and weeks here's how they so can you explain what the corrections corporation of america is and how it exploits or criminal justice system and in particular to humans. you know what we started seeing last year was after after the campaign that i was talking to you about that a lot of anti immigrant laws were being replicated across the country we saw you have a new which texas is trying to pass with georgia and alabama and florida and so immediately when you see this type of domino effect we know that there's something behind it

that there's a driver and a bad driver was particularly well with ideological and what we understood as for profit and what i like to say what we like to say all the time is that whenever there is a social issue like immigration is there's always someone trying to make a buck off of it and that's what happened with c.c.a. c.c.a. corrections corporation of america is the largest for prison for profit prison in the united states they currently operate along with the geo group the second largest over one hundred fifty thousand bed spaces in this country and the way they operate is that they said make the facilities the walmart's of prisons in different small towns and cities and locales and states and then the drug contrast contracts we do the county or the state or the federal government and d.h. has the power department of homeland security and those contracts of course are being paid with our own taxpayer money and the way that they do it is they have for

example a facility in georgia with two thousand beds and so they draw up a contract to get paid two hundred dollars a night for any individual that occupies that bed space and so their main goal their main intent is to drive more occupancy like a hotel the hotel has its yearly budget it's a yearly forecast of how many people there are going to know what the percentage rate of occupancy is going to be in their hotels they have the same thing in fact in two thousand and five they had an annual report that said harder harder sentencing harder in fortune and harder particularly grounded. war and drug policy and immigration will drive our occupancy rates higher and that's exactly what they're doing this year they're partnering up with interest groups like the american legislative exchange council with politicians where they're hijacking all of these state legislatures and they're pushing for laws for anti immigration rights and by far they've denied this of course but they're pushing for those laws

to make sure their occupants the rate is high and for that matter to make sure that they make those two hundred dollars a night and then that bat is counted down to the five billion dollars a year that the industry currently mates it's mind boggling your immigrants for sale campaign also focuses on the role that alex alex plays in the private prison industry here's a quick shot of a piece that you did about this. the american legislative exchange council or alec is an extreme right wing membership organization comprised of state legislators and powerful multinational corporations including the corrections corporation of america. is the most active. anti immigrant. and is on its. russell pearce like c.c.a. he's an alec number one with obscure ties to national white separatist neo nazis.

during an alec meeting c.c.a. and pearce crafted a model legislation that became almost word for word arizona's s.b. ten seventy. nine and as long as they feel they can change this so these four days. months or even years suddenly the new copy cat was trotting out across the country for something. so actual how does alec get away with this. very easy baby have a lot of interest in sight of their own organization their membership organization that is comprised of big corporations not only c.c.a. not only for profit corporations we're talking the likes of. wal-mart for example we're talking the likes of exxon philip morris big corporations that have an

interest in some aspects of the corporate legislative process as we call it they also get money from the koch brothers of course to promote a lot of their same same policies around the nation they constantly deny that their lobbying group and time and again we're finding videos. and available to everyone where they're proud of saying how they lobby this person or how they love the other person and how they're they're really throwing out money or connecting the corporation with the legislative process in the way they do it is part of their membership is also legislators state legislators as well as federal legislators every year they have conference there's one coming up in arizona in november after thanksgiving and there's another one in d.c. where they get together and they you know representatives from the corporations and representatives from the different legislative bodies as well as the different states and locales end up going to the same place and they talk the talk and you

can imagine what they talk about they're not going to talk about how you're doing and how was the last week for you the devil you got to talk about legislation or how to push forward their agenda and their agenda is usually an agenda that benefits corporation and put puts corporations or for profit ahead of people it's it's an extraordinary story and i understand about a third of all state legislators in the country are members of alec and the vast majority of them are republicans. and i'd like to get into the this whole concept of actually of mr guillermo goma's sanchez with you in. and the issue of actual slavery in america in just a moment we'll be back with more conversations with great minds with axel in just a moment. drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who made decisions who could with

great peril be made who can you trust no one will be easy you will be noble mission and it's a. state controlled capitalism score sets with nobody there is to read you our t. question more. what about to govern sages of the great minds tonight we're speaking with

progressive activist and human rights advocate axel. so axel in a recent article you tell the story of he had a wall for him as sanchez who ended up speed serving two years an attention facility owned by the question corporation of america you also profiled him in a short documentary here's a here's a quick excerpt for our viewers. before you get on the. morning of the way you. came to your little know what. front lawn. i mean i'm a milk bottle it up and if i'm a good god well you know. yeah but none of it will be all that i don't know i'm not . sure that will do you a lot of that and i can't believe. what no horrible thought

he would i will. be killed just watch people. get me get getting me to go to jail. and he's happy and that can use him. you know what i would. like to entice customers who want in front of an immigration judge within a month immigration judge realized there was issues. that need to pertain to whether it was even competent to help in his own hearing and she wanted immigration authorities to have a competency voted wish invasion of tony's asked for the court to close the proceedings temporarily meaning there would be no church hearing until the evaluation was concluded. gratian authorities didn't get that i wish them done this . since he certainly profited from having to get. me off your boat it will get you . is a lot better when they get. it was that. so

axel brilliant filmmaking by the way you're doing or audio production or video production rather or whatever however you would describe it how prevalent are cases like that of mr gomes sumptuous. they're widespread and in this particular case is a really sad and infuriating story yet more good news songes is a fifty fifty year old man that has a mental disability. and really a ray of issues that he has and so he's that he doesn't understand a lot of the processes that happened around here mind you he is a legal resident he has documents here in this country as well as his mom what happened was he was at a convenience store and he asked. to take a couple of tomatoes to the attendant there and she didn't know what to say this is such that yeah go ahead take it a couple minutes later the owner of the store followed him and then they got into

a small dispute and somebody called the police and he ended up being arrested for those charges but what happened there is. a double jeopardy that's happening in our immigration system because the first thing that happened is he goes into our criminal system and immediately you know there's there's there's no understanding of his mental condition there's no understanding of his ability to communicate effectively and so he's sentenced to two a year in prison he spends a year in prison so what happens when you have legal green card as you call it is that when you are accused or convicted of a particular crime in this case the crime was that public disputes you then go into an immigration system but now would what happens is that our immigration system is a criminal system is no longer just an immigration system but is it is another criminal penitentiary system so he thing goes into that system in his transfer over

to private prison corporation like c.c.a. who doesn't have. his need to tell people that this person has a men told this capacity an illness and that he should be treated in a different manner. why why shipmate because every night that he spends in that cell it's two hundred dollars that they bank and so he ends up spending about two years there after already having served where was one year and in between another two years in total he was five years that he was in prison for dispute over tomatoes and that is what's happening in our system right now that our integration system is leaving a void that there's no real policy in place and because there's no real policy in place corporations are taking advantage of it they see the opportunity to make money as is the case with c.c.a. and the case is emblematic of many cases that are happening across the country there are cases in georgia where the steward facility has the largest c.c.a.

facility in the nation the house over two thousand detainees there's multiple cases there of abuse of stories that you couldn't even think about in fact every day at any given day there's about thirty five thousand immigrants behind bars in the detention center that doesn't mean that there's that's the only number that means that on any given day that's the amount in this country meaning that some leave after being there months sometimes years and then a new flock of prisoners come in and their sole purpose is sometimes is because we got detained they didn't have their driver's license and other cases like the hole was a dispute over tomatoes or they didn't have proper documentation at the border there's multiple cases and and then the given day you have all these folks that are filling cells to fill your bed spaces and ads and making the strong amount of money for c.c.a.

and the geo group it's extraordinary by the way their stock prices are the highs that they've ever been. currently for example wells fargo manages forty million of their shares and each share is that approximately around forty dollars so that's a process one hundred. sixty million dollars the just pushchairs that will starve americans imagine you know just in general the amount of money that they're making and on top of that we think that slavery ended in the united states of the civil war but you suggest we have a clip but i'm not i'm not going to play the clip here i'd rather just get your take on this you suggest that slavery is actually making a comeback thanks to these harsh new anti immigration laws and prison labor tell us about this. well this is what would souls are happening we're seeing with both georgia and alabama particularly alabama as of late as we know the particular anti immigration law there age fifty six it's the worst in the country and it really

criminalize has not only your status but it criminalizes your transaction or interaction with a person that doesn't have documents and that creates a huge problem in fact one of the things that we saw as part of this segregation that is happening is that you know if you want water service is you have to prove that you're in the city in a legal manner as you're going to get your water cut off that's just the one part of the second part of it is that you're taken into prison and what is happening there is that a lot of a lot of places that had a lot of migrant labor documented or undocumented like farms like a lot of processing plants among other areas they're losing their employees at a record number i mean we're talking thousands and thousands that have fled to the states and so they're leaving the whole problem for a lot of farmers in particular and there they need to build out or elles their

crops are rotting so what is happening is that the secretary of agriculture in the states the agriculture commissioner has suggested john millen should suggest that well you know if you need labor then we're going to go to the prisons to get the labor for you i don't know where it was or what other name to call it slavery because you're in prison in the same people that are picking out your crops you're putting them behind bars and then you're making them work for free or for pennies so if that is not slavery that i don't know what it is and did i correctly understand something i read i want to websites that c.c.a. will pay these people a very very small amount for the work that they're doing and then if they want to make a phone call to somebody they have to pay five dollars a minute to use the phone in the us they suck the money back out of these people. yes in fact we have a video coming up next week. i believe it's mid week that focuses on stewart detention center and wood we're hearing is that individuals who want to call their

family for example outside they have to pay ahead of time and most of them don't have money inside of prison or their families can't get to them because their prisons are really far away and so what ends up happening is that they have to work for it they have to work within the facility whether it is cleaning. toilets whether it is sweeping or mopping and they make a couple bucks an hour at most sometimes i believe it's something like ten dollars a day depending on the work that they do it's happening is that they want to make a call they have to buy these cards and each card has certain amount of minutes and each minute the card cost and now it is like ten fifteen dollars just to get the card to purchase the card and then you know to make a phone call and each minute cost five dollars so an average ten minute call can range anywhere between fifty and seventy five dollars that is more than they would

make in a week's pay there at the facility so a lot of the times is all the work that they are doing they're doing it for calls for full calls outside and this is what sad about this is that these this without trying to separate the the inmates per se or the quality or the reason why they're behind bars but this is our immigration policy right now this is this is folks that that only came here to look for a better life for better circumstances and they're put into the you know they're. behind bars and making them pay for services that should be allowed just for human decency for example to communicate and not only that but to communicate with lawyers for example to fix their cases. so a corporate sort of private corporation can make more profit we have just a little less than three minutes left and i bunch of questions i want to get into with you let me just toss

a couple at you and you you can pick which ones you want to the dream act i'm curious your thoughts on that it seems in some ways that this is like yeah you can become a q citizen if you become cannon fodder i'm also curious about your thoughts you were part of the occupy fox news protest in los angeles today the occupation l.a. movement your thoughts on that if you take a shot at all of that. with the dream act it's it was heartbreaking the last year to get so close at the end of the year and then to have the whole barrage of media just pound in a tag the bremer movement specially young kids eighteen sometimes even younger than eighteen that are out there that are out there on the street fighting for their own survival and then having bad really using then as the scapegoats of something that is that is ron insistently wrong and broken in our political system is just it's just a mistake in

a huge mistake because they are the future they are the future and a lot of our constituents a lot of our cities and a lot of our states we're seeing positive steps like it was in california with the california dream mag pass and we know immediately you've got after a gap has there was positive outcome out of this so we believe that in the states approach this might actually this might actually work but we're still i think the organizations in general still fighting for for federal legislation that they would really make this. a sensible policy more so as far as the occupy l.a. does it was very powerful today different groups different organizations and individuals individuals that were from the occupy movement showed up outside of fox studios to demand a couple of things in particular the supports for the one percent versus the ninety

nine percent and that is that is a crucial thing when our media is standing behind those corporate interests and are using the airwaves to attack and in particular our migrant community to blame our migrant community to blame latino's for everything that is wrong in this country and then go ahead and say well who's right is these corporations then they're not doing their job they're not doing their job as your absolutist democracy and it seems like it's also pervading now the republican debates and everything else axelrod of times thank you axel caballero thank you so much for being with us today . thank you so much for having me on it and i encourage everyone to visit facebook dot coms last winter ok you got it thank you very much to watch this conversation again as well as other conversations with great minds go to conversations and great minds start. coming up on the big picture of president obama announces a full american withdrawal from iraq by the years and now will the republican.