to push for change and educate all of us about issues that are impacting minority communities nationwide. organize conversations in the great minds are joined by axel kabhie out o. is the founder and producer of may 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 metaphor apocalyptica 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 with particular emphasis on latin american affairs and he's played integra role in several teams both in the united states and in mexico he's also served as the media and relate 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 san diego and received his master's degree in international law and the protection of human rights from the university of in the now the ones axel joins us now from our studios in los angeles axl welcome. hired thank you friend 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 do you consider a cross border child the new kind of generation that lived in bold size 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 it growing up while working in restaurants going through college while. 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 and just seen a lot of my fellow students and students in classroom and part of the soccer team for example and they being to a certain extent intact and affected by the issues that we're fighting for today so that's i think what 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 bab 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 i want to participate or. you came you came out of college into. what happened was once i graduated from from college and i was active all through. through college. and then doing graduate work particularly human rights i started 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. and to work closely with robert greenwald who really important actions that he was

doing particularly through film and i decided immediately the impact that could be done in the. year later of working with him and with the organization we kind of gathered would do would call the latino intelligentsia with the new foundation a 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 environment and kind of create a marriage between the latino community and a lot of the issues that we're already advocating within very new foundation and so what happened was that we decided to create a community a community called. a committee for latinos by latinas the really the public in general and that would use video and strong documentary campaigns along with 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 count me in and we use visuals and we use 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 s b ten said that he had 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. planned 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 sign and still i look illegal in that posting on their twitter side posted on facebook mobilized on their local

marches going to their local store with the shirts capturing the 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 by the economic issues corporate greed issues that were impacted directly and especially getting feedback from our supporters are that's spectacular and thanks for correcting my pronunciation of. one of your problem one of your main good little accident of the yeah it's. 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 at one of the little piece or one of the videos you produced to educate the public about this issue show to our viewers. this tension of migrants is

a multibillion dollar industry one in which immigrants are treated like their voice sank to the highest good benefits and profits. corrections corporation of america were c.c.a. the geo group and the management and training corporation combined a little over two hundred cities in the nation with over one hundred thousand bed spaces for total profit if closed by galleries private prisons for profit like a hotel the more occupants that go in the more money it comes out. you just feel like you're selling cars real estate. hamburg private prisons rely on anti immigrant laws that guarantee them access to fresh and here's how they so can you explain what the corrections corporation of america is and how it exploits or criminal justice system and particularly those. 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 that driver was particularly both 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 the. 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 mega facilities the wal marts of prisons in different small towns and cities and locales and states and then they draw up contracts contracts with either the county or the state or the federal government has the 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 facility in georgia with two thousand bed spaces 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 a hotel has a yearly budget it's a yearly forecast of how many people there are going to of 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 around the dry. 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 laws and by far they've denied this of course but they're pushing for those lost to make sure that their occupancy rate is high and for that matter to make sure that they make those two hundred dollars a night and then that that is tantamount to the five billion dollars a year that the industry currently makes its 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. in. russell pearce like c.c.a. he's an alec member one with obscure ties to national white separatist neo nazis during an alec meeting c.c.a. and pierce crafted a model legislation that became almost word for word arizona's s.b. ten seventy. doesn't mind as long as they feel the detention facilities for gays. months or even years speed ten seventy and the copycat laws sprouting up across the counter to something . so actual how does alec get away with this. very easy they have

a lot of interest in 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 more is big corporations that have an interest in some aspect of the corporate legislative process as we call it they also get money from the cold brothers of course to promote a lot of their same same policies around the nation they constantly denied their lobbying group and time and again we're finding videos online available to everyone where they're proud of saying how they lobby this person or how they live and the other person and how they're they're really throwing out money or connecting the corporation with the legislative process and 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 could be the target and you can imagine what they talk about they're not going to talk about how you how you're doing and how was the last week for you they're definitely going to talk about legislation or how to push forward their agenda and their agenda is usually an agenda that benefits corporation the puts corporations or for profit ahead of people it's a 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 whole concept 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 caballero in just a moment. drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions come to the breakthrough it's already been made who can you trust no one who is imbue it with the global mission that would see where we had a state controlled capitalism is called sessions when nobody dares to ask so we do our t. question more.

going back to conversations with 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 yet all told me as sanchez who ended up spy serving two years enter detention facility owned by the correction corporation of america you also profiled him in a short documentary here's a here's a quick excerpt for our viewers. feel given that are they have the normal. one moment of the why you. didn't and then you know my father said i look. he gave a little bit more thought than me i've been a. bond i don't. mean i'm

a. thaw and. you know. you have to move him out of it when you build that a. lot better with a lot of not a. whole the whole i think. he will speak with people. we have going to mean. that we have. to be in the good news is. i would want someone to ask us to he what kind of an immigration judge within a month the immigration judge realized there was a souse. maybe between whether the animal was even competent to help in his own hearing and she wanted immigration authorities to have a competency evaluation immigration authorities asked for the court to close the proceedings temporarily meaning there would be no future hearing i'm told the

evaluation was completed and immigration authorities to get that valuation done they forgot about. certainly profit from her. you know you can look at me it. is a lot but i will not get. that. so axel brilliant filmmaking by the way that you are doing or audio production or video production rather what whatever however you would describe it how prevalent are cases like that of mr gomes huntress. they're widespread and in this particular case is a really sad and infuriating story yet it will go in the sun just as a fifty fifty year old man that has a mental disability. a ray of issues that he has and so he's and 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 borrow to take a couple of tomatoes to the attendant there and she didn't know what to say this is yeah go ahead take it a couple minutes later the owner of the store followed 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. 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 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 were accused or convicted of a particular crime in this case the crime was that public dispute 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 is another criminal penitentiary system so he then goes into that system and he's transferred over to private prison corporation like c.c.a. who doesn't have the slide is need to tell people that this person asked and then told this capacity an illness and that he should be treated in a different manner. why why should they 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 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 there is no real policy in place and because there is 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 guillermo's case is emblematic of many cases that are happening across the country there are cases in georgia where 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 they got detained they didn't have their driver's license and other cases like the

mall was that 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 in cells to fill your bed spaces and dad's making a strong amount of money for c.c.a. and the geo group it's extraordinary by the way their stock prices are the high is that they've ever been. currently for example wells fargo manages four million of their shares and each share is that approximately around forty dollars so that's a hundred one. sixty million dollars the just of the shares that wells fargo manages 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 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 immigration laws and prison labor tell us about this. well this is what will happen and what we're seeing with georgia and alabama particularly alabama as of late as we know the particular anti immigration law there are fifty six. the worst in the country and it really criminalize is not only your status but it criminalizes your transaction our interaction with a person that is 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 this in a legal manner as you're going to get your 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 the state 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 state of the agriculture commissioner suggested john miller suggested 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 or what other name to call it but slavery because you're in prison in the same people that are picking up 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 and. i believe it's midweek that focuses on store detention center and would 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 the prison or their families can't get to them because their prisons are really far away and so what ends up having 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 if they want to

make a call they have to buy these cards and each card has a certain amount of minutes and each minute the card cost an amount 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 costs 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 day that they're doing they're doing it for calls for. 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 that only came here to look for a better life for better circumstances and they're put in be the you know they're. put behind bars and making them pay for services that should be allowed just for

human decency. to communicate and not only that but to communicate with lawyers for example to fix their case. is this also a story for the 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 are going to take a shot at all that. to the devil 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 dreamer 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 wrong interesting plea wrong in broken in our political system is just is the mistaken 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 god pass and we know immediately you bet after has there was positive outcome out of this so we believe that in this state approach this might actually 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. sensible policy more so as far as 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 support 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 a migrant community to blame our migrant community to blame latinos for everything that is wrong in this country and then go ahead and say bubble who's right is these corporations. they are not doing their job they're not doing their job as you're out of that still that is the moccasin and it seems like it's also pervading now the republican debates and everything else axelrod of times thank you. thank you so much for being with us tonight.

what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through that sort of to be made who can you trust no one who is imbue it with a global mission that we've seen where we had a state controlled capital so it's called sessions when nobody dares to ask so we do our t. question more.