Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is spending so much money on television spots across the country, $119 million so far, that it’s causing ad rates to soar.

With such a naked attempt to buy the election, news like this isn't all that surprising.

Former New York City mayor and multibillionaire Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg used prison labor to make campaign calls. Through a third-party vendor, the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign contracted New Jersey-based call center company ProCom, which runs calls centers in New Jersey and Oklahoma. Two of the call centers in Oklahoma are operated out of state prisons. In at least one of the two prisons, incarcerated people were contracted to make calls on behalf of the Bloomberg campaign. According to a source, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, people incarcerated at the Dr. Eddie Warrior Correctional Center, a minimum-security women’s prison with a capacity of more than 900, were making calls to California on behalf of Bloomberg. The people were required to end their calls by disclosing that the calls were paid for by the Bloomberg campaign. They did not disclose, however, that they were calling from behind bars.

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The Department of Corrections website lists the maximum monthly wage for the incarcerated at $20 dollars a month, but another policy document says there is a maximum pay of $27.09 per month.

This epic fail puts an exclamation mark on the billionaire's campaign.

It also puts Bloomberg, and Trump, directly at odds with the national political trends.

Increasingly, these criticisms of private, for-profit facilities have been reflected in policy and spending. Fueled in part by opposition from their constituents, lawmakers of states like California and Nevada have banned private prisons from operating. Businesses are also increasingly cutting ties with the industry following pushback from their customers. The number of inmates in these facilities are also seeing a downward trend: In comparison to its peak in 2012 of about 136,220 people, the private prison population has decreased about 12 percent in the past five years as more facilities are closing. Given private prisons rely on facilities being full to remain economically viable, there is concern among executives that these falling numbers could eventually drive these businesses to their demise. Some in the industry have begun to accept that private prisons may not exist in the decades to come.

Even some conservatives recognize the evil incentives of a private prison industry, and politicians are feeling it.

What is surprising, even shocking, is that Wall Street is feeling it.

All of the publicly known existing banking partners providing lines of credit and term loans to private prison leader GEO Group have now officially committed to ending ties with the private prison and immigrant detention industry. These banks are JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, BNP Paribas, SunTrust, and Barclays. Fifth Third Bank and PNC have additionally made commitments to stop providing financing to the private prison industry as a whole. This exodus comes in the wake of demands by grassroots activists — many under the banner of the #FamiliesBelongTogether coalition — shareholders, policymakers, and investors. Major banks supporting the private prisons behind mass incarceration and immigrant detention have now committed to not renew an estimated $2.4B in credit lines and term loans to industry giants GEO Group and CoreCivic once their current facilities expire. This shift represents an estimated shortfall of 87.4% of all credit and term loans to the industry, which depends on these instruments to finance their day to day operations.

This is unprecedented.

Credit for private prisons is so scarce that credit rating agencies are downgrading them. These downgrades will make it more difficult to secure the plentiful, cheap credit and loans.

Huge pension fund, like CalPERS, are now considering divesting from the industry.

Indeed, these companies can no longer deny the writing on the wall. GEO Group’s March 2019 quarterly report acknowledged the impact of these shifts: “Public resistance to the use of public-private partner- ships for correctional, detention and community-based facilities could result in our inability to obtain new contracts or the loss of existing contracts, impact our ability to obtain or refinance debt financing or enter into commercial arrangements, which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.” In their August 2019 Q2 investor call CoreCivic’s CEO Damon Hininger derided the banks’ decisions to no longer finance his company: “Despite many of the banks claims of conducting a thorough review process, they clearly bow down to a small group of activists protesting and conducting targeted social media campaigns pushing false information rather than engage in a constructive dialogue about the facts… The most disappointing aspect of these politicized bank decisions, disingenuous activists efforts, and no solution proposals from politicians, is the people who they ultimately hurt. It hurts the American people because of poor policies are being discussed, made or awarded based on misinformation rather than an open and honest dialogue on the challenges at hand.”

The last time capitalism turned down a profit on slave labor because of popular opinion was a couple centuries ago.

This needs to be acknowledged.