Privatization is stripping powers from electable government, and
handing it to the unelectable public - in other words, for profit -
sector…
The repugican cabal makes much of the idea that people can be “dependent on government.” Whether their target is blacks (where we’re often told
that, entitlement” handouts to blacks keep them “dependent” on the
government), Latinos (where we’re often told immigrants are only coming
to the United States for “free stuff”), or women
(where we’re told they want free contraception to subsidize their
slutty behavior), we are told that these people are motivated solely by
the lure of “entitlements” and hand-outs.
Never mind the government hand-outs rich repugicans get in the form of tax breaks and subsidies.
As Deborah Foster explained in 2012,
[repugicans] have come up with the phrase,
“entitlement society,”
and have spent a lot of money trying to get “Real Americans”
(White, 'christian') to worry that we have one, and that it
is ruining the country. They have preached that entitlements are going
to bankrupt the nation and doom its children and grandchildren to lower
living standards, debt, even some form of slavery. In short, they
promote what Jeffrey Sachs has called
“entitlement hysteria,”
the irrational fear that social programs will wreck the country,
encourage dependence and sloth, and benefit unworthy groups who don’t
deserve them, despite a considerable amount of available evidence to the
contrary.
There are 47 percent of
the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right,
there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon
government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the
government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they
are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it — that
that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And
they will vote for this president no matter what. … These are people who
pay no income tax. … [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I’ll
never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care
for their lives.
Funny that Mitt Romney has no problem representing
the rich white people like himself, and corporations that pay little to
nothing in the way of income taxes.
This obsession with liberals and free stuff runs deep and wild. Supposedly, the Democrats won in 2012,
wrote Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post, by “feeding its base cotton candy.”
Better than the steady diet of hate and fear fed its base by the repugican cabal, I’d say.
It’s not a traditional
America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want
stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President
Obama.
…He was talking about blacks, Latinos, and women.
But this argument is being pushed by the Red states, which are economically dependent on the Blue states.
I’ve always liked cats, because cats have the misguided notion that
they are the masters and that we somehow exist to serve them. But what I
find charming in cats I find obscene coming from repugicans.
What the repugican cabal does not advertise is that repugicans are “dependent on corporations.”
What repugican politicians get for being
dependent on corporations is money. We imagine that we are paying them
to do their jobs, which from our perspective entails representing us in
the halls of government. But their real pay is that they receive from
corporations in exchange for their votes. Stop talking about your repugican congressman. He is not yours at all, but the wholly owned
property of one or more corporations.
And all your average repugican receives
from these corporations which own them, directly or indirectly, is,
well, what everyone else receives from corporations: nothing. Generally,
not even a living wage, and that’s if you work for them. To see the
truth of this, you have only to look at the example of McDonald’s, or Walmart.
And trickle down? The more money Walmart makes, the fewer benefits it passes on to its employees.
Walmart wants to destroy so-called “safety net” yet increasingly
expects its employees to depend on this much-maligned “free stuff” in
order to subsist.
The calculus here is as brazen as it is horrifying,
and points to the worst abuses of the Gilded Age: work till you drop.
You think you’re important to them? Look how they treat the soldiers
they send to war after they’re no longer of use to them.
Abraham Lincoln wrote “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” but it is perishing.
It is being devoured before our eyes by greedy corporations, which have
bought politicians are courts and are now buying the government itself
through what Republicans call “privatization” but which is really
“corporatization.”
That is exactly what stripping powers from
government, and handing it to the public – in other words, for profit –
sector is, as the complete disaster of the repugican cabal-led charter school scam demonstrates. And it is easy to see why.
What matters to corporations is the bottom line:
profits. What matters to government, say in the matter of public
schools, is outcome. The education of the children sent to attend those
schools. But the corporations which run these charter schools don’t
exist to teach the children. They exist to enrich the entities running
the schools because that’s why corporations exist.
Seen in that light, does privatization really seem like such a good idea?
Think about this for a minute: we can elected our
governments. We can also un-elect them if they go to far, through recall
campaigns. Ultimately, we have control over who serves in our
government through the democratic process.
The democratic process does not exercise control
over who runs a corporations. We have no control over a CEO or over a
board of directors. We can’t recall what we can’t vote for in the first
place. It is difficult to imagine a government every being as terrifying
as a corporation.
Sure, you can point to the Founding Fathers and
their distrust of big government, but you have to remember that they
were writing only on the cusp of the Industrial Age, back in a day when
manufacturing was still largely a cottage industry.
You also have to remember that when the interests of
freedom-loving colonists collided with the big corporation of its day,
the East India Company, the colonists were no more enamored of corporate
power than they were of royal power. They were witness first-hand of
the unbridled power of regulation-free corporatization. It is difficult
to believe they would be big fans of it today.
The Founding Fathers bequeathed us democracy, the
idea that political power derives from the will of the people.
Increasingly, that power derives from the pocketbooks of the wealthy,
and of corporations. It is increasingly evident that if we are to speak
of democracy, that we are not speaking of the repugican cabal.
Astrophysicist
Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University won the Nobel Prize
for physics in 2011 for discovering dark energy. Speaking at an event
in New York last month, he talked about how winning a Nobel changed his
life. Some of the things that come with the medal are money, respect,
worldwide recognition of your research, and at least for Schmidt, a bit
more hassle with U.S. airport security. 
The American Library Association's code of ethics demands that library
professionals "protect each library user's right to privacy and
confidentiality" and they've been taking that duty seriously since the
first days of the Patriot Act.
