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Edited on Sun Jun-03-07 02:27 PM by arendt
It has been remarked many times that the post-1980 GOP has always put party ahead of country. We have watched as they have politicized every part of government they get their hands on - up to and including violating the Hatch Act at the GSA. This politicization is nothing but privatization at the level of political party. At minimum, it is a return to the rotten "spoils system" that the Hatch Act was written to eliminate over 100 years ago. Worst case, it is a foretaste of what a corporatist America will look like.
Regardless of the scandals and failures, we keep having "privatization" of government rammed down our throats. We have been paying top dollar for private mercenaries in Iraq (some of whom were deployed in New Orleans). We are paying for private prisons that use prisoners as slave labor for the private profit of their owners. We have had the Constitutionally illegal funneling of dollars to discriminatory churches (a very private organization) to operate Federal welfare and social programs.
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There are so many things wrong with privatization. First, government services are intrinsically those functions which are unprofitable or low profit. In an era of "maximize your profit", the idea that the low tech ventures of government social programs will be transformed to return maximal profits can only be accomplished by abolishing all the societal rules that govern workplace conduct, allowing the owners to sweat a profit from indentured employees. And what better place to do that than in a jail, where your employees work under duress and have no rights at all. Studies of privatized police and fire departments have shown absolutely no financial or efficiency benefits. Ditto for charter schools, when you discount self-selecting for good students. Nobody studies jails. They just keep building more of them.
The second thing wrong with privatization is shown by what happened at DOJ. The non-partisan nature of the enterprise collided with the right of private owners to maximize their profits. In a privatized business, owner rights trump everything. In the case of the USA purge, the GOP felt it wasn't getting maximum value for the Republican Party (not for America) from the fired USAs. So it exercised its ownership prerogative. The jury is still out on whether or not the GOP own the DOJ as private property. Stay tuned.
The third thing that is wrong with privatization is that there is no public accountability for functions that go to the heart of our democracy. Try to find out what Blackwater is doing in Iraq. You will hit a stone wall. Try to find out what goes on in a private jail. Good luck. Congress had tried to find out what happened at the privatized DOJ. Three months later, they know nothing and Alberto Gonzalez is still running the place as a hit squad for the GOP. Worst of all, try to find out about the "emergency camps" that Haliburton is building inside the U.S.
Can someone tell me the difference between privatized and partisan judicial, police, and military functions and a bunch of local warlords and dictators?
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The corporate media and the corporate-funded politicians refuse to connect these dots. They still shill for privatizing Social Security, privatizing the National Weather Service, turning welfare into charity, turning education over to the charlatans and ideologues in the charter and homeschooling rackets, and generally removing the power of citizens to have any meaningful control over their government.
It is only by constant vigilance over the so-called "representatives of the people" that we, the citizenry, can prevent the fraud of privatization from stealing our democracy outright.
I would hope more people would point to the DOJ as a high-profile case of the failure of privatization.
Thank you for your attention.
arendt
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