Privatizing America By Jay Farr

[Demeter]

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_jay_farr_080118_privatizing_america.htm




George W. Bush thinks he is the Chief Executive Officer of the United States of America. He sees the government as his "company" just as a corporation is a CEO's. This explains his otherwise inexplicable behavior and thought processes...We can only imagine what the latter might be, so I imagine this: Bush feels entitled to the same all-powerful role in government that he sees played by men in the private sector earning ten to twenty times what he is earning and who will retire with a bundle that would make a president's pension seem, well, embarrassingly inadequate...He may even feel more entitled to supreme rule above the law because, unlike a CEO, he got elected (well, once by Florida and once by Ohio)...Furthermore, if he had previously lacked a rationale to seek supreme power, September Eleventh gave it to him. It explains why he has a craze to privatize everything.

He sees his government as a private enterprise doing this country the service of running things in the absence of an actual government. What we see as incompetence, the Bush doctrine sees as cutting losses. Where was the profit in Katrina? Nothing for KBR and Halliburton there. Defense spending: Why spend all that money on our military when it could be contracted out to Blackwater? Contractors wouldn't be hindered by rules and laws applicable to American Forces.

The $64k question Will privatization ultimately take control of our nation so that Lincoln's words, of the people, by the people and for the people, ring hollow? What will it morph into, an oligarchy, a monarchy, anarchy? At its fullest manifestation, privatization would strip away everything public, everything shared by people and held in public trust, including our most sacred document, the Constitution.

If privatization is part of some greater economic and political plan, a necessary step in establishing a self-appointed oligarchy, that plan is fatally flawed. Bush's bosses, whether the Neocons, the New World Order Bankers or other anonymous control freaks have an Achilles Heel. Common to these types throughout history, is that they overestimate themselves and underestimate the dumb peasants. They are not as superior as they think, and we are not as inferior as they think. In their hubris they will overreach; indeed they already have...To continue their plan for a new American century, they need to keep their man in the White House, or one just like him, a functional illiterate who has delusions of his destiny that match their short and long term goals. They can't use spin or propaganda to deprive citizens of their right to vote and choose their leader; even our reactionary supreme court would not survive changing the constitution to allow Bush/Cheney to stay on for another term. That leaves suspending elections.

They must maintain control, one of their Straussian basic tenets, and they won't trust the democratic process to produce the next Bush, so they might use some kind of national emergency (if nothing presents itself as a crisis event, there's always the economic collapse) to suspend "normalcy," including elections, as this year's HUGE October Surprise! The timing of this would need to be before the general election in November 2008, I would say, toward the end of the "Democracy in Action Dog and Pony Show" (2008 Campaign). Sometime in the next eleven months they would have to deny American voters the right to change government through democratic means (more bluntly, suspend elections), and people would notice.

The minute our political process is suspended by the current administration (for, say, economic emergency, homeland security emergency, whatever), the cat is out of the bag. At that moment, the Second American Revolution will begin. Ironically, the insurgents would be trying to restore Constitutional Rule of Law, and as a wise friend once told me,

The next revolution won't be against the government, it will be the people against Business (corporate power).

[starroute]

1. They're trying to get control of the sources of wealth

Wealth and power have always come out of control of resources and essential products.

When agriculture was invented, every peasant tilled their own plot of land and fed their own family. But as cities developed and needed food their inhabitants could not grow for themselves, land became a commodity, the peasants were either displaced or reduced to serfs, and the major landowners became feudal aristocrats.

America was founded and grew on the promise of land for everyone, and the free landowners rejected the hierarchies and dogmas of the land-hoarding aristocracies. That availability of land was an historical accident, based on the conquest and dispossession of the original inhabitants, but it set an example that undermined old-line aristocrats everywhere and made America an example of democracy and equality for 200 years.

However, that revolution wasn't fated to last. A couple of centuries ago, everything had to be made by hand, from clothing to household utensils to farm equipment. But as machines were invented to do those tasks, and factories and sweatshops took over the job of making things, the factory owners became a new aristocracy and the rest of us were pressed into working on their assembly lines and in their offices.

It's been that way for the last hundred years, but now the industrial system of wealth and power is quickly going the way of feudalism. For one thing, in a globalized world it isn't possible to hold a permanent monopoly of "making things" the way it was once possible to hold a monopoly on farmland, and as a result, the wealthy are getting out of that business and looking for some new road to wealth and power.

I don't think they've found an ideal alternative yet, and it's possible that they can't. Trying to get control of essential resources, like water, just pisses people off, because instead of offering them something new at an affordable price, you're trying to sell them what they already had at a price they can't pay. Trying to lock down information and entertainment with draconian intellectual property laws that criminalize the customers similarly goes against the grain.

The inadequacy of those attempts may be why the wealthy have now become such parasites. With nothing of any value to offer, they're reduced to pillaging the old industrial economies like ours, playing bizarre financial games to increase their pile, and then running to whatever island refuge will have them.

It might be that there's some vague notion brewing in the elite's collective consciousness that if they can collect all the money in the world and sit on it like Scrooge McDuck, the rest of us will be forced to borrow from them if we want to accomplish anything at all and they'll be able to control the world and live on the interest forever.

I don't have the economic expertise to justify why that can't possibly work, but somehow it seems like a major non-starter. It does seem to be what they're attempting, though.

[tom_paine]

3. The other thing they failed to foresee: The speed of environmental collapse

It is often said that no nation ever successfully and permanently occupied another in the 20th Century.

Our Bushie Elites (Bushie being the rubric for all authoritarian Right-Wing tyrants, as they all form a straight line back to Feudalism) have sped up their processes due to demographic shift in America but also perhaps in the growing awareness that the environment is collapsing on them and they have to quickly get the cages in place before shit really starts breaking down.

But it's happening far faster than anyone expected, and exponential population growth keeps pressing it faster and faster, no matter how fast the "Bushie" Elites want to close down Liberty and get us back to a pre-1776 condition.

The environment is the wild-card, and it is going to do by probably violent natural force what the Elites wanted to "gently massage us into" over a much longer period of time.

[Uncle Joe]

4. I agree with your environmental impact analysis, tom_paine,

and thanks to Demeter for the thread.

[Demeter]

5. You're Welcome, Uncle Joe!

[slipslidingaway]

2. Kick for later, looks good, thanks n/t