The Separation of Profit and State

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/02/28-0



Sometimes what I fear most is that the disintegration of public life — indeed, the very idea of the public good — is complete. The vultures and profiteers swarm around the carcass and make a profit and that’s all that matters.

Thirty years on, the Reagan Revolution has done its job, or nearly so. There’s no sustaining integrity left to how our society is organized, no principle that can’t be gamed for private benefit. And even awareness of all this has been successfully marginalized. We still proclaim ourselves, in the prevailing media, the world’s oldest, greatest democracy, and worship the old rituals.

But the common good has been auctioned off.

For instance, “Human rights are increasingly the business of corporations,” Paloma Muñoz Quick of the Danish Institute for Human Rights wrote recently at Common Dreams, discussing the U.N.’s proposed Arms Trade Treaty, which would establish rules — currently nonexistent — for the international weapons trade.