Privatization: The Radical Republican Plan to Steal Our Democracy

The main theme of the eye opening new book, “The Fox in the Henhouse – How Privatization Threatens Democracy”, by Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich, is self evident from the book’s title. The ideas for this post are largely taken from that book, though I held most of these ideas prior to reading the book.

Prior to the 2000 election I believed that the most important single issue facing our country was campaign finance reform – because I felt that too much money in our political system was corrupting the system and threatening our democracy. But now I see that the Republican agenda has moved so far to the right that all the money in the world wouldn’t allow them to win elections without the help of other aspects of the privatization movement – most especially their control of the national news media and their control of our elections.

The privatization movement in the United States has been described by the Wall Street Journal as the “effort to bring the power of private markets to bear on traditional government benefits and services”. Kahn’s and Minnich’s translation of this says it well: “Privatization is letting corporations take over and run for profit what the public sector has traditionally done”. I would change that translation slightly by adding to the end of it, “and must continue to do in order to preserve our democracy”.

One of the essential features of evil people is that they try to make people believe that down is up and up is down (Example: We are going to Iraq to spread democracy there). How else could they survive? Who would like these people or buy into their ideas if they were presented as they actually are?

That is the essence of the privatization movement. The rationale behind it is presented as good old fashioned American values: Self-reliance, freedom, competition, efficiency. We need to be able to expose how the meanings of those values are twisted beyond recognition by the privatizers so as to make their movement the antithesis of what those values are meant to represent.


Self reliance

When the privatizers use “self reliance” to characterize their privatization schemes, they are mainly using this as a code phrase to express contempt for our social safety net programs, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, worker’s compensation, and welfare for the poor.

A great deal can and has been said in justification of each of these programs, but since Social Security is probably the least controversial of these programs, I’ll confine myself to that for this post: Social Security has been a program to which millions of people have contributed their hard earned money throughout decades of their working life. It is a program that spreads financial risk over a large population so as to reduce the risk of financial catastrophe, in the process reducing by a small amount the financial gap between the rich and the poor.

Consequently, it is a great and undeserved insult to impugn the “self-reliance” of people who receive and need Social Security checks. If those individuals who have retired and don’t need Social Security checks to maintain their livelihood want to express contempt for those who do need those checks, we should ask them to disavow their own reliance on inheritance money, for example (they could contribute the money to charity or to reduce the national debt), thereby increasing their own self-reliance, and in the process expressing their patriotism and altruism.


Freedom

Of course nobody would want to say that they are against freedom – so the privatizers aggressively try to equate their privatization schemes with “freedom”. But in doing so, they greatly oversimplify this very complex issue, for one person’s freedom to enslave, for example, is another person’s slavery. In fact, one of the most important and legitimate purposes of government is to put limits on the “freedom” of the powerful to intrude on the livelihood of the rest of us. Without that function of government we would have anarchy. And that, in fact, is exactly what the privatizers are advocating: The freedom of the powerful (themselves) to do whatever they want.

Consider environmental issues, for example. The privatizers speak of the need for people (themselves) to have the freedom to own as much land as they please and to do with it whatever they want, as long as they pay for the privilege. And, they also claim the right to pollute the air, water, and soil that they don’t own. Disregarding the fact that they generally are required to pay no more than ridiculously low prices for these privileges (for comparatively small campaign contributions they reap huge profits), we need to have a national policy for land use and pollution control because the absence of such a policy will result in the deterioration of our natural resources in return for the short term profits of a few wealthy individuals. This will not only deprive our current population of the benefits of this land, but will deprive future generations as well. Here is a current example of the plan for the privatizers to take over our land.

Few American citizens are aware of the extent to which our election system has been privatized over the last several years, and they would be appalled to learn of this (I hope). If there is any government function that should not be privatized it is the running of our elections, since they provide the foundation for our democracy.

Yet, private companies now run our elections to a large extent. Their own employees have told us how easy it would be to rig their machines to help a specific candidate, and our General Accounting Office has told us that we should have little basis for confidence in the results of our 2004 election. Another voting machine employee has testified before Congressman Conyers’ Committee that he was asked to write a computer program that would transfer votes from one candidate to another and yet be undetectable. And under the banner of privatization, the voting machine companies tell us that we (the public) have no right to interfere with their “freedom” to run our elections by inspecting the codes that their machines use to count our votes . And they have so far succeeded in guarding that “freedom” that they claim, as they have successfully resisted numerous legal challenges to inspect the machines that counted our votes in the 2004 election.


Competition

The privatizers want us to believe that a program run by the government, by definition, lacks the competitive elements that ensure that only the best programs will be chosen to do the job. But the privatizers don’t want competition. In fact, they will do whatever they can to eliminate competition, as long as they are the ones who benefit. I don’t see them complain when Halliburton receives one no-bid contract after another.

As a moderate, I believe that there are many economic activities that should be left to the private sector, in order to foster a competition that will ensure that those with the best products will be appropriately rewarded. And, as Theodore Roosevelt recognized in the early 20th century, there is a need for government regulation to ensure that big corporations don’t become too powerful and thereby eliminate competition.

But the privatizers do whatever they can to eliminate competition. They whine about any government regulation meant to foster competition, as an impingement on their freedom. Hence, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which eliminated much of our control over monopolies in the telecommunications industry, followed by consolidation and control of our national news media by a small number of powerful people. Consequently, our national (corporate) news media has largely become a megaphone for our Administration, thus representing perhaps as large a threat to our democracy as the privatization of our elections system.

As Bill Moyers says, in explaining the consequences of this: “Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and – in defiance of the Constitution – from their representatives in Congress. Never has the powerful media oligopoly ... been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the peoples' need to know.”


Efficiency

The privatizers and our corporate news media have for so long echoed the claim that privately run programs are more “efficient” than government programs that most Americans take that as a given. I am unaware of evidence that makes this case, but even if is was true to some extent, we need to look carefully at what is meant by “efficiency”.

For a corporation, “efficiency” is joined at the hip with making a profit. In fact, if a corporation makes a decision that is in the public interest but which hinders their ability to make a profit, they can be sued by their shareholders for that decision.

But the purpose of government programs should not be to make a profit. The purpose of government programs should be to serve the citizens who elected their representatives to enact and enforce those programs.

Take Public Health, for example. Public Health has been largely the responsibility of government in the United States for about two centuries. When a disease outbreak is in the making it is responsibility of governmental public health programs to take steps to stop that outbreak. A privatized public health program, on the other hand, may be encouraged to cut corners, in order not to impinge on their profits. It might even be to their advantage to allow the outbreak to spread widely, because that would provide numerous opportunities for even more profits.

Or consider our prison system. According to Kahn and Minnich, the increasing privatization of our prison system since the 1980s is responsible for at least three ominous trends: 1) As wealthy corporations take over our prison systems, recognizing that their profits are related to the size of the prison population, they lobby for legislation that will result in more prisoners. That may be one reason why we have seen a large increase in our already outrageously large prison population in the United States, paralleling the prison privatization movement; 2) Physical and sexual prisoner abuse is much higher in private than in public prisons. It costs money, which cuts into profits, to train prison guards to control this kind of thing; 3) Private prisons do not have to comply with many of the requirements for open decision making that public prisons must comply with. Therefore, corruption of all kinds is able to flourish to a greater extent in private than in public prisons.

And finally, why do you think it is that our military personnel must rely on patriotic groups in the United States to raise money for the protective equipment that they lack but need to enhance their safety?

of our national coffers to benefit cronies. If this wasn't bad enough, they send our young soldiers off to die for oil, water and defense contract profiteering. They are despicable war criminals, tarnishing our nation!

Great post TFC! Recommended.

Our founding fathers warned us that preserving democracy would take constant vigilance - and they were right. Our Constitution isn't enough by itself. We have to take every opportunity to point out to our less insightful citizens what is going on.

Privatization & killing the Fairness Doctrine are the two Reagan era "gifts" that keep on giving...

And he's getting plenty of help from our corporate media.

other patrons.

Thanks for posting this. Many pearls of wisdom and insight.

They did it by removing the Fairness Doctrine, and look where that got us.

I had to post before even reading it all. Slowly, we're pulling it all back together again. I can only hope we succeed.

Congress tried twice to mandate that the FCC would have to enforce it, but both times the legislation was vetoed, once by Reagan and once by Bush Sr, as described here:

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/F/htmlF/fairnessdoct/fairnessdoct.htm

"...in the spring of 1987, both houses of Congress voted to put the fairness doctrine into law--a statutory fairness doctrine which the FCC would have to enforce, like it or not. But President Reagan, in keeping with his deregulatory efforts and his long-standing favor of keeping government out of the affairs of business, vetoed the legislation. There were insufficient votes to override the veto. Congressional efforts to make the doctrine into law surfaced again during the Bush administration. As before, the legislation was vetoed, this time by Bush."

I think, though, that the consolidation of the industry into the hands of a small number of wealthy corporations probably had a larger effect than this, don't you think?

Might want to correct that. It takes me in an endless loop right back to myself.

That last question of yours is interesting. I am not qualified to answer. I think that regardless of whomever owns the broadcast companies, if the Fairness Doctrine were law, they would have to comply. Of course, that's being simplistic. But I would take responsibility over diversity without it.

Ah, greed and power are so much fun to have to battle. Not.

Try this:
http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/F/htmlF/fairnessdoct/fairnessdoct.htm

I think that they're both important, but I'm more concerned about the consolidation of our news media. It seems to me that as long as you have all the major news stations run by wealthy corporations who are very interested in maintaining the status quo, they'll do what they can to get around the Fairness Doctrine, and they'll very likely succeed. I'm no expert on that -- that's just the way it seems to me. All of our major news stations today are run by corporations who have turned into mouth pieces for the Administration.

Thank you.

While listening to Noam Chomsky, I heard him say one time that if the American people knew what the corporations were doing in their names, they would never stand for it.

It makes sense that the Fairness Doctrine was discontinued. It was their first shot in the war that you are talking about. I got a lot of value out of your discussion on misnaming. I knew it, but somehow it took your sense of writing to really hit home with me.

I found it strange when I was in a British forum last week, and without even giving it a moment of thought, a poster mentioned that the health care system in America was akin to something from the dark ages. It's common knowledge over there that they get something for their taxes, and we don't. And it boils down to just what you've said. Twisting and contorting the truth.

Being involved in real estate, I've had first hand experience with the situations and the people who are on the front lines of this sickness. Deforestation, subdivision of land, wealthy people playing a greedy game. I'm lucky enough to be in that arena, but for an honest person it is highly distasteful to watch.

The link you gave is a dramatic contrast to what has happened in our country. I find it unbelievable to see just how far we have strayed from the path. And to think that they could call themselves Fair and Balanced. You know who I mean. Damn them. It's very much along the lines of your post. Before it's too late, I hope we catch on. I don't think we will. But I am pessimistic right now. There are Jimmy Carters and Feingolds and Barbara Lees, and Conyers out there.


edit- Well, I might be more careful just tossing the idea of the Fairness Doctrine around. I believe it's invaluable. But, by the 70's, journalists were already finding ways to subvert it. Weird. I didn't konw that until now. Thanks again for a great link.

You'd probably enjoy reading the book then -- Fox in the Henhouse. I've only read a few chapters so far. It's very interesting.

Still, there are hopeful signs -- as there always are. After the civil war (As pointed out in Fox in the Henhouse), prison systems became privatized in the south because they couldn't bear to see the ex-slaves walking around free. They were run like slave labor camps. That lasted many years.

But there was a big reaction against them from people who had consciences (as there had been reactions against slavery), and by the late 1920s there were no more privatized prisons in our country. Then in the 1980s, with the Reagan revolution, they started coming back.

It's like a pendulum. But hopefully the overall direction will be positive.

Just to add to your point regarding Social Security and the impugning of the recipients of it, it must be said that it is an insurance program that requires every working American to pay a premium. This is a given. The money is deserved them.

Yet, the Radical Right corporate faction insists in a public treatment that paints Social Security as an overly generous giveaway program, which could not be farther from the truth.

Thanks for an excellent post. The privatization of public services is a major threat to America and our way of life.

The Right Wing Agenda

Abolish

Social Security
Medicare
Employer supplied health insurance
Unemployment Benefits
Welfare
Abortion Rights
Collective Bargaining
EPA
Public Education
Public Housing
IRS

The Republican mantra has always been "Smaller Federal Government". Back in the good old days, a Republican's fundamental position was that power should be in the hands of state and local governments.

Cut to: Today.

As Government services continue to fail on unprecedented levels, one solution to staunching the raft of failures is privatization.

"The Fox in the Henhouse."

Starve federal programs for funds, and all the while complain about how inadequate they are.

How long will it take for this country to catch on?

government to the point where the military is most of what it does, whose involvement in wars would mostly be about protecting the big corporations that would go without any regulation whatsoever.

I wonder how this would work for future recruitment: "Put your lives on the line to protect big business!"

are very important, as well as justified. But they're harder to defend in a short amount of space.

http://home.earthlink.net/~dick156/

Dick, indeed.

They use so many legalisms that it's very difficult for me to tell what their argument is -- in fact it's not evident to me that they even present a rationale for what they're advocating.

something I read very recently, maybe even today, but I can't find the source now. The article noted an attack where 22 U.S. soldiers died. The reason so many died in one attack was because they were all eating together in the mess hall. The article pointed out that prior to the privatization of the feeding of our troups this would never have happened because our soldiers would have dispersed their eating schedules for the sake of safety.

contract only to subcontract out to an African nation company who pays it's employees a ridiculously low wage. Privatization=GREED

Well, we eventually got out of that one. If enough people catch on to what's going on we can get rid of these greedy bastards and get our democracy back.

K&R

:mad:

This has been one of the biggest CON jobs in our nation's history.

I didn't talk about this is my OP, but here are some scary quotes from "The Fox in the Henhouse":

"Even as schools in the formerly Communist countries are hungrily turning back towards the liberal arts, Education in the United States, under pressure from market competition and legislators forced to cut budgets because of tax cuts, is moving away from them".

"We tighten restrictions on public and non-profit educational institutions -- as President Bush's underfunded ... No Child Left Behind initiative does -- but we loosen them for the private profit-making ones"

"What ... is actually happening: corporate logos on teextbooks; corporate boards setting course requirements ..."

I work for the FDA.

Not very long ago, as part of my research that I did for the FDA, I identified a problem with a medical device which had the purpose of preventing rupture of aortic aneurysms - a highly fatal event. My research suggested problems with the functioning of that device, leading to an excess of ruptures. I wrote a research report, cleared it through the FDA, and then submitted it for publication. It was accepted for publication.

But then the manufacturer found out about the fact that the article was about to be published. They threatened the FDA with legal action, claiming that the data that I used to do my research was their privately owned data (of course it was - no other data existed).

The FDA withdrew the article:

http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/07/09.php

is the number of product approvals over a period of time. This "scoredcard" item is not dependent on the quality of the review that led to the approval, or how the products perform and their effects after they're approved -- just the number of approvals.

have obviously never worked for a corporation. I am constantly astounded by the waste and inefficiency at the corporation I work for. If you want to say small business is more efficient, then, yeah probably alot of them are, but they can't do what the government or a large corporation can do so it's not fair to compare those. Yet, I have to listen to how your cousin got his lawn mowing business off the ground so that proves the government is less efficient than your cousin :eyes: Just another example of republicans dumbing down the conversation to the detriment of the country.

They were very efficient -- at making money for themselves.

They had a government contract, and they saved a great deal of money by simply not doing many of the things that they were contracted to do.

sold to the sheeple by saint raygun the retarded. It was shown to be a lie then, but that never stops them, they just kept repeating it and repeating it until, if you stop a dozen random people on the street and ask they will swear that corporations are much more efficient than government.
As the following poster points out, one of the corporations favorite tricks is to collect payment and than refuse to provide the service paid for. After all, what could be more profitable than that? :grr: :banghead:
I am also cynical enough to believe that the sheeple will go ahead and let them continue until we are all made into serfs.

If you idea of efficient is having a filing system of “throw it on the floor over there” and then having all our locations asking us for copies of crap they should have copied for themselves before they sent it in, THEN having only one copier for the entire floor of about 50 people and having people hunt for invoices stacked nicely on the ground in no particular order and then wait in line for the copier and hire more people to make up for the fact that no one is getting anything done, then yes, we are very efficient. We don’t waste any money. In fact, we wait til the last second to send in bills so that we have to pay FexEx or UPS to make up for our fucking around and also paying 3 people to do all this special handling. I don’t think the government could think up anything like that.

governments I've seen incredible waste in both places. The only criteria I've seen that gives any real indication is the cost of bureaucracy; Government = < 10% (commonly 2% - 4%), Private corps = > 24% (frequently rising into the 40's).
Add to that the fact that government agencies have rules and regs that are adhered to much more closely than the few that corporations operate under, and regularly ignore with no consequences. Again I, reluctantly, give the nod to government.

This is a very well-written original post, (and is not an excerpt from the book), very wide-ranging, but it is a sign of all that is wrong nowadays, that the message does not even cover all that they are doing and all that they have destroyed, now that we have reached the latter days of this disaster. Now that the horrible process is so well along, we really get a sense of the scope of the thing, and how it is now affecting everything. You hardly know where to begin.

Representative Louise Slaughter of New York just gave another really great speech on the floor of the House this morning, carried on C-SPAN, on all the harmful measures being passed by the Republican Congress, not addressing any problems in the country, increasing the deficit and the debt, and that no matter what the pressing need in the country is, that Republicans' answer is, cut taxes for rich people and corporations. She used a phrase early on, that I thought summed up the complete corporate Republican approach to "governing": everything they do now is designed to "entrench (their) privilege," to consolidate what changes they have made to law, to keep the non-rich victims of this power grab from being able to respond anymore, and to convert all legislative actions to commercial interests. This explains why legislators on the Federal level never respond to the people's concerns anymore, and explains why they pass, over and over again, laws that are so nonsensical and so damaging to the operations of government and to funding any of it. Above all, it explains why they do nothing other than deregulate, and cut taxes to rich people and corporations. Their only aim now is to protect themselves, their class.

This process has been going on for a long time now--remember how that bastard Reagan used to gut the power of a Federal Department, after failing to kill its budget, by putting some incompetant ideologue like Clarence Thomas in charge of it, so nothing would ever get done--but now that they have actually accomplished so much of what they wanted and we are getting completely cut out, people are now realizing why having a corporate approach to life is a life-and-death threat to all of us.

First, corporations had to make money or they were out of business, but the employees who had not caused this would get workers' compensation to help them as they searched for a new job; a large percentage of jobs were unionized. Then, during the Reagan era, they started actively busting unions, rewarding corporations for moving overseas, and started a whole new approach to "free" market capitalism where they made it profitable for corporations to lose money and/or declare corporate bankruptcy, as they would now get it all back by declaring the loss. This made destroying the economy and being incompetant profitable for the rich investor class, who could now not possibly suffer any risk--a bizzare change. Meanwhile, government bailouts to aid failing businesses now went completely to management, and not to help employees anymore (that would be "welfare"). Raising the minimum wage was now "socialistic" and "undeserved," whereas executive pay now being hundreds, even thousands of times higher than the pay of employees was no longer called greed--by their media. Unemployment figures were starting not to be released, but something called "productivity"--which was apparently never good enough--now was. Republicans tried to abolish the Department of Education, the Commerce Dept. (which monitors corporations, keeping statistics and prosecuting corporate crime), and the Internal Revenue Service. They also cut back severely on catching corporate tax cheats, costing the governemnt billions. The Fairness Doctrine was killed, all mergers approved with no concerns for society anymore, and we were silenced.

By the time of the current era, there is actually no longer a government or political system anymore, only fundraising, corporate lobbyists (doubled since 2000), and lobbyists now writing the law itself. There is only the global corporate world, and its offshoots and holdings, such as "government." No law is even considered in Congress anymore that does not pay back a Republican contributor with a now-legislated unfair advantage. Anything else is "frivolous." The media is now totally a corporate mouthpiece, and does not even extend into the real world or our country anymore. Nothing gets out over the air unless it advances the corporate propaganda; everything is told from the corporation's perspective and there is no opposing response to it. Their lives are devoted to research to manipulate us--getting kids to be greedy and bother their parents to buy them everything; getting women to feel ugly and hated, so they will buy products; getting people to believe Republicans are doing a great job, so we will all be eternally docile--yet they will not spend a dime on research studying the harmful effects to society of their commercialization of every value that was once cultural and human. Every second of every day that they are annoying you with brain-rotting trivial content, vulgar close-ups and quick cuts, flipping the camera around, and not letting you look where you want, but instead presenting everything up-close as if it were a product--remember, it is all deliberate, and it is all done to censor something else that is going on in the WORLD, which they still do not own as a "market," but which they want you to feel they do, so you will give up and quit.

This does not even begin to cover it, of course, but Democrats would do well to finally tie these things together so we can all fix on the pattern of total devastation by this small group--traitors--and realize how these things they do all fit together and how one thing led to another. All of these things are happening because of the now overwhelming influence of corporations. It can only be understood as a whole, as you realize what the corporate/oligarchical traitors were getting at. They still aren't finished.