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Talk about capitalism run amok! When the U.S. Command in Iraq was setting up the rules and laws for selling off Iraq's resources after the invasion, Naomi Klein wrote about it in The Nation. Now Jim Hightower describes how the capitalists are selling off America. It's privatization beyond belief! — an estimated $100 billion worth of highways, bridges, airports, and other public properties could be transferred into corporate hands in just the next two years. Among those already gone or actively being considered for privatization are Chicago’s Skyway commuter route, the city’s entire downtown parking system, and Midway Airport; in Indiana, three major throughways (a 157-mile toll road across the state, a new Illiana Expressway, and a section of the I-69 NAFTA highway) and the state lottery; Virginia’s Pocahontas Parkway and Dulles Greenway; the 537-mile Pennsylvania Turnpike and Philadelphia International Airport; New York’s Tappan Zee Bridge; a vast 4,000-mile network of toll roads across Texas; Colorado’s Northwest Parkway; Alabama’s Foley Beach Expressway bridge; the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel; and, in New Jersey, the NJ Turnpike, Garden State Parkway, and Atlantic City Expressway. What’s at work here is a convergence of gutless politicians, right-wing ideological fantasizers, conniving investment bankers, and raw corporate greed. What has drawn them together is the incandescent, transformative, blinding, neon-green force that rules American society: MONEY.
What we’re losing here is the whole idea of public purpose. This is our commonly shared infrastructure we’re talking about, and it’s more valuable than money. For example, privatizers estimate that the magnificent Golden Gate Bridge is worth $3.4 billion to investors. But that’s its price—NOT its value. That bridge embodies community identity, history, aesthetics, unity, service, and purpose.
These are the people’s assets—belonging not just to all of us here today, but to those who went before and to all those yet to come. Politicians need to know that these are not “theirs” to sell, that no one can “own” our public assets as their private property. By politicians, I mean Democrats as well as Bushites. It’s Democrats who’re running the fire sales in Chicago, it was a Democrat— Rep. Chaka Fattah—who ran for mayor of Philadelphia on a plan to privatize the city’s airport (he lost), and it’s Democratic Governor Jon Corzine (a former CEO of Goldman Sachs) who has pushed the sale of New Jersey’s major highways.
This abandonment of the public trust and the common good is a leadership issue of Rooseveltian proportions, yet no one running for president has made a peep about it. If they did, they’d tap into a rich reserve of public resentment against the rip-off deals, the profiteering, and the very principle of selling what is ours. Where are the Rooseveltian Democrats who’ll stand up to the profiteers and rally the people to reclaim and reinvest in our public infrastructure?
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