Steve Miller: "Democracy Privatized!"

Guest post by Steve Miller

Democracy Privatized!

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Oakland teachers have had to face the hard lessons of Privatization earlier than most. The state took over the public schools in 2003 and then turned the school system into a virtual laboratory for the corporate concept of schools: opening charters left and right, closing schools, laying off librarians and custodians, trashing the quality of public education, and testing, testing, testing.

Our experience is that privatization proceeds in pieces, the first step includes turning over public functions to “the market” through corporatizing every policy and procedure. The United States – the first country to establish free, universal public education – is on now track to being the first country to eliminate it. After seven years, far more cities than Oakland are living out what this means.

The final step is the disenfranchisement of the public in all forms and the extermination of public rights, public lands, public parks, public control, public concerns, public spaces, the public commons, the welfare of the public, public issues and… public power.

This is the formal Dispossession of the Public and the elimination of its role in human affairs. Privatization and dispossession are two sides of the same coin. Naomi Klein describes how this began with the federal government, under George Bush II, in her great book The Shock Doctrine. New Orleans showed us what this means in practice.

So, on January 21, 2010, dispossession just took a giant step forward with the Supreme Court decision that reversed a century of controls restraining corporate influence in the electoral process. Now corporations can spend unlimited amounts in any election, right up to election day. We can now state with certainty that it will be corporations, not Democrats or Republicans, who will win out in the 2010 mid-term elections.

Implications

1) This was an open and aggressive usurpation of power. The Supreme Court chose to re-open a case they had already decided upon and twisted it in an entirely new direction. This will be a polarizing issue in the months ahead. It may also be the biggest Constitutional Crisis since Watergate in 1973-74. After all one branch of the government – the Supreme Court – openly attacked another – the Congress – by drastically changing the rules. State laws restricting corporations are now on the road to oblivion.

2) Corporations can attack or support any candidate they choose. If Standard Oil used just 5% of their legally-reported profits to spend in elections, they would spend more than all candidates spent, at every level, in the 2008 elections – the costliest election in history. The entire electoral process is now under corporate control. The ratio of corporate political spending to corporate profits is so small that it is just chump change to corporations.

3) Corporations can buy up all commercial time and totally censor a candidate out of the media. They can also use this time to push their agenda, their way of framing the issues, and – as we have learned from our experience with Fox News – completely lie to the audience, 24 hours a day. When the most powerful institutions in world history seize the electoral process, it is beginning to smell like class warfare.

4) The decision opens the doors to the open purchase and selling of laws as commodities. Of course, we know that corporate influence is already paramount, in every state capitol as well as Washington DC. But now laws will be openly written, endorsed and sponsored by corporations, to be handled by the Congressman from Wall Mart, Standard Oil, or perhaps billionaire Eli Broad’s Aspire Charter Schools Corporation.

5) In essence, the decision opens the doors to the privatization of the basic right to have free elections. This came from the same court that decided George Bush II won the Florida election, thus getting the Electoral College Votes to win the 2000 election. They refused to permit recounting the ballots, in the face of massive open public fraud, when most people expected that a re-count would show that Gore had won the election.

Conclusion: The right of the Public to control the electoral process is now eradicated. The presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were openly stolen. But it’s just too expensive gearing up for this every time! So now elections are now simply subordinated to the Market. Everything is now for sale. Democracy is now being privatized.

We have only to look at Haiti to see where this is going. Haiti was and is the best and most elaborated example of Corpworld – a completely privatized society, government abdicating all responsibility to the people, no public schools, death squads funded by the richest men in the country. The government could not even provide water, yet water was available after the quake – for a price.

The Dred Scott Decision

The last time such an attack on the public was made was in the run-up to the Civil War. In the 1850s, the South had strategically seized control of all three Branches of Government - the Presidency, the Congress and the Supreme Court. Property in Slaves began an aggressive assault of property in slaves against the Property of the Public.

The 1857 Dred Scott decision was the last step. A Southern slave owner had sued to recover his property, Dred Scott, who had escaped to the North. The court held that property in slaves trumps democracy and that by asserting that all Government had the duty to protect slave property – even in the North and the Territories. Following from the right of private property to exist, it is an unfair limitation to restrict private property’s right to own human beings!

The Corporate Election Spending decision is a similar attack. Today corporate private property demands and now receives greater rights over public property in free and democratic elections. Like 1850s, corporate private property now has complete dominion over the three Branches of Government. Now they are turning to the attack.

Historically property wars such as these have always been the indicator of massive societal turmoil, war and destruction that can last for decades until one form of property predominates. Then they usually abolish the other form of property, as the American Revolution abolished the Property of Royalty and the Civil War abolished property in human slaves, and a new society is born. This occurs when human beings consciously establish new ways to relate together.

What Is Corporate Property?

Americans are exposed to the ubiquitous corporate influence 24 and 7. But most people have only a hazy understanding of what a corporation really is.

There is no mention of corporations in the US Constitution, nor in our founding document, the Declaration of Independence. Rights and protections are assigned to the press, religions, militias and the people – but not corporations. In fact, the Revolution that was supposedly against English King George, was also against corporations, for each territory was ruled by a corporation – the Massachusetts Corporation, the Virginia Corporation, etc. In those days, corporations had their own militias, armed bodies of men to enforce their wills.

Corporations were first empowered by the state to raise money for public works – digging the Erie Canal for example. There were fewer than 20 corporations in existence before the Revolution of 1776. Their numbers exploded after 1800. Every corporation is still licensed by the state to exist. This, of course, means that the state can abolish them, just as wealth in human slaves was abolished after the Civil War. If we can put people to death for criminal activity, why can’t we execute corporations for criminal activities?

Corporations are artificial legal constructs that allow the people involved with them to avoid personal responsibility for any personal liability against the Public. Furthermore, given that a CEO is responsible to advance the interests of the investors, he/she is prevented, by law, from doing anything that hinders investor ability to maximize profit.

This means that if it is cheaper to produce coal by blowing off mountain tops (a current practice known as “mountain topping”), then a CEO is restrained from doing anything to prevent this. Neither can CEO’s put in those expensive filters that clean the water before they dump it into the rivers. If they did, they could be forcibly replaced, ending all those cool corporate bonuses they were receiving.

This vision of Corporations Ubber Alles was first advanced by Milton Friedman in the ‘50’s. More recently, the ultra-reactionary Grover Norquist, demanded that government be shrunk down to the size that it could be drowned in the bathtub. The open corporate goal is a totally privatized society, in tandem with the absolute dispossession of the public as an entity having any legal standing whatsoever. These ideologues argue that every single thing in society should be controlled by corporations and offered to people at a price.

Quite cooperatively, federal, state and local governments are getting out of the business of providing any people services at all. They are abdicating their responsibility to the public.

Politicians, rich with corporate money, regularly trumpet the line that private corporations can do a better job of handling the business of the public than the public itself can. How does this make any sense at all?

The seizure of public power is now going very far, very fast. Here are just a couple of examples.

1) For example, in 2006, Diane Feinstein, one of the top three richest Senators, amended the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, originally passed in 1992. A “terrorist” is now legally defined as someone who commits an act of protest that reduces the profits of a corporation, its suppliers or partners. (November 29-December 5 SF Weekly (matthew.smith@sfweekly). Labeling pickets or demonstrators as “terrorists” is now just a matter of a simple judicial proceeding.

Feinstein’s husband, billionaire developer Richard Blum, is perhaps the most powerful of the UC Regents, who just voted to increase fees at the Universities of California by 32%. This step throws the state’s three higher education systems into immediate crisis.

How this powerful Senator and Corporate Executive team works is just one good example of how CEOs move in and out of the government.

From “How the UC Regents Spin Public Funds into Private Profit”

“Blum, who is a major force in the state and national Democratic Party, manages private equity investments for a number of publicly-funded universities, generating substantial management fees and business opportunities for himself. He is deeply embedded in a national network of private-sector bankers with interlocking interests in an array of public pension funds and educational institutions and public works projects.

“Historically, Blum has specialized in operating firms that are dependent upon government contracts. It is of note that Blum Capital, a multi-billion private investment firm, has benefited from managing hundreds of millions of dollars in California’s public employee pension fund (CALPERS).”


2) America’s public schools are now more segregated by race than before the Civil Rights Movement. Only two years ago, the Supreme Court cut the legs off Brown v Board of Education by stating that race could not be used to show discrimination “in individual cases”. Now an Arizona court has found that charter schools cannot be sued for discrimination under the Civil Rights Act. Arizona’s charters are heavily segregated.

Crisis

For the first time in generations, America is experiencing how an unresolvable economic crisis begins to be expressed as a political crisis. As this process deepens, the two begin to reinforce each other and threaten to spin out of control. The longer the crises last, the more achingly unresolvable it becomes, the more unstable current events become, and the more any person – who is not a millionaire – will pay.

Corporate forces understand this and thus are using their political power to change the role of government in America. The state itself is being restructured to facilitate the needs of private property in a new era, and protect it in new ways. Instead of providing for human beings, government steps in to organize what can only be called a for-real class war - from the top-down. Privatization and the dispossession of the public are features of this process.

The economic polarization of our society is already one of the most severe in the world. We are up against the military-industrial complex, the media-industrial complex and the health care-industrial complex, all firmly controlled by corporations. Now the political polarization is beginning. This is a forum for the most important task in our country – adult education. When people understand that corporations, laws and government are simply arrangements and agreements, they will quickly know what to do.

Government now stands between the corporate attack and the rights of people. It must be forced to guarantee every human need by expanding public property in every direction. The rising political crisis demands that we hold government accountable for the welfare of every single person. If the government isn’t constantly improving the welfare of the public, what good is it?

We are going to fight forward to something new. This mess is no longer reformable. It will take convulsive social activity to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision. Yet this is based on a century and more of legal precedents that give corporations all the rights of individuals and then even more rights. How does hallowed corporate right get reversed? Yet the rights and powers of corporate property must be curtailed by the public, or they will curtail the public. That’s going to be a battle for the ages!

The process begun with the Declaration of Independence must be finished

“…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – ed], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Steven Miller

Oakland, California

January 24, 2010

A High School Teacher Responds

This is the second piece I've posted by Steve Miller, a longtime Oakland public school teacher.—P.P.

A High School Teacher Responds to Obama’s Speech to Students

Obama’s Back-to-School speech deserves commentary on many points. Here I am going to simply mention some telling assumptions that are laced through the presentation.

The President, of course, gets some points for talking about how students must accept responsibility for their own achievement. Though fundamental, this is hardly new. The elephant in the room is – achievement… for what? What is the real purpose of an education – a public education – in America 2009?

1) Obama talks about getting a good job as a major goal of going to school: “You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You are going to need a good education for every single one of those careers”.

The idea that America today is full of good jobs, waiting for each year’s crop of graduates has been exploded many times. Here’s one from Gerald Bracey, for years a harsh critic of the notion that America’s schools are failing:

From On Education, Obama Blows It, by Gerald Bracey:

I have not the expertise to address the merits of President Obama’s speech to Congress on the issues of the economy. I do claim some expertise on education. He blew it.

He accepted the same garbage that the propagandists, fear mongers such as Lou Gerstner, Bill Gates, Roy Romer, Bob Wise, Craig Barrett and many others—God help us, Arne Duncan?--have been spewing for years.

Obama said, ”Right now, three quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma, and yet just over half of our citizens have that level of education. Scary, huh? Not really. This statistic was a favorite of ex secretary of education of education Margaret Spellings, about whom we can all express a sigh of relief that the operative word is, “ex.”

If you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics stats on job projections, it is almost true (but not really) that what Obama said is right. But there are two hugely compromising factors that make this statistic much less fearsome that it first appears:

1. The definition of “more than a high school diploma” is a weasel phrase, an incredibly slippery statistic. It does not mean a B. A., an Associates Degree, nor even a year of on-the-job training. The BLS projects that the overwhelming majority of jobs to be created between now and 2016 will require “short term on the job training.” That’s one week to three months.

2. The “fastest-growing occupations” account for very few jobs. For every systems engineer, we need about 15 sales people on the floor at Wal-Mart (and we have three newly minted scientists and engineers for every new job in those fields). The huge job numbers in this country are accounted for by retail sales, janitors, maids, food workers, waiters, truck drivers, home care assistants (low paid folk who come to take care those of us who are getting up in years), and similar low-trained, low-paid occupations. Note that I did not say these people are “low-skilled.” As Barbara Ehrenreich showed after she spent two years working in “low-skilled” jobs, there really is no such thing (see her Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America).

The reality, that every President knows full well, is that computer-driven automation is polarizing the labor market and eliminating most high paying jobs. Hi-tech robotic production is labor-replacing technology that requires a tiny few highly skilled engineering-level jobs on one hand, while “creating” jobs that require little sophistication for those who can actually get them.

Manufacturing as a percent of all employment has dropped from 26% in 1970 to about 10.5% today.

No one who looks seriously at the labor market makes any projections about enough new jobs to put America back to work.

2) In the next paragraph Obama states, “What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country”. Then in the next paragraph, he says, “You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.”

Isn’t it a little disingenuous to conflate “this country” with “new companies”? Is it only corporations who can offer us a decent future? They aren’t doing a very good job on handling the present these days.

Furthermore, the lack of jobs, especially quality jobs in the US is a direct result of corporate policy to move jobs out of this country into regions where workers can be paid pennies an hour. Corporate interests, by law, must always be antithetical to the interests of the public, since corporations are required to place maximum profit above any other concern.

The Bail-Out of Wall Street is up to $13 trillion dollars to corporations, all paid for by working people (since corporations now pay a small and ever-decreasing share of taxes). For this price, don’t we deserve someone in leadership who can separate the public of “this country” from organizations that increasingly proclaim their right to privatize our public schools?

For $13 trillion, the Bail-Out could have paid off the mortgage of every household in the country. That money would have gone into the banks that went bust for speculating with other peoples’ money, then the public and corporations would have been solvent. But… that didn’t happen. And Wall Street isn’t even required to tell the public what it is doing with our money!

3) Eight paragraphs later, the President states one of the great, unchallenged platitudes, “No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.”

How true is this, really?

– Did the millions of families who will be evicted because they were suckered by predatory mortgages write their own destiny?

– How about the thousands of people who will be denied health care by corporations because they had “pre-existing conditions”?

– How about the California state workers who have been forced to work 4 day weeks and lose close to 20% of their income, while less than 50% of the profitable corporations in the state pay zero income taxes?

The list of people who were worked really hard but were screwed by a system that glorifies it’s right to make a profit off of human misery would fill Wikipedia. This idea that America offers success for all who work hard has been a crock since it was first propagated by Horatio Alger. But it is the flip side that is so dangerous today.

It is not so strange that a country that was obsessed with slavery for three centuries can think of nothing but working hard. The corollary to the “Your Own Bootstraps” myth is another false idea that is preached across our country everyday: “It’s your fault that you are poor. You didn’t work hard enough. Everyone else can do it, but you chose not too. Now you want a free ride.”

What else can the President be saying? “You make your own future”. So if you are poor that is the future you made. Tell it to the hundreds of thousands of good high school students without papers who are not allowed to go to college unless they can pay cash. Tell it to the thousands of Detroit auto workers who were denied – by Obama – any kind of Bail-Out and whose pensions and health care are virtually day-to-day.

It’s this corporate vision of what education is that needs to be changed. For over a hundred years, corporations have used their vast power to guarantee that public education should be is tied to a job. Well, since they aren’t providing too many of those these days, maybe we can develop a more transformative vision.

This has been well stated by The Charter for Public Education, developed by the teachers of British Columbia [It has nothing to to with charter schools!]. This charter says:*

Public Education is a Sacred Trust.

As a community we promise to prepare learners for a socially responsible life in a free and democratic society, to participate in a world which each generation will shape and build. We promise a public education system which provides learners with knowledge and wisdom, protects and nurtures their natural joy of learning, encourages them to become persons of character, strength and integrity, infuses them with hope and with spirit, and guides them to resolute and thoughtful action.

Everyone has the right to a free, quality public education.

Each first nation has the right to be recognized and respected by those within the educational institutions located in their traditional territory.

We promise:

• To recognize that the learner is at the center of public education. To offer learners a broad-based education which includes aesthetic, artistic, cultural, emotional, social, intellectual, academic, physical and vocational development in order that they can find and follow their hopes, dreams and passions.
• To nurture and value critical thinking so that learners are equipped to be reflective and analytical global citizens.
• To respect, encourage and foster the learner's role as a full participant, together with others in the educational community, in developing their own goals, learning activities and curricula.
• To create an environment in which each learner can reach their greatest potential, each learning style is affirmed, and the achievements of each learner are measured and assessed accordingly.
• To provide a safe and respectful environment for life-long learning which celebrates diversity, embraces the physical, spiritual, emotinal and intellectual integrity of each individual, recognizes and acknowledges differences and prevents discrimination in all of its forms.

We expect:

• Government to be responsible for fully funding all aspects of a quality education.

Steven Miller

Oakland, Ca

8 September 2009

*One official definition of charter: A document outlining the principles, functions, and organization of a corporate body; a constitution.

Pimping for Privatization

By Steve Miller, a longtime Oakland public school teacher.

The privatization of public education has developed characteristics of both tragedy and farce. Suddenly Plainfield Asset Management, a hedge fund that has been trying to privatize New York City’s Off-Track Betting operations, is concerned about the achievement gap between African-American and Anglo-American students!

So they “donated” $500,000 to the Education Equality Project! Here’s the background:

“The Rev. Al Sharpton and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein stunned the education world last June when they joined forces to reform the nation's public schools.

“They called their ambitious venture the Education Equality Project, and they vowed in a Washington press conference to lead a campaign to close the decades-old achievement gap between white and black students.

“What Klein and Sharpton never revealed is that the National Action Network, Sharpton's organization, immediately received a $500,000 donation for its involvement in the new effort.” (Juan Gonzalez, NY Daily News, April 1, 2009)

Such awesome generosity is typical of the corporations and their henchmen who are going all out to privatize the public schools of the United States! They have long experience is buying spokesmen to extol their corporations.

The Basic Premise

Now that these forces are out of the closet at last, we can examine their central premise, first articulated by that champion of civil rights and equality, right-wing economist, Milton Friedman.

Friedman demanded the total privatization of schools. He claimed that the so-called “free market” is the best guarantee of efficiency, quality education and equality (not to mention modernizing the system) because it introduces competition, which provides “choice” for parents.

This is in essence the corporate model for education. It is being sold across the country to parents, especially minority parents, who are quite clear that the public schools are more segregated than ever, and who are desperate for something different. Nationally, a gaggle of reactionary billionaires (the Walton family, of Wal-Mart, Eli Broad, of KB homes and AIG Retirement, and Donald Fisher of the Gap) have suddenly become champions of equality and are pushing charter schools as the solution.

So let’s examine how valid these assumptions really are.

People were shocked when the extreme right-winger, Grover Norquist made his famous call to shrink the government to the size where “we can drown it like a baby in the bathtub”. But this is exactly what has been happening for the last eight years. It is well known that the Bush Administration outsourced the war in Iraq to private contractors. He attempted to also privatize the Iraqi government.

The government’s pitiful and criminal response to Hurricane Katrina tells us a lot about privatization, because the relief effort was also privatized. Naomi Klein shows in her great book, The Shock Doctrine, how Bush privatized many of the federal governments functions by out-sourcing these to private corporations. Even the Bail Out is outsourced, with the law firm of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett winning the contract to oversee distributing billions to corporations that are its own clients!

The government is getting out of the business of governing. So it should be no surprise that privatization is being forced on school systems across the country. The United States really has two highly segregated school systems. Suburban schools are the best in the world; urban schools are among the worst. Privatization is being forced on urban school districts alone.

Since the upsurges of the ‘60s, government at all levels has been forced to address the public demand to provide an equal and quality education to all students, regardless of race, nationality or class. What happens, then, when the government no longer handles public education? It is then absolved of this essential responsibility.

The next step then is to make the responsibility for the quality of education a personal one. Just like health care, “you get what you pay for”. The big ideological push for a decade now is to make everything personal responsibility. Then it’s your fault if something goes wrong. Government no longer is even expected to provide equal access.

Is this really what we want? To terminate the social demand of decades that the government makes good on its promise, without discussion? Ask yourself – when exactly was it that this was taken off the table?

When was it that the problem started being described, as in the article above, as “the achievement gap” rather than the refusal of government to fulfill the historical demand for real equality? Why do we now just assume that corporations are somehow going to do this better for us and let governments off the hook? Where were these discussions held?

These questions have answers. When you ask the privatizers these questions directly, they simply talk about something else.

Enter the Odd Couple.

Joel Klein is Chancellor of the New York public school system, the country’s largest. He is famous for stating that every school in New York should become a charter. He is also on of the signees of the notorious report, Tough Choices in Tough Times, which calls for ending local community control of schools, ending high school in the 10th grade, and replacing all public schools with “contract schools”. These schools would have total authority to determine what is taught and how it is taught. This removes the power over public schools from parents through their elected school boards.

Al Sharpton is an erstwhile “civil rights leader” who has inserted himself as a champion for the equality that the United States has never provided African Americans.

Both are now proponents of the corporate model for providing equality. Can this really be done?

Here is Barney Frank’s take on the question. Frank is the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee that “supervises” the $ 9 trillion in Bail-Outs so far to Wall Street.

Frank, a self-described capitalist and liberal, stated in a House Financial Services meeting, on Wednesday, July 16, 2008, “No one expects equality, equality is not a good thing. You can’t have an economy that works if everything is equal.”

Frank has emphasized this before. In Business Week, February 2006, Frank wrote, “Inequality is not a bad thing in a free market economy; indeed, it’s essential if we’re to benefit from the incentives and efficiencies that make the market so effective a producer of wealth.”

Turning a public good, provided by the government, into a private service, provided by corporations for profit will do exactly what Frank describes. We are witnessing this with the Bail Outs, which are shrouded in secrecy and lack any public control or oversight. If we have trillions for banks, imagine how war a mere $100 billion would go to create a real system of equal, quality education, free for all.

If they are so sincere about addressing the history of inequality in this country, how would Klein, Sharpton and the privatizers address these issues?

Choice

The idea of school choice is another “get rich quick scheme” that sounds good until it is examined. What happened in America that should we even have to choose at all

In 1999, David Hughes and others wrote Trading in Futures. Why Markets in Education Don’t Work. In it they concluded, “in effect education markets trade off the opportunities of less privileged children to those already privileged.” (p 2).

Other books document the same effects: Michael Appel’s Educating the “Right” Way, Helen Ladd’s introduction in Choosing Choice, Joycelyn Berthelot’s Education for the World, Education for All. Alfie Kohn also provides abundant material.

Data from countries like Chile, Britain under Thatcher, New Zealand, Sweden and other countries all show the same result. Schools push out the students who take more time and resources to educate. Once privatized, schools compete for the “good” students. Middle-class parents, who have the time and know-how to work the system, get their kids into the “right” schools. Parents from poorer families generally lack these resources and usually wind up taking whatever they are given.

To paraphrase… the law, in all of its magnificence, allows poor parents, as well as rich, to drive their students across town twice a day in their Porsche SUVs to insure their kids are receiving a quality education. “Choice” benefits parents who have the resources to choose. It simply does not carry the same guarantees as a “right”.

New Orleans all but privatized its school system. What do we see there? Boutique schools for well-off families and poorly supported charters for the poor. How’s that for “efficiency, quality education and equality”?

The End of Equality?

The idea that the so-called “free market” can solve social problems is a scam and a fraud. For 40 years, the US has pushed the economics and politics of Neo-Liberalism on countries from South America to Asia and Africa every time there has been an economic crisis. Now that we are beginning to live through what clearly is the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, these policies are being forced on the American people.

Back in the ‘90s, Edward Luttwak, a champion of the “free market” described their agenda this way. He could be describing our current public school policy:

“At present, almost all the elite Americans, with corporate chiefs and fashionable economists in the lead are utterly convinced that they have discovered the winning formula for economic success – the only formula – good for every country, rich or poor, good for all individuals willing and able to heed the message, and of course, good for elite Americans: PRIVATIZATION + DEREGULATION + GLOBALIZATION = TURBO-CAPITALISM = PROSPERITY”. (Thomas Frank, One Market, Under God, 2000. p 17)

We are now living out the results of “Turbo Capitalism”. It ain’t prosperity that’s for sure. Markets have never solved social problems. They create them.

All we have to do is look around to find the answers. The “free market” Bailouts are creating social problems in all directions, not eliminating them. This is the inevitable result of turning the responsibility for public problems over to private forces. The privatizers are all about deregulating public schools by eliminating public control.

Markets are designed for profit making. Remember when Bill Clinton told us that corporations were the best institutions to tackle the national health care disaster? HMOs have made things much worse, producing the worst health care for the highest price in the industrial world – and – completely outside public control. Sharpton and Klein support the domination of EMOs (Educational Maintenance Organizations) and the elimination of the responsibility of government to address the concerns of society.

In a ironic fashion, the “free market” imposes an equality of sorts on all the peoples of the US. This is the equality of poverty and its misery. This is not the concept of equality that drove this country forward for the last 60 years to say the least. If not deregulation, privatization and the market, what is the alternative?

The only counter to privatizing and ending the control of the public is to de-privatize and extend the control of the public. Who says that everything we fought for 60 years is off the table? Why are we supposed to settle for this scam? It’s not time to let government off the hook. If a privatized government cannot guarantee a free, equal, and quality education for everybody, and maintain education as a public good, then the public must replace the government.

Steven Miller
April 9, 2009
Oakland, California