They bring bad things to life
by digby
This piece by Tom Engelhardt about our swiftly decaying democracy is a must read for a lot of reasons. He discusses everything from our increasingly corrupt electoral system to the rise of the National Security State and near total congressional dysfunction. It’s quite an indictment.
But I thought this was particularly worth highlighting a bit:
Though the marriage of the state and the corporation has a pre-history, the full-scale arrival of the warrior corporation only occurred after 9/11. Someday, that will undoubtedly be seen as a seminal moment in the formation of whatever may be coming in this country. Only 13 years later, there is no part of the war state that has not experienced major forms of privatization. The U.S. military could no longer go to war without its crony corporationsdoing KP and guard duty, delivering the mail, building the bases, and being involved in just about all of its activities, including training the militaries of foreign allies and even fighting. Such warrior corporations are now involved in every aspect of the national security state, including torture, drone strikes, and — to the tune of hundreds of thousands of contract employees like Edward Snowden — intelligence gathering and spying. You name it and, in these years, it’s been at least partly privatized.
All you have to do is read reporter James Risen’s recent book, Pay Any Price, on how the global war on terror was fought in Washington, and you know that privatization has brought something else with it: corruption, scams, and the gaming of the system for profits of a sort that might normally be associated with a typical third-world kleptocracy. And all of this, a new world being born, was reflected in a tiny way in Hillary Clinton’s very personal decision about her emails.
Though it’s a subject I know so much less about, this kind of privatization (and the corruption that goes with it) is undoubtedly underway in the non-war-making, non-security-projecting part of the American state as well.
The obvious place where this merging of domestic government and special interests happens is in the criminal justice system with private prisons, “asset forfeiture” and the scams like that run in Ferguson. There is even a move toward debtor’s prisons. And as we saw with the Enron electricity gambit, the move to privatise public utilities and government run services has been moving quickly for some time. One might also say that the insistence on keeping the health care industry profitable was a primary requirement of Obamacare.
Outsourcing and privatization is a huge part of the Republican revolution and one of the main forms of “modernization” enthusiastically adopted by the New Democrats back in the 1980s. Part of this was surely designed to make it possible for Dems to keep their share of the special interest money that was already flowing into politics. But some of it is simply the fact that elites who spend most of their time with other elites tend to believe that elites know what they’re doing and should be left to do what elites do best. This scheme to give taxpayers money to the private sector to do traditional functions of government was touted as being more “efficient” even though we were paying a profit-taking middle man. The idea stemmed from a belief that those profit-taking middle men were just so much better at everything than some faceless government bureaucrat. And they are very good at what they do — scamming lots of money from the taxpayers.
One of the GOP’s great successes during the Reagan era was persuading people that government was their enemy. This, in turn fed naturally into the idea that private institutions, corporations, were your friend. They were making it possible for you to live a better life. (GE’s famous advertising slogan was literally that: “We bring good things to life.”) Now, why average workers actually believed this I never understood except for the idea that they were intimate with their own bosses and co-workers and so saw the essential humanness of them as compared to “the government”. But they did believe it. And the results are in. In nearly all aspects of our lives, wealthy individuals and private institutions in conjunction with government are spying on us, getting us into useless wars from which they profit, putting us in jail and making us financially vulnerable.
This new discussion of income inequality remains quite abstract in many ways. And it’s hard to tell if it will mean anything if people start to feel a little bit less stressed financially. But the fact remains that people have been getting royally screwed for decades and things aren’t getting any better. If the Democrats can shake off their propensity to sell themselves to the highest bidder for campaign cash, they might have a winning message. This experiment has been a failure for average people. If they are willing to tell the truth about that, people may just be ready to hear it.
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