Plunder

“The actual process of exploitation transpired through political and economic means. Controlling parties and governments, the nonproducing classes had licensed business and banking monopolies that favored members of their own classes.”  

      

Harvey Kaye, author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America

The notion that private enterprise can do anything more efficiently than government is accepted as gospel in these United States, where most members of the Republican Party profess hatred of government, and a fair number of Democrats believe much the same thing. In the halls of our government, despising government is an article of faith – right up until the shit hits the fan. That’s when the for-profit crowd tosses in the towel and hides under cover of PR flackery. A chemical spill in West Virginia contaminates drinking water, impacting hundreds of thousands of people. No harm, no foul. The spill may never have happened if the chemical industry, a close crony of Big Coal, hadn’t paid lobbyists to buy off politicians to write laws and cast votes gutting regulatory agencies, and allowing these companies to police themselves. Big mistake.

How about Target, the retail giant, and all those credit and debit cards compromised to hackers because Target took the cheap and easy approach to network security?

How about our domestic airlines? Hardly a day passes without a story about a mid-air near miss, or a 737 jet sliding off a runway.

How about the cable TV monopoly, owned and operated by a mere handful of companies – Time Warner, Comcast, Cox – courtesy of a captive FCC, bought and paid for by corporate money? Shit service for premium prices. Good for the corporate bottom line, bad for powerless consumers. Watch what happens to your cable bill now that an appeals court has struck down Net Neutrality. The fat cats at Verizon are licking their chops with anticipation.

Not satisfied with ruling almost everything, the corporate motherfuckers and their political allies demand more privatization, more unaccountable monopolies, more “regulatory” relief; otherwise they can’t unleash creativity and innovation. It’s a load of BS that has been forced on the public, drummed into our heads year after year: the profit motive is the only pure motive. We’ve been force fed Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand fantasies of freedom and democracy through free market capitalism.

Privatize the CIA, the armed forces, the DEA, the prisons, the schools, and the national parks. Slap a price tag on every aspect of human existence.

Every time I hear some self-satisfied asswipe compare public schools to for-profit businesses I want to puke in the nearest gutter. Schools are not mirrors of your local Wal-Mart.  Public education is a sacred trust, not a discount emporium that makes profits by squeezing suppliers and paying workers slave wages.  If participatory democracy is to have any meaning and relevance, informed citizens are needed. One of the reasons Americans fought a war for independence from King George is because our forebears believed that ordinary citizens had the capacity to govern themselves. No monarch, dictator, czar or pope need apply.  

Too much power, whether political or financial, in too few hands is a tried and true recipe for tyranny. The phenomenon recurs in our history: 1825, the Gilded Age, 2014.  Craven and corrupt politicians desperate for campaign money sold the governed – that’s us -- down the proverbial river (probably polluted). In this pathetic and cowardly era, Democrats act like Republicans and happily vote to make the poor even poorer. The idea of an active government, counterweight against corporate power, has been discredited. But when our corporate masters fuck things up, taxpayers are expected to cover the bill. Wealth is stripped from the dying middle class and handed to profitable corporations in the form of direct or indirect subsidies, tax breaks, and loopholes in the tax code big enough for a blind first year lawyer to drive an armored truck through.

Our brand of perverse capitalism legalizes plunder. Our modern day robber barons hide behind lofty concepts like free enterprise and free markets and competition, but what they love more than anything is a captive market and a comfortable monopoly. No band of pirates ever had it so good.