Rob Schofield of North Carolina Policy Watch lives in a state taken over by the Tea Party, who are intent on selling off whatever they can to private industry.
We have fallen victim to corporate propaganda and allowed the corporate foxes into our henhouses.
He has written a brilliant article about what we are losing as our public sector is diminished and privatized. Americans who are concerned about our culture and our society should join the fight against the privatization of everything.
Something strange happened in my neighborhood the other day. It was a warm and pleasant Thursday – the day on which a city sanitation truck arrives each week to empty the trash bins.
The truck just didn’t come.
A couple of days later, another equally strange thing occurred: Our postal carrier didn’t make it to our neighborhood.
There were no holidays that I’d missed and no readily discoverable public explanations for the lapses.
Of course, neither of these developments was completely unprecedented. In the past, during hurricanes and snowstorms, such services have occasionally been interrupted. And neither was a life and death matter. The trash truck finally arrived a few days later and our mailbox was fairly stuffed the next day.
My guess/fear was that COVID might have taken a toll on the local sanitation team. And we all know of the struggles the U.S. Postal Service has been enduring.
But, in both instances – modest and unexplained failures in two core public services that have been utterly reliable for decades – there was something disquieting and noteworthy.
There was a time in our country – not that long ago – in which top-notch public services and structures were not just taken for granted, but widely accepted as points of common civic pride. Almost all Americans knew of the U.S. Postal Service motto: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
Public schools and city halls often featured architecturally impressive buildings that served as important community hubs and gathering places. And public service employment – as a teacher, an employee of a state administrative agency, or yes, a postal worker or a trash truck driver – was widely viewed as an honorable and respectable middle-class career.
Today, it seems, our attitudes and expectations have been altered by a half-century of relentless and cynical messaging from conservative politicians, media outlets and think tanks that has helped set in motion a kind of vicious cycle.
First, government services and structures are demonized as inherently corrupt, inefficient and “the problem.”
Next, politicians demand that these structures and services operate “more efficiently” – “like a business” – so that taxes can be reduced.
After that – not surprisingly given the fact that most private businesses in a capitalist economy fail – numerous public structures and services (like schools, transportation, parks and even mail delivery and trash services) struggle to fulfill their missions.
After that, the whole cycle is repeated again and again until, at some point – especially in moments of crisis and extra stress like, say, a health pandemic – structures and services simply start to crumble and even fade away.
We’re witnessing this phenomenon play out right now in our public schools in North Carolina – particularly in some smaller and mid-sized counties, where the relentless pressure brought on by a decade of budget cuts, privatization (i.e. competition from voucher and charter schools that’s siphoning off families of means), and now the pandemic, is posing what amounts to an existential threat.
Last week, a former school board member in Granville County told Policy Watch education reporter Greg Childress that the public school system there has entered something akin to a death spiral in response to these pressures.
Reports from other counties sound disturbingly similar.
Meanwhile, in New Hanover County, a recent story in the Port City Daily paints a sobering, if familiar, portrait of how performance in that county’s system has been badly damaged by the resegregation that has followed in the wake of the county’s decision to, in effect, heed “market forces” – in this case, the demand of more affluent, mostly white families for “neighborhood schools.”
And so it goes for many other public structures and services as well.
From our torn and threadbare mental health system to our eviscerated environmental protection structures to our frequently overwhelmed courts, prisons and jails to our dog-eared parks and highway rest stops, the destructive cycle of reduced services and disinvestment continues to repeat itself.…
All we lack right at present is the awareness, imagination and will to make it happen.
And let us not forget about how healthcare has been fully privatized. Doctors and nurses no longer have a say in the care of patients. Insurance companies dictate treatment and Big Pharma bleeds the system. Hospitals are now run by Boards of business people instead of Physicians who are responsible for care.
Hospital administrators earn HUGE salaries, too.
Guess if one is a lawyer and runs a hospital one can demand those HUGE salaries.
America needs to rethink its priorities … BIG TIME.
Do they really, Yvonne? I only ask because a friend in NJ is one, and between him & his scientist wife they make a comfortable, but not what we think of as “upper” middle-class income. I googled it & found a range of $55k-$175k, but that was from very general BLS stats.
We need to keep the pressure on Biden regarding the public option portion of his revised Bidenobamacareplan. (I like the sound of that, kind’a catchy. Gotta place the heavy accent on the second syllable. then, it sings.)
“Bidenobamarommacareplan”
Yes. This is exactly descriptive.
Public services are generally efficient and cost effective, Privatization imposes inefficiency, and often taxpayers pay more for a less efficient service Privatization is designed to create profit for investors while it destroys middle class jobs. One of the reasons our privatized healthcare is so expensive is that it is highly inefficient. Countries with universal healthcare pay for less on healthcare than we do.
Privatization in public education has failed to deliver on its promises. Instead, it has created a patchwork of poorly funded schools where Jim Crow is often part of the admission process. It has also resulted in a tremendous amount of money wasted on inflated administrative salaries, fees to management companies, in some cases fraud and embezzling while it undermines the public schools most students attend.
Taxpayers should have a right to well funded public services. That is what the tax levy is designed to do. It should not fund additional revenue streams for the already wealthy.
well said: “Privatization in public education has failed to deliver on its promises. Instead, it has created a patchwork of poorly funded schools where Jim Crow is often part of the admission process. It has also resulted in a tremendous amount of money wasted on inflated administrative salaries, fees to management companies, in some cases fraud and embezzling while it undermines the public schools most students attend.”
Oh, I think it it has delivered on its, promi$e$ all right.
This Land ain’t your land (with sincere apologies to Woody Guthrie)
This land ain’t your land. This land ain’t my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf stream waters
This land ain’t made for you and me
As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that Amazon convoy
I saw below me that Silicon Valley
This land was made for Bill and Jeff
I roamed and rambled, and I’ve followed my footsteps
To the bursting bubbles of the Dimon jet sets
And all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for Jamie and Lloyd*
When the sun come shining, then I was strolling
And the Waltons waving and the Think Tanks trolling
A voice was chanting as the fog was falling
This land was made for Company
This land ain’t your land. This land ain’t my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf stream waters
This land ain’t made for you and me
*Bankers Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan Money Chase) and Lloyd Blankfein (Golden Sacks)
Thanks for your creatvity, SomeDAM!
cx: creativity
One and only take.
On Google drive
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14Wru47ljdDWSInK2Czf_6XemCkw8Dwfj/view?usp=drivesdk
Laughing and crying simultaneously. A masterpiece, SomeDAM!!!! One of your very finest!!!!
That kind of makes me cry too, but unfortunately, it seems to be true
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
I had a frustrating run-in with PayPal’s automated help system recently, and as I was reading this post, I was thinking about all the time I spent listening to a computer app’s voice asking me to select from a list what my problem was.
At one point, I was so frustrated with this crappy, incompetent, private-sector, automated help system, I cussed the app out like only a U.S. Marine can cuss, and that automated system hung up on me.
I was stunned. Had PayPal programmed their automated help system to hang up when abusive language was heard?
This PayPal problem had caused problems with my bank account, too, and I was also talking to people at CHASE bank explaining the mess PayPal had caused.
When I called CHASE’s help number I talked to real humans and during one of these calls, I told the help person how PayPal’s automated system hung up on me when I cussed it out. During a previous call, a real human at CHASE also provided a toll-free PayPal phone number that would reach a real human. I called that number and ran into the frustrating, automated help voice again. I also told the CHASE human that story.
That CHASE human must have shared that story without someone else, maybe her supervisor because the next day, a live human from PayPal called me and before the call ended, the problem I was having was solved in a fraction of the time that I had spent dealing with PayPal’s automated help system that kept sending me in circles achieving nothing but wasting a log of time.
The reason I’m sharing this here is, because that is what we will end up with if the public sector is privatized, too many frustrating, incompetent automatons that seldom if ever resolves our problems, just send us in circles as our blood pressure spikes and blows of the top of our heads.
You probably just offended the computer.
They have feelings too, you know.
AI (Artificial Indignation )
The PayPal bots have feelings
And tend to get i-Rate
With swearing in the dealings
That fills them up with hate
Oh Lloyd, can I relate, and I am sure most of the people on this blog can as well although I bow to your “cussive” power. When real live people aren’t replaced by technology, they are turning humans into bots with their scripted protocols. The sad thing is i have run into people who cannot respond to questions that don’t match their stock answers.
It is sometimes said that most Americans didn’t have a problem with public education until integration. Private schools were mostly for the elite and/or people who wanted more specific religious education. I wonder to what extent this animosity toward government jobs is based upon all of the black people these government jobs have pulled into the middle class, like the USPS.
The links below provide more information about the situation in Granville County and also an interesting letter to the editor in more affluent Wake Forest. NC suburbs are also feeling more pressure as well.
What can be done to mitigate things at this point? Serious question (not rhetorical). Any advice?
https://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2020/11/12/as-charters-siphon-off-students-granville-countys-public-schools-are-struggling-to-stay-afloat/
https://wakeforestgazette.com/opinion-letter-outlines-problem-with-charter-school/