Tom Ultican has written extensively about the greed and politics behind privatization. In this post, he reviews an important new book about the dangers of privatization by Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian. I urge you to buy the book.
Ultican writes:
Ronald Reagan claimed the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” The new book, The Privatization of Everything, documents the widespread theft of the commons facilitated by Reagan’s anti-government philosophy. His remark echoed a claim from the “laissez-faire cheerleader” Friedrich Hayek that government has us all on the “road to serfdom” (Privatization 120). Sherrilyn Ifill, the former Director-Council of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund observed,
“What we’re seeing in our country today: the rhetoric, the hate, the ignorance, the coarseness, the vulgarity, the cruelty, the greed, the fear is the result of decades of poor citizenship development. It is a reflection of the fully privatized notion of citizenship, a feral conflict for the scraps left by oligarchs (Privatization 13).”
Libertarian politicians like former speaker of the house Paul Ryan and Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul claim Hayek and writer-philosopher Ayn Rand as their guiding lights. In a 2012 article, Politico reported, “…, to bring new staffers up to speed, Ryan gives them copies of Hayek’s classic “Road to Serfdom” and Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” — books he says inspires his political philosophy.” Politico also stated,
“But Hayek and Rand were violently opposed to each other’s ideas. It is virtually impossible to hold them in the same brain. When the termagant Rand met Hayek, she screamed across the room, ‘Compromiser!’ and reviled him as an ‘abysmal fool,’ an “ass” and a ‘totally, complete, vicious bastard.’” (Termagant: a violent, turbulent, or brawling woman.)
Ayn Rand’s problem with Hayek was that he was not really the “laissez-faire cheerleader” he was purported to be. He certainly opposed many of the ideas emanating from Franklyn Roosevelt’s New Deal believing they would lead to worse problems than the ones being addressed. Fundamentally his thinking was shaped by a fear of communism. However, unlike today’s libertarians, he was not opposed to all government programs or interventions and that is what stirred Ayn Rand’s fury.
Robert Nielsen’s 2012 review of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom observes,
“He also calls for social insurance in case of sickness and accident, as well as government assistance after a natural disaster. ‘But there is no incompatibility in principle between the state providing greater security in this way and preservation of individual freedom.’ I think most advocates of Hayek have not read this passage and don’t realise he is not an extremist arguing against all forms of government. Let me repeat this, Hayek is arguing there is a good case for the government to get involved in healthcare, either in the form of universal healthcare or government insurance.”
John Maynard Keynes is thought of as the liberal economist whose theories guided President Roosevelt as he grappled with the great depression. Hayek’s and Keynes’s economic theories were in some ways polar opposites. However, Hayek came to London to work at the School of Economics where he and Keynes who was 16-years his senior became friends. They exchanged several letters concerning Hayek’s works in which Keynes found some agreement.
Chet Yarbrough’s audio book review of The Road to Serfdom states,
“Contrary to a wide perception that John Maynard Keynes (a liberal economist in today’s parlance) denigrated ‘The Road to Serfdom’; Keynes, in fact, praised it.”
“Though Keynes praised ‘The Road to Serfdom’, he did not think Hayek’s economic’ liberalism practical; i.e. Keynes infers that Hayek could not practically draw a line between a safety net for the poor, uninsured-sick, and unemployed (which Hayek endorsed) while denying government intervention in a competitive, laissez-faire economy.”
It is disingenuous to cite the theories of Friedrich Hayek as the justification for privatizing government functions and the commons.
The Privatization of Everything
The Privatization of Everything co-author Donald Cohen is the founder and executive director of In The Public Interest. Co-author Allen Mikaelian is the bestselling author of Metal of Honor and a doctoral fellow in history at American University. Besides the authors’ individual work, the team at In The Public Interest contributed significantly to the book with research and documentation.
Of their intention in writing the book, the authors state,
“Our approach is both idealistic and practical. We want readers to see the lofty values and big ideas behind the creation of public goods, and we want readers to feel empowered to question those values and introduce new ones. We want to help change the conversation, so we can stop talking about ‘government monopolies’ and return to talking about public control over public goods (Privatization 19).
They detail several cases showing the downside of the government being forced to give control over to private business. In this era of human-activity-induced climate change, what has been happening at the National Weather Service (NWS) is instructive.
In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy believed that the US and the Soviet Union could find a field of cooperation in supporting the World Meteorological Organization. As a result, 193 countries and territories all agreed to provide “essential data” on a “free and unrestricted basis.” “Each day, global observations add up to twenty terabytes of data, which is processed by a supercomputer running 77 trillion calculations per second (Privatization 267).”
The book notes, “In the 1990s, at about the same time that forecasting got consistently good, private interests and free-market absolutists started insisting that the NWS and related agencies were ‘competing’ with private enterprise.” Barry Myers, head of AccuWeather was loudly accusing the government of running a “monopoly.” He went to the extreme of calling for the government to get out of the weather predicting business which made no sense since AccuWeather is completely dependent on NWS predictions. (Privatization 268)
After a killer tornado in 2011, NWS employees proposed a smart-phone app to better inform the public. The author’s report, “… this ultimately took a backseat to Myers’s insistence that his AccuWeather apps shouldn’t face ‘unfair’ competition (Privatization 270).” To this day, NWS has no smartphone app.
Weather forecasts are pretty good for up to a week but after that as time passes they become more and more useless. The models for predicting the weather are highly dependent on the preceding day and the farther you get from accurate data for that day the more error invades the predictions. NWS restricts its predictions to a one-week time-frame but AccuWeather and the Weather Channel in order to attract customers provide meaningless 2-week up to 90-days predictions. (Privatization 272)
Extreme weather events are life threatening. The authors state,
“The NWS’s mission includes saving lives. The business model of corporations like AccuWeather includes saving lives of paying customers only (Privatization 273).”
There are many episodes like NWS detailed. In the section on private prisons, we read about such atrocities as the Idaho correctional facility known as the “Gladiator School” (Privatization 140). When detailing the privatization of water we are informed of Nestles CEO, Peter Brabeck stating how extreme it was to believe that “as a human being you should have a right to water (Privatization 54).”
Privatizing Public Education Stabs Democracy in the Heart
The First Public School in America
Boston Latin School was founded April 23, 1635. America’s first public school only accepted boys for their curriculum centered on humanities including the study of Latin and Greek. Its more famous revolutionary-era students were Samuel Adams, John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin. These revolutionary thinkers who gave America democracy were educated in a public school and would latter agree that free public schools were necessary to a functioning democracy.
When Betsy DeVos was calling for vouchers and charter schools, she was implicitly demanding public dollars support religious schools that would not accept transgender students or homosexual teachers. She wanted schools free to teach a doctrine of science denial and religious bigotry. “Freedom of choice in this case meant the freedom to discriminate, with the blessing of public funds (Privatization 210).”
One of the several disturbing stories about the menace of privatizing schools comes from Reynolds Lake Oconee, Georgia. Wealthy real estate developer Mercer Reynolds III made a charter school the center of his community development. The charter school application called for 80% of the children to come from Reynolds properties. The other 12% would go to students in nearby wealthy white communities and the remaining 8% would go to countywide residents. (Privatization 211-212)
With a mix of taxpayer and private funding, Reynolds built an impressive school. It had a piano lab with 25 pianos, a pond and offered 17 AP classes. The school is 73% white. The nearby public school that is 68% black and would never dream of a piano lab has seen the Reynolds school continually siphon off more of their students. They have been forced into laying-off staff and tightening budgets. (Privatization 212)
Cohen and Mikaelian concluded,
“This was a clear-cut case of rich whites diverting money from struggling black families in order to further push them to the margins. And they used the ideas of school choice and free market to justify it.
As the book makes clear, every time a public good is privatized the public loses some of their democratic rights over that lost good. This is a powerful book that everyone should read. In the last chapter the authors call out to us,
“We can’t let private interests sell us public goods as consumers, because the free market can’t avoid creating exclusions. School choice quickly devolves into segregation. Public parks and highways are divided into general versus premium services. In the midst of a notional health crisis, ventilators go to the highest bidder.”
We lack a good word for what is really going on here. Privatization proper would mean no taxpayer dollars are harmed in the process, but that is not what the privateers want. They envy most of all the power of taxation but free of all the bother of representation. Just like the old days before the Revolution …
Its called “piratization”.
Steal the public booty and bury it in Switzerland.
Piratization
Captain Charter does his duty
Piratization of public booty
Makes the public walk the plank
Hides the booty in a bank
Nailed it
Fascism always comes with a great big eraser to erase the line between the State and the Corporations.
“Given the conditions that exist, she argued, taking social security, unemployment compensation, etc. was justified”
That seems totally out of character with her lifelong criticism of “government aid” and sounds a lot like the sort of excuse a child would concoct when caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
Where did she argue that? Do you have a reference?
And critically, when did she argue that?
Did she argue that before or after she was taking social security and Medicare?
It makes all the difference.
Interesting how private companies want GOVERNMENT money (they want to pay no taxes, but they want to get government subsidies from OUR taxes! (IE – Bezos gets BILLIONS from the government in the form of subsidies for his space program, Amazon, etc.
I so very much enjoy reading your blog. It’s among my favorites. Some very good points here on the differences between Hayek and Rand. Not all libertarians, however, are oblivious to the issue of the commons. Many, inspired by the writings of Elinor Ostrom, understand how communities, cooperatives, trusts, trade unions and other associations might prevent the depletion of the commons without excessive government intervention.
That said, it should also be noted that the GOP’ers who peddle Hayek and Rand are hypocrites at best. Hayek himself wrote an essay called “Why I am Not a Conservative”, as he celebrated the market’s ability to disrupt stultifying tradition; and Rand called out conservatives for their racist support of Southern apartheid, their alignment with the religious right, and their virulent opposition to reproductive freedom. She was also against US entry into Korea and Vietnam and opposed the draft. Like Hayek, she viewed the US on a path toward what she called “the new fascism”. She’d be spinning in her grave over the policies advocated by the GOP today, but it would not have surprised her in the least.
Many years ago when MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment) tried to see the light of day, it became crystal clear (already then) that the only ones who were to profit were the big companies – for the little guy on the street: mostly zilch. And it still is the same today – all these so-called ‘free trade’ agreements…’free trade’ becoming free rape of whichever natural resources or other state goods could be stolen. Any type of public service must NEVER EVER be in private hands – to benefit owners/share holders at the expense of average John/Jane Doe.
It’s the height of disingenuousness to describe markets that most people could never dream of participating in as “free.” This stuff brings to my mind the bread riots throughout Europe in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Lake Oconee academy has fewer students than Greensboro County Schools. Is it better that some blue collar students get out of the school that is 98% free lunch or is it better than the people who live in the gated communities have a private school to attend?
Also, the article would have been better if it had review the per student spending at the charter school as compared to the public school high school
Per student spending is not an appropriate indicator of whether a school is doing a better, more efficient job of educating its population. Charter schools cherry pick their student populations, leaving higher numbers of SPED, ELL, etc. at the public school. These high-needs children are obviously more expensive to teach. Charter schools also fail to provide necessary expenses such as food and transportation, and hire from cheaper, less experienced teaching pools like TFA.
It should be obvious to all of us today that the citation of Ayn Rand (mercurial individualist and sophomoric idealist opponent of all government and most society) or any other figure of history out of context is the problem. In this day of facebook/instapost argument, any uneducated fool can sound like a scholar by reposting someone’s allusion that happens to ring true to them momentarily. This is not scholarship from a historical point of view.
What this leads to is the growing phenomenon of political leaders who can say almost anything without alienating their political base. At this moment in history, and for the most part of the last 40 years, this has been a recurring problem with those on the political right. Before that, perhaps the political left suffered a bit from it. Either way, there will always be those who will use any idea to legitimize the fleecing of the common man for personal gain. Just because someone claims a philosophy does not mean theat they live by this philosophy.
Not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven.
Just because someone claims a philosophy does not mean theat they live by this philosophy.”
Ayn Rand is a perfect example. Despite all her attacks on the evils of socialism, she took medicare and social security for the last six years of her life (after contracting lung cancer, which she likely got through her own actions: decades of smoking). She was the epitome of a goddamned hypocrite. But most of her acolytes either don’t know it or, dishonesty, wont admit it.
She certainly had character flaws, but taking social security and Medicare wasn’t one of them. Given the conditions that exist, she argued, taking social security, unemployment compensation, etc. was justified. She believed that poverty was a structural outgrowth of the regulatory state, and, like many on the New Left, ironically, she argued that that regulatory state was created to benefit an “aristocracy of pull”—those business factions across industry and banking who used the regulatory apparatus to benefit their own interests.
There are those of us who take Rand seriously (and critically) as a thinker, but who reject the cult-like adjulation of her modern-day acolytes, many of whom have dropped the ball on Rand’s radical critique of the ‘welfare-warfare’ state.
Given the conditions that exist, she argued, taking social security, unemployment compensation, etc. was justified”
That seems totally out of character with her lifelong criticism of “government aid” and sounds a lot like the sort of excuse a child would concoct when caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
Where did she argue that? Do you have a reference?
And critically, when did she argue that?
Did she argue that before or after she was taking social security and Medicare?
It makes all the difference.
As early as June 1966, in an article, “The Question of Scholarships,” she argued that it was morally proper to accept government research grants and scholarships, social security, unemployment compensation, and welfare—long before she had accepted social security and Medicare for herself. Since she blamed systemic poverty and the boom-bust cycle on the state-banking nexus, in which the politically-connected wealthier classes clearly benefited at the expense of everyone else, she believed that accepting government “handouts” was, in fact, “restitution”, for the very human damage that was a structural outgrowth of a system she called the “new fascism.”
So, whether she was a hypocrite depends on which of her two contradictory views toward government she actually believed?
From a 1959 interview with Mike Wallace:
Mike Wallace: Let’s move ahead. How does your philosophy translate itself into the world of politics? Now one of the principle achievements of this country in the past 20 years, particularly, I think most people agree, is the gradual growth of social and protective legislation based on the principle that we are our brother’s keepers. How do you feel about the political trends of the United States, the Western world?
Ayn Rand: The way everybody feels, except more consciously. I feel that it is terrible, that you see destruction all around you, and that you are moving toward disaster until, and unless, all those welfare state conceptions have been reversed and rejected. It is precisely these trends which are bringing the world to disaster, because we are now moving towards complete collectivism, or socialism.A system under which everybody is enslaved to everybody, and we are moving that way only because of our altruist morality.
Mike Wallace: And you believe there should be no right by the government to tax. You believe that there should be no such thing as welfare legislation, unemployment compensation, regulation during times of stress, certain kinds of rent controls, and things like that.
Ayn Rand: That’s right. I’m opposed to all forms of control. I am for an absolute laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy. Let me put it briefly. I’m for the separation of state and economics. Just as we had separation of state and church, which led to peaceful co-existence among different religions, after a period of religious wars, so the same applies to economics. If you separate the government from economics, if you do not regulate production and trade, you will have peaceful cooperation, and harmony, and justice among men.”
// End quotes
From that interview , it doesn’t sound like Rand thought it was “morally proper to accept government research grants and scholarships, social security, unemployment compensation, and welfare”.
More like “morally reprehensible.”
But maybe Ayn Rand had a split personality?
You quote Rand as saying the following: “I’m for the separation of state and economics. Just as we had separation of state and church, which led to peaceful co-existence among different religions, after a period of religious wars, so the same applies to economics. If you separate the government from economics, if you do not regulate production and trade, you will have peaceful cooperation, and harmony, and justice among men.”
Note this is a conditional: IF you separate state and economics, THEN X, Y, Z will follow.
But if you DON’T, Rand would maintain that you have to try to live a “rational life in an irrational society” (the title of one of her essays). Given that you don’t live in the “unknown ideal” that Rand extolled, given the imperfect, nonideal conditions that exist, it is morally proper, in her view, to take actions that under “ideal” conditions would not be necessary. Structural poverty—caused by a system that is rigged to favor oligarchic corporate looters—requires one to take actions to further one’s ability to survive and flourish.
In many ways, Rand’s approach was a “dialectical” one not unlike that of Karl Marx, who understood that under the conditions of the real world, it is necessary to milk the inner contradictions of the system. The contradiction or “split personality” isn’t in Rand; it’s in the world she analyzes and critiques. I have long argued in my published works that this parallel with Marx may be ironic, but it’s not ahistorical. She learned to use this dialectical method of looking at the world from her Marxist and non-Marxist Russian teachers at the University of Leningrad, from which she graduated in 1924.
rhymes with split …
Every day is a good day when I learn something new, which I did about Hayek. Some people get upset with me when I say Ronald Reagan is the worst president in our history. I remember G. H. Bush calling his econonmic plan “voodoo economics.” Reagan is responsible for our long descent into neo-conservative madness.
Amen and Amen. Reagan ushered in a wave of top down economics. Milton Friedman, who was one of Reagan’s economic advisors, embraced privatization with a profound effect on the education reform movement.
YES. Reagan “embraced” many ideas about privatizing services over supporting public institutions, and then he empowered his ideas by legitimizing powerful privatizing voices like Friedman and Murdoch.
On a somewhat lighter, more linguistic note, any post employing the noun “termagant” is aces in my book. The last time I had occasion to use this fine word, it was in reference to Amy Cooper, as in “disgraced Central Park termagant Amy Cooper.” Let’s bring this word back into common use!
TerMAGAnt: a harsh or overbearing one term MAGA ant (of either gender)
Usage: The terMAGAnt encouraged his fellow ants to lay siege to the Capitol with guns, spears and buffalo horns.
Oh, man, SomeDAM: how did I miss that? Beautiful job!
I have a feeling that may be the first and last time the latter word is used. At least I hope so. Because of Trump gets re-elected, he will no longer be a terMAGAnt, by definition. (I was wrong. That makes two times.)
In that case he would probably be a twoterMAGAnt (twitterMAGAnt too, if they ever reactivated his account)
Maganifient, SomeDAM!
Alas, the word has a dark history. Women are termagants. Men are forceful, go-getters.
I am aware of that, Bob, which is why I use it advisedly. But for Amy Cooper…well, nothing else quite worked.
I understand the temptation to apply it to Rand. I really do. Rand appeals to teenagers and to people who remain, intellectually, teenagers throughout their lives (Rand Paul, Paul Ryan)–folks who want cheez whiz philosophy lite–a comprehensive ideology that purports to explain everything. “Objectivism” is a cult religion, which is ironic, given her virulent (everything about her was virulent/bombastic/overblown) atheism.
That said, one must honor her very real experience of Soviet totalitarianism and its attendant evils.
Absolutely–I think we can be best advised to accept SomeDAM’s repurposing of this word as ungendered. In that framing, a termagant is neither male nor female, but rather a nagging, complaining, person.
Men are forceful, go-getters
Ie, spermagants
LOL
That said, one must honor her very real experience of Soviet totalitarianism and its attendant evils, including the gulags, the show trials, the annexation of neighboring states, the secret police, the breathtakingly dangerous and stupid attempted top-down economic micromanagement leading to disaster.
The name Objectivism was obviously chosen to make people believe it’s science, which it isn’t.
And maybe it’s spelled “spermagents” , agents of sperm, or sperm gents (gentlemen)
There’s some lessons from other countries – not that the privatization advocates will learn anything from them, but they do exist.
Germany privatized their power grid but then took it back public when their citizens were being robbed. Sweden’s school privatization was a huge failure. Chile just elected a Leftist leader partly in response to failed privatization.
It will be difficult to roll back the ed reform echo chamber’s huge push to privatize K-12 schools because unfortunately they dominate elite public education policy.
Privatization isn’t even questioned or debated within ed reform. They all cheer each and every charter and voucher initiative. As far as ed reform is concerned, the decision to privatize has already been made. There is no dissent. By the time the public figures out they were misled – that this was never about “improving public schools” – public schools will be eradicated.
They simply don’t value public schools. They don’t work to that end.
Go look at any of the big ed reform orgs or university departments or professional cheerleaders. There is no mention of any possible downside of privatizing- it is uniform, 100% cheerleading. It’s an echo chamber.
The level of overpromising is just incredible. “Choice will fix everything!” This is what passes for “research”.
Chairs,
Agriculture collectivization is an example of disastrous publicization of what works best as decentralized private organizations. There are some things that work best with private decentralized markets, some that work best with public production, some that require a mix, and some that work equally well with both models.
Here is a podcast about markets solving issues in allocating food to food banks: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/09/11/565736836/episode-665-the-free-food-market
There are some things that work best with private decentralized markets, some that work best with public production, some that require a mix, and some that work equally well with both models.
Agreed!
There’s an information mismatch in ed reform too. They strictly regulate public schools with numerous mandates on testing and reporting but they DEREGULATE their own ideologically preferred systems- charters and publicly funded private schools- so they have copious information on public schools, less information on charter schools, and no information at all on publicly funded private schools.
But they don’t recognize this, so they compare the wealth of information they have on public schools to NO information. Of course all of their articles focus on deficiencies in public schools. They don’t have any information on deficiencies in charter or private schools.
This has led to the ridiculous situation we have now, where people who work to eradicate public schools ALSO review public schools and govern them. It’s ludicrous.
Of course all ed reform coverage of public schools and public school students is negative. They’re employed to promote charters and vouchers.
Podcast With Donald Cohen One Of The Authors
The Privatization Of Everything
Does anyone really believe that any of the professional promoters of privatizing K-12 schools will admit it was a mistake if it’s a disaster?
You know they won’t. They’ll simply say it wasn’t privatized ENOUGH. That’s their argument now. They’ll pull that out forever.
Ed reform can’t fail. It can only be failed- by the evil teachers unions, by local leaders, by teachers, by state or federal government.
The fact is if they succeed in abolishing public schools we are stuck with their privatized systems forever. Not one of these people has ever admitted an error. All they do is double down and the rest of the echo chamber cheers it on.
This “movement” is now to the Right of Barry Goldwater and moving further and further Right every day. None of them object. There are no dissenters.
How can we forget Barry Goldwater’s role in the conservative privatization approach? Shame where the right has gone—possibly no way back. They, along with the ed reformers, will never admit to any mistakes. What infuriates more is how our economic history is right there for all of us to see yet is largely ignored by the general public who seem to operate on whims, trends and immediate emotional reactions to anything political. Our systems are now in the hands of actors who care more for theatre than for nuance and depth regarding our social and fiscal economics. Our lives are being dictated by memes and their human counterparts being elected to office. What is the hot, new political spectre of the day? Just ask the news and social media. All fluff and emotion—very little thought and substance. The truth is out there, but people don’t want to see it. Why would anyone admit to it publicly if doing so would devalue their power and ignoring truth continues to serve them?
Privatization is only good for investors and private companies, not people. Privatized public goods cost more for the service, and the service is often less efficient and thorough than the public service because it will only provide service to areas that will produce profit. For example, rural areas would lose in a privatized postal service as the service would be considered too costly. We have already seen the devastating impact of small community hospitals that have closed because they are on the losing end of “market forces.” Some sick people in rural communities must travel more than a hundred miles when they have a medical emergency.
Chester, PA, which has already faced the collapse of its public schools, is trying to sell off its public water to keep the community afloat. States are in debt. The federal government is too busy providing subsidies to corporations to help them out. The loss of tax dollars from Covid may find more communities facing bankruptcy. Like Chester they may need to sell off public assets to continue operating. The vulture capitalists are eagerly waiting in the wings to hoover them up.https://www.inthepublicinterest.org/a-philly-suburb-wants-to-sell-its-water-offering-a-glimpse-of-post-covid-america/
Cutthroat capitalism as practiced in the United States is a perfect example showing the world how destructive unbridled greed is.
Rand also wrote breathless, wordy prose full of comic book villains and heroes. My brother nailed it when he said that her books should have pictures of Fabbio on their covers, like Harlequin Romances.
Who is John Galt?
Ayn’s boyfriend Alan Greenspan, whose hands off approach to financial regulation resulted in the massive subprime mortgage fraud that caused the financial meltdown in 2007.
“I have found a flaw” (in my thinking) Galt famously later said in testimony to Congress.
Yeah, the flaw was that his brain had a massive hole in the pre frontal cortex.
LOL.
But yeah, Hayek believed that government had some limited purposes–protecting property rights (ofc), enforcing contracts, keeping companies from poisoning people. I keep my copy of The Road to Serfdom next to my copy of Mao’s Little Red Book. But I used up my copies of Ann Rand novels during the toilet paper shortage.
Ayny for your hiny?
Flannery O’Connor on Ayn Rand: “She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”
Here’s another “Hall of Shame” moment for Nestle from the 1970s. The company told mothers in developing nations that formula was essential for growth and development. Many babies died when the mothers were unable to pay for the formula, and the mothers’ milk had dried up. Terrible! https://www.businessinsider.com/nestles-infant-formula-scandal-2012-6
Nestle also had a big scandal back in the 1970s. They convinced mothers in poor countries their babies needed formula to be healthy, and many died when the mothers could no longer pay for the formula.
I went into moderation hell by providing a link with my comment so I am trying to reword it without the link.
Yeah. This was truly obscene. Their marketing people told mothers in developing countries that formula was much better for their babies than was breast milk, but the formula had to be mixed with water, and in many of these places, local water sources were really bad for babies. Horrific.
We can thank companies like Nestle for all the billions of plastic bottles now polluting the landscape and waters — bottles that did not even exist a couple decades ago.
Plastic water bottles are an absolute plague, to say nothing of a scam. In most cases the water in the bottles is no better/safer than the water coming straight from the tap. In fact, in about 25% of cases, the bottled water IS tap water.
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/truth-about-tap
There are exceptions , of course (Flint , Michigan being a particularly egregious one). But the exceptions are mostly due to gross government disregard for safety.
The EU had the good sense of outlaw single use plastic. We Americans need to change some of our wasteful ways and our hyper-consumerism. The Earth is not disposable. Like our public schools it demands protection so that it will serve future generations.
In other news, eldest Trump daughter Princess Sparkle will not comply with subpoena by AG because OMG do you really expect Ivanka to go hang around with people who don’t even own designer beach wraps?
In still other news, Scotland has decided that it was wrong 400 years ago to execute people as witches and will issue pardons to 300 persons put to death for witchcraft.
But don’t get too ahead of the curve, Scotland! There’s a fine line between visionary/progressive/cutting edge, on the one hand, and playing right into the hand of The Prince of Darkness on the other. What was the deal with granting him permission to build golf courses, for example?
The wikipedia article says between 4 and 6 thousand were tried for witchcraft (3/4 were women) and 1500 executed — strangled and then burned.
But hey, at least they didn’t burn and then strangle them. Imagine getting strangled after you were burned. Nothing worse than that.
What a lovely place Scotland must have been in the old days.
Oh, what wonderful comments! But a suggestion: Please don’t talk about what anyone–but one’s self “believes.” We do not know what Rand or anyone else believed. We know what they said, or wrote. Did they believe it? In Rand’s case, maybe. In the case of many politicians–who knows? Politicians–like most of us–often give rationalizations for their actions. Today’s GOP and the Right in general, what power and money and the comfort that goes with all that. Look, for instance, at all the Republicans–such as Ted Cruze–who were sharp critics of Trump and his “New York values (Cruze called them). Now they are lap dogs for him, because he has power and popularity and they are (probably) afraid to oppose him. Let’s talk about what people say and do, not what they “believe.”
If they aren’t believable, it doesn’t matter what they believe.
And Ted Cruz is unbelievably unbelievable.
It’s really quite simple: “Privatization” is Republican/Corporate code for “Profitization”.
Every public service that We the People collectively provide for our Common Good is the target of being converted to a for-profit corporate enterprise — and wherever that has happened the result has always and will always be the same: The quality of service steeply declines, and the cost of the service steeply increases as private corporations take profits at the expense of We the People.
YUP. Consider healthcare. The per capita cost here in the U.S. is TWICE the average of the OECD. Why? An enormous amount of the healthcare dollar goes into profits to engorge the rich.
Opponents of expanding Medicare to include all Americans claim that healthcare should be left to “the free market”…BUT, Healthcare is NOT a free market — it’s what economists define as a “captive market”. In order for a market to be a free market, the consumer must have three free-will choices:
1. The consumer must be able to choose between what products or services to buy.
2. The consumer must be able to choose between sources from which to buy.
3. The consumer must have the choice to not buy at all.
But when a person is seriously ill or injured, the person doesn’t have choice #3; the person must seek medical care and medicines or suffer or die. To suffer or die is not a logical choice; the consumer has no logical choice but to seek medical care — therefore the consumer is captive to the market, captive to the provider of medical care and medicines who can charge the person whatever the provider wants to charge.
So, next time you read, see, hear, or meet someone claiming that health care should be left up to the “free market”, point out to them the reasons why healthcare is NOT a free market.
In other news, some background on the Cuckoo Coup of 2021:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/peter-navarro-trump-distributed-bogus-election-fraud-research-to-every-congressional-republican/ar-AASoYf4?ocid=msedgntp
Facebook’s Memory Alpha just reminded me of a note I wrote ten year ago whose time has apparently come round again …
The naivest stuff I read from some people in social media these days is the idea that Free Markets are some kind of brake on Government Control. And this old hippie is just as wary of government control as anyone can be. But it’s not a choice between government control and something else, it’s a choice between democratic government and corporate government, between one person one vote (OPOV) and one dollar one vote (ODOV). And the latter is where we are now and heading deeper as we speak.
So here’s what I wrote …
In a complex society, people making decisions and taking actions at places remote from you have the power to affect your life in significant ways. Those people are your government, no matter what spheres of influence they inhabit, private or public. The only way you get a choice in that governance is if there are paths of feedback that allow you to affect the life of those decision makers and action takers in significant ways. That is what accountability, response-ability, and representative government are all about.
Naturally, some people are against that.
In the United States there has been a concerted campaign for as long as I can remember — but even more concerted since the Reagan Regime — to get the People to abdicate their hold on The Powers That Be and just let some anonymous corporate entity send us the bill after the fact. They keep trying to con the People into thinking they can starve the beast, to limit government, when what they are really doing is feeding the beast of corporate control, weakening their own power over the forces that govern their lives.
That is the road to perdition as far as responsible government goes. There is not much of anything one leader or one administration can do unsupported if the People do not constantly demand a government of, by, and for the People.
• https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache/posts/2640545926435
[…] https://dianeravitch.net/2022/01/03/tom-ultican-on-the-privatization-of-everything/ […]