Corporate Takeover of America

by Ron Stouffer

Appearing in September at The Hill School in Pottstown, PA, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. cited Mussolini’s famous definition of fascism as the merger of government and corporations and warned against it. I have seen fascism/corporatism developing for years, pushed mostly by Republicans, but Democrats, unfortunately, are often complicit.

As large corporations intensify their efforts to take over America by seeking to privatize all things public– Social Security, turnpikes, school cafeterias, libraries, pensions, Medicare, parks, police forces, prisons, the military, public nursing homes, water, sewer systems, and public education (through the Trojan horse No Child Left Behind)– we need to heed RFK Jr.’s warning. Each time a public enterprise, asset, or function is outsourced or sold off to privatizers, we move closer to fascism. Private wealth increases its stranglehold on local, state, and national government. Recommended reading on this topic is The Fox in the Henhouse- How Privatization Threatens Democracy by Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich.

Here are just a few examples:

***Conservatives blamed government for the gruesome conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Actually, a private company (funded by your tax dollars) ran Walter Reed, according to Paul Krugman, New York Times. Krugman reported that the government could have done the job more cheaply, but I guess few campaign contributions come from government workers as opposed to private contractors.

***Conservatives blamed government for the poor response in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. However, Wayne O’Leary reports in The Progressive Populist (11-1-07, p.16,”Needed: A Public Sector”), “…recovery was largely turned over to corporate interests operating with marketplace priorities…”

***The college loan program, a government program formerly known as Sallie Mae, was fully privatized in 2004, O’Leary reported in the same article. The program is now plagued by problems and scandals.

***The dangers inherent in privatizing/leasing the PA Turnpike are too numerous to mention here. Check out “The Highwaymen” by Daniel Schulman with James Ridgeway in the January/February 2007 issue of Mother Jones at The Highwaymen . Also see Related Articles at this site.

***Large corporations with friendly, local-sounding names control some local water systems. Pennsylvania American Water Company is one example. To learn more about the consequences of water privatization, check out “A Price on Every Drop” by Jon R. Luoma in the December, 2002, issue of Mother Jones at Water For Profit .

***America’s health care crisis is really a subset of the corporate takeover. Health insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations are heavily invested in preventing a much more economical single-payer public insurance program with superior benefits from becoming a reality. Those corporations are also hard at work privatizing Medicare. See November’s issue of CommonSense2 , “The Death of Medicare”.

***Sustainable agriculture is threatened by the corporate factory farm model which is harmful to the environment and to our health. Sign up for newsletters at www.organicconsumers.org .

Beware of code words. Because “privatization” became a dirty word in the Social Security debate, corporatizers and government officials use terms like “public-private partnerships” (PPPs or 3Ps). Beware of any politician who uses the vocabulary of “partnering”. To its credit, the Berks County PA Democratic Committee unanimously passed an anti-privatization, anti-outsourcing resolution in 2005. See Resolutions at www.berksdems.org .

It seems the Reagan-Bush legacy and the conservative movement were not about conservatism. Their real legacy was corporatism/fascism and the centralization and expansion of corporate government and corporate welfare. The result is the steady erosion of democracy and the diminishing power of the people. A fundamental question is whether the 1886 Supreme Court decision (Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad) which declared corporations to be “persons” needs to be overturned. See The Hidden History of Corporations at www.ReclaimDemocracy.org as well as Model Brief on Eliminating Corporate Rights at www.celdf.org .

For more on the Democracy Movement’s fight against the Privatization Movement, check out resources available at www.poclad.org (Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy) as well as Dorothy Reilly’s article on fascism, ” Sound Like America To You?”, in the November 2007 issue of CommonSense2.com.

Arm yourself with information and fight back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibcsQpEj7Zo

Dear activists, colleagues and friends, We all saw what happened with FEMA’s response to Katrina. What many don’t know is that rampant corporate cronyism is pervasive throughout the entire Department of Homeland Security, not just FEMA.