Government exists as a profit center for private enterprise, as I have said many, many times.
In today’s America, Karl Marx’s criticisms of capitalism are understated. Wherever one looks, the scene is one of the government using taxpayers’ money to enrich private interests. Taxes are collected from people who can barely make it, and the revenues are transferred to multi-millionaires and billionaires. The federal government piles debt on the backs of heavily-burdened and dispossessed Americans in order that investment banksters can pay annual bonuses that exceed the lifetime earnings of most Americans.
Every aspect of the US military has been mined for private profit. Supply and other functions for the military, such as those provided by Halliburton and Blackwater, services once provided by the military itself at low cost, have been privatized. These services now cost many multiples of the cost to taxpayers of in-house military provision.
The “war on terror” enriches the armaments/security industry and enables Israeli territorial expansion. The Israel Lobby and the munitions industry are major sources of funding for U.S. political campaigns.
Prisons have been privatized in order to create profits for private corporations. The prisons require high incarceration rates in order to be profitable. Consequently, “freedom and democracy” America not only has the highest incarceration rate and the highest absolute number of prisoners in the world, but also a prison population comparable in size to the prison population of Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago.
And this is only going to get worse, by the way.
anonymous
LOL. At first I thought you were referring to Roberts the Supreme Court judge. At first I kept thinking, “This sure is candid of him!”
Lex
I read that one, excellent piece laying bare a lot of American mythology professed by “conservatives” by what i’ve come to consider a real conservative…who’s clearly gotten so fed up that he’s either walked away from his supposed allies or been kicked to the curb by them.
Mandos
For all its merits, the enabling factor is ultimately the New Deal compromise, and perhaps the fact that it didn’t go far enough. In order to provide for the middle class without inducing dreaded socialism, it connected capitalism to the public purse. It was inevitable that, as the private sector eventually came to build up its concentration of wealth, it would discover ways to convert the compromise into a system of neofeudal tithes—which is what the raiding of Social Security will eventually be.
gan1
The Roberts piece is right on. I am in the medical field and see this first hand. “Integrated” health care systems are all the rage now with corporate owned hospitals buying out private medical groups as the MDs see their bottom lines fall. Although the docs are not in the poor house, they are eager to lock in a fixed rather than falling salary.
Eventually, the reimbursement for private practice will be low enough to force all MDs, nurses etc to work for a large corporation. We will then have health care rationing on a nationwide scale, not via the govt, but via the profit driven corporations.
There will be a limited number of corp health systems to cater to the elite, but Walmart type systems for the overwhelming majority. (and with HCR as planned we will be forced to shop there)
Medicare for all and the public option never had a chance against this master plan.
BC Nurse Prof
Yes, gan1, I see this happening in Canada, too. Private clinics are creeping in, and hiring the “best” nurses away from the public system. The nurses in the public system are overworked and underpaid (by design). A private clinic opens up and advertises for nursing positions and gives a high salary and low nurse-patient ratios. Hundreds of nurses apply. They cherry-pick the best. And the care goes down in the public system. Public complains. Politicians scream, “the solution to our problems is more privatisation!” and gullible citizens believe them. Shock doctrine in health care.
DancingOpossum
Roberts is one of those principled conservatives who have no place in today’s GOP. He’s been running around with his hair on fire over this stuff for years. Like the folks at American Conservative and Antiwar, who oppose the same things lefties do: interventionism abroad, military-industrial complex at home, and support of the criminal rogue state.
George
I’ve had it and as soon as I can sort out the socialist alternatives, I’m dumping the Democrats. They can destroy the country without me.
jo6pac
A friend sent to me Green Shoots we can Believe In. Shipping News
http://marketoracle.co.uk/images/2010/Jan/us-collapse-18-11.gif
Celsius 233
What Roberts said is one thing; what’s done about it is entirely another.