Privatization: Selling your soul to the company store.
There's a song from the 50's sung in the deep, sonorous tones of Tennessee Ernie Ford called "Sixteen Tons," that describes backbreaking, depression era work in a coal mine where the mining company owned every human need; the worker's housing, the schooling available for dependent children, the store where the miner had to buy supplies for his job and food for his table. The primary, repeated chorus of that song was "Load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter, don't you call me cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the Company store."
We would be wise to remember that chorus, because if the neo-Federalists, the ultra right of the Republican party, and all the corporate interests who own most of our current crop of politicians get their way, we'll all be singing that song on stage instead of warming up behind the curtain.
Capitalism, free trade, private enterprise, and profit margins are words and concepts all of us find familiar. Those ideas don't surprise or worry us at all, because those 'principles' of a free market economy are how our nation has progressed in the world. Right? Better take a deep breath and re-think that. Those words, under today's banner of Privatization have a whole new meaning...and that meaning is sly and sinister.
Stop and think for a moment about all the things essential for human survival and progress that are being suggested for or already fall under the Privatization banner: food sources, water, education, the prison system, medicine, our Social Security system, even our ballot boxes. The major spiel used by the scam artists and hucksters pushing for complete privatization is that you will have control, government will be very small and uninvolved in your life, and, most importantly, you will become self-reliant.
The idea of self-reliance has great appeal. It works well with the concept of individualism. Both those concepts by their very possibility stress responsibility, and as can be seen every day, we need more responsible people. Even before we became a republic, we as an immigrant people, idolized the bold, brash loner who stood up for himself, fighting the elements, eschewing dependency, making his was forward by the muscles of his back and the sweat of his brow. Not only is that memory largely mythic, but there is a big hole in this type thinking today that no one bothers to talk about. In order for any of these self-directed ways of life to work, the environment in which they occur must allow for them. The environment must be conducive and encouraging. That is not the case. When everything within your environment is owned by a private entity on which you become dependent, even for the very air you breathe, how can you own yourself?
Almost all essentials to survival and to quality within today's life are not only growing more precious for their increasing scarcity, but are more costly because they are privately owned. During our history when agriculture dominated, self-sufficiency through reliance on the land was the primary option for most of our population. We lived, worked and prospered on family owned farms and ranches. Water, usually free for the taking, became an issue only in certain geographical locations. Drought, increasing numbers of people, and the changes wrought by the Industrial age began to change all that. Cities and cosmopolitan areas grew beyond the ability of people to fend for themselves, and they became dependent on wages and materials supplied by others. Today that dependency is magnified, even in former rural areas. Few of us can survive on our own.
Progress has supposedly ushered us into the next stage some pundits and wags have call the Information Age, others baptized the Technological Revolution, and still others with a more jaundiced eye think of as the Age of Supremacy. In my own opinion, this time period is best described as Chaos on the Half Shell simply because like a single spoiled shell fish in a feast of riches, you run the risk of becoming deathly ill through your own appetite. Within this age, we are enthralled with all the venues of communication excepting the simple one where we stand or sit face to face and engage in a genial conversation. Technology is triumphant, be it in military hardware, digital and wireless consumer gadgets, or computerized spy ware that enters very thorough, once private data on you into a massive data base that can be shared by governments, banking and collection agencies, insurance and medical corporations, police forces, marketers, identity thieves, computer hackers and advertising gurus. We are no longer individuals so much as we are multiple target markets for every type business interest, including monkey business.
Herein lies the problem of our disappearing ownership of our own souls.
There has never been a time when I have ever met a business company or corporation with the characteristics of a human being. No such organization or collective is an individual. Yet, these groups through accommodating members of the executive and legislative arms of our government are now being treated better than human citizens. All the regulating bodies supposedly created to increase the efficiency of government no longer constrain or regulate business. No longer does government envision or assess penalties against organizations engaged in shoddy business dealings, fraud, vanishing pensions or double entry bookkeeping. After much blatantly overt - and just as much covert - posturing and positioning, big business through lobbyists and direct purchasing agents has bought representation of their interests over the interests of real human citizens by offering massive political campaign 'donations.' But corporations can't vote, you say? Sure they can. They vote by giving or withholding money, and in so doing control, direct and dictate government actions, none of which are for your benefit as a citizen or a consumer.
The United States is no longer being run by elected representatives of her people. The United States is being run by a consortium of business, legal, medical, communications and manufacturing pragmatists who have sold their honor and integrity for an assured payoff from their real bosses - big business. Politics has become only another game of riding the business tiger where to choose the welfare of humanity over the bottom line of business is to fall off and get eaten. Politicians have sold their souls and yours for a ticket to ride the whirlwind where no one really survives.
If you doubt that you and your soul have been sold, simply look at the legislative changes already passed and currently pending, look at the executive orders that have slipped through in secrecy, look at the propaganda you've bought into, look at how your tax dollars are being spent, take a sharp pencil and run your own numbers on how all these things affect you and your children and their children.
Every piece of legislation geared toward helping people advance themselves, or pull themselves up, or improve the air they breath, the water they drink, the way their children are taught, the way their health and resources are maintained, or the prices they must pay for the simple elements of survival (housing, food, water) have been changed, slashed to the bone, or eliminated at the same time changes to the tax system have been altered to allow the wealthy of the country and the business interests to retain more and more of their money. The big ticket items - the energy bill, the drug bill within Medicare, the environmental bills affecting quality of life for everyone, the bills to allow mining, logging, oil exploration, the bill regarding eminent domain which allows private homes and property to be taken by private interest development for their profit, the bankruptcy legislation and other banking bills, have all taken security, protection, and money away from average people and put it into the pockets of the oil, automobile, utility, oil, chemical, drug and banking businesses.
The concept of a globalized economy, the facade of free trade agreements, the WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA, The World Bank, and all the hundreds of alphabet soup organizations affecting little people worldwide who can't fight back and business interest who don't want people to fight back have been and continue to be designed to make countries and people in all countries dependent. Freedom has nothing to do with it, particularly if that freedom is individual freedom. Democracy has nothing to do with it, particularly since we are no longer a democracy but a "capitalocracy" where money is the method and power and supremacy are king and queen.
Jobs and opportunities to advance in those jobs have all but disappeared. But we have war on two fronts. As long as wars continue, the military is essential as is all the military product, hardware and technology supplied by the industrial portion of that military industrial complex Dwight Eisenhower warned against. And our government under the direction of industry and business which keeps eliminating jobs and other aids to people is assuring that even without a draft, we will always have a military - because when nothing else is available to keep the wolf of hunger from the door, desperate young people will sign on to be cannon fodder. Peace doesn't earn a third of the money for corporate coffers that war brings in.
If you aren't already, you soon will be loading your own form of sixteen tons just to keep your head above the swirling waters stirred by this consortium founded on power and greed. You might grimmace when you put a dish of dog or cat food on your table because you have to eat to keep up your strength for slavery and can't afford anything better. Average people are not only denied comfort and ease, but have no access to steak.
Sing it, children. "St. Peter don't you call me, cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store."
There's a song from the 50's sung in the deep, sonorous tones of Tennessee Ernie Ford called "Sixteen Tons," that describes backbreaking, depression era work in a coal mine where the mining company owned every human need; the worker's housing, the schooling available for dependent children, the store where the miner had to buy supplies for his job and food for his table. The primary, repeated chorus of that song was "Load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter, don't you call me cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the Company store."
We would be wise to remember that chorus, because if the neo-Federalists, the ultra right of the Republican party, and all the corporate interests who own most of our current crop of politicians get their way, we'll all be singing that song on stage instead of warming up behind the curtain.
Capitalism, free trade, private enterprise, and profit margins are words and concepts all of us find familiar. Those ideas don't surprise or worry us at all, because those 'principles' of a free market economy are how our nation has progressed in the world. Right? Better take a deep breath and re-think that. Those words, under today's banner of Privatization have a whole new meaning...and that meaning is sly and sinister.
Stop and think for a moment about all the things essential for human survival and progress that are being suggested for or already fall under the Privatization banner: food sources, water, education, the prison system, medicine, our Social Security system, even our ballot boxes. The major spiel used by the scam artists and hucksters pushing for complete privatization is that you will have control, government will be very small and uninvolved in your life, and, most importantly, you will become self-reliant.
The idea of self-reliance has great appeal. It works well with the concept of individualism. Both those concepts by their very possibility stress responsibility, and as can be seen every day, we need more responsible people. Even before we became a republic, we as an immigrant people, idolized the bold, brash loner who stood up for himself, fighting the elements, eschewing dependency, making his was forward by the muscles of his back and the sweat of his brow. Not only is that memory largely mythic, but there is a big hole in this type thinking today that no one bothers to talk about. In order for any of these self-directed ways of life to work, the environment in which they occur must allow for them. The environment must be conducive and encouraging. That is not the case. When everything within your environment is owned by a private entity on which you become dependent, even for the very air you breathe, how can you own yourself?
Almost all essentials to survival and to quality within today's life are not only growing more precious for their increasing scarcity, but are more costly because they are privately owned. During our history when agriculture dominated, self-sufficiency through reliance on the land was the primary option for most of our population. We lived, worked and prospered on family owned farms and ranches. Water, usually free for the taking, became an issue only in certain geographical locations. Drought, increasing numbers of people, and the changes wrought by the Industrial age began to change all that. Cities and cosmopolitan areas grew beyond the ability of people to fend for themselves, and they became dependent on wages and materials supplied by others. Today that dependency is magnified, even in former rural areas. Few of us can survive on our own.
Progress has supposedly ushered us into the next stage some pundits and wags have call the Information Age, others baptized the Technological Revolution, and still others with a more jaundiced eye think of as the Age of Supremacy. In my own opinion, this time period is best described as Chaos on the Half Shell simply because like a single spoiled shell fish in a feast of riches, you run the risk of becoming deathly ill through your own appetite. Within this age, we are enthralled with all the venues of communication excepting the simple one where we stand or sit face to face and engage in a genial conversation. Technology is triumphant, be it in military hardware, digital and wireless consumer gadgets, or computerized spy ware that enters very thorough, once private data on you into a massive data base that can be shared by governments, banking and collection agencies, insurance and medical corporations, police forces, marketers, identity thieves, computer hackers and advertising gurus. We are no longer individuals so much as we are multiple target markets for every type business interest, including monkey business.
Herein lies the problem of our disappearing ownership of our own souls.
There has never been a time when I have ever met a business company or corporation with the characteristics of a human being. No such organization or collective is an individual. Yet, these groups through accommodating members of the executive and legislative arms of our government are now being treated better than human citizens. All the regulating bodies supposedly created to increase the efficiency of government no longer constrain or regulate business. No longer does government envision or assess penalties against organizations engaged in shoddy business dealings, fraud, vanishing pensions or double entry bookkeeping. After much blatantly overt - and just as much covert - posturing and positioning, big business through lobbyists and direct purchasing agents has bought representation of their interests over the interests of real human citizens by offering massive political campaign 'donations.' But corporations can't vote, you say? Sure they can. They vote by giving or withholding money, and in so doing control, direct and dictate government actions, none of which are for your benefit as a citizen or a consumer.
The United States is no longer being run by elected representatives of her people. The United States is being run by a consortium of business, legal, medical, communications and manufacturing pragmatists who have sold their honor and integrity for an assured payoff from their real bosses - big business. Politics has become only another game of riding the business tiger where to choose the welfare of humanity over the bottom line of business is to fall off and get eaten. Politicians have sold their souls and yours for a ticket to ride the whirlwind where no one really survives.
If you doubt that you and your soul have been sold, simply look at the legislative changes already passed and currently pending, look at the executive orders that have slipped through in secrecy, look at the propaganda you've bought into, look at how your tax dollars are being spent, take a sharp pencil and run your own numbers on how all these things affect you and your children and their children.
Every piece of legislation geared toward helping people advance themselves, or pull themselves up, or improve the air they breath, the water they drink, the way their children are taught, the way their health and resources are maintained, or the prices they must pay for the simple elements of survival (housing, food, water) have been changed, slashed to the bone, or eliminated at the same time changes to the tax system have been altered to allow the wealthy of the country and the business interests to retain more and more of their money. The big ticket items - the energy bill, the drug bill within Medicare, the environmental bills affecting quality of life for everyone, the bills to allow mining, logging, oil exploration, the bill regarding eminent domain which allows private homes and property to be taken by private interest development for their profit, the bankruptcy legislation and other banking bills, have all taken security, protection, and money away from average people and put it into the pockets of the oil, automobile, utility, oil, chemical, drug and banking businesses.
The concept of a globalized economy, the facade of free trade agreements, the WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA, The World Bank, and all the hundreds of alphabet soup organizations affecting little people worldwide who can't fight back and business interest who don't want people to fight back have been and continue to be designed to make countries and people in all countries dependent. Freedom has nothing to do with it, particularly if that freedom is individual freedom. Democracy has nothing to do with it, particularly since we are no longer a democracy but a "capitalocracy" where money is the method and power and supremacy are king and queen.
Jobs and opportunities to advance in those jobs have all but disappeared. But we have war on two fronts. As long as wars continue, the military is essential as is all the military product, hardware and technology supplied by the industrial portion of that military industrial complex Dwight Eisenhower warned against. And our government under the direction of industry and business which keeps eliminating jobs and other aids to people is assuring that even without a draft, we will always have a military - because when nothing else is available to keep the wolf of hunger from the door, desperate young people will sign on to be cannon fodder. Peace doesn't earn a third of the money for corporate coffers that war brings in.
If you aren't already, you soon will be loading your own form of sixteen tons just to keep your head above the swirling waters stirred by this consortium founded on power and greed. You might grimmace when you put a dish of dog or cat food on your table because you have to eat to keep up your strength for slavery and can't afford anything better. Average people are not only denied comfort and ease, but have no access to steak.
Sing it, children. "St. Peter don't you call me, cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store."
posted by kaz at 4:46 AM
4 Comments:
Gasp! This is a gem among gems [and I think I can judge]!
I read this the day you posted it and really needed a second reading & a couple of days grace to truly appreciate it.
Good old Ralph Waldo must be churning in his grave - the underlying concept of self-reliance, and the plain & simple fact that we don't have access to it anymore, is criminal. Yes, there were mythic heroes aggrandized above and beyond the norm - but everday heros exist too, even now.
You've managed to cover a lot of ground in one post, but this is the sort of thinking that really needs to be pounded into our minds again and again.
The only point with which I take any exception is technology - notwithstanding its various ills and downsides, we've been lucky, I think, to experience as an upside this rare opportunity to send our words out into fleeting cyberspace; to connect with like-minded others whom in real life we would probably never get a chance to meet.
The freedom to let your thoughts fly outward as [in your case Kaz] pointed arrows skewering whom and what we will - that's not something I've considered a burden [she says, as she loads her sixteen tons...]
wonderfully well said...would have been worth the read even if presented in 6pt...!!!...
Miliana's comment regarding technology is well taken, and since the technology she speaks of is Internet communication, I can't help but agree. After all, I'm posting 'peculiar' observations of my own. With that, however, something rarely discussed must be mentioned.
We all take our Interstate highway system for granted even as we complain about the boring drive while we motor along at least 10 mph above the posted speed limit. Yet when that system was first envisioned at the end of WWII, public use was only a secondary consideration. Interstate's were to accommodate the logical and rapid deployment of our military. That, in fact, is one of the reasons all even numbered routes run east/west and all odd numbered roads run north/south...simple logistics.
The same must be said of the Internet - it was first envisioned and developed as a total and secure commuication network for the military to do a great deal more than simply send messages back and forth (think satellite links, think lurking submarines, think computer scenarios of world wide war and training games).
That the Internet has been 'taken over' by private concerns and individuals is not surprising, but falls under the Laws of Unintended Consequences. And each time we've heard in the past (and will continue to hear) that it should be regulated or controlled or censored...think really hard about what that truly means.
Kaz has a salient point here. I personally like to think of the Internet being designed by fuzzy Silicon Valley nerdy frat-boys, intent only on displaying their intelligence and their sense of their own superiority. I don't often think of the original application for all of this, so thanks for the reminder.
There was been some rumbling in the perhaps more "techy" spheres of the corners of Internet about a United Nations idea a while ago, namely their soggy effort to wrest control of naming websites [or three syllable country signifiers] away from the US and making it more of an international concern. I'll have to troll around to find the actual news - it wasn't bandied about, as you can imagine. I'll see what I can find.
Yet, it will affect us all in the long run. By the way, did you ever come across the cluetrain manifesto? It's dated, to a certain extent, but I always thought what was embodied in there was very much of a point.
http://www.cluetrain.com/
At this point it's read-only site, but well worth a browse or two.
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