privatization

That which we want less of in society should rarely be privatized and that which we want more of often should be.

People often don't understand the engine that drives corruption. Particularly in India, they assume government equals corruption, private companies equal efficiency. But government officials are not genetically programmed to be corrupt. Corruption is linked to power. If it is the corporations that are powerful, then they will be corrupt.

Golden sees parental uninterest in collective solutions as part of a larger __ecline in the social contract__ "As a scholar, I'm very disturbed that we have more [media] articles about toxins in the home than the fact that we don__ have universal prenatal care, she says. __e__e moved from collective concern about infant and child welfare into this very privatized focus on __y child_ and this intensive child-rearing.

The main substantive achievement of neoliberalization, however, has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income. _[T]his was achieved under the rubric of __ccumulation by dispossession_. By this I mean the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated of as __rimitive_ or __riginal_ during the rise of capitalism. These include the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (compare the cases, described above, of Mexico and of China, where 70 million peasants are thought to have been displaced in recent times); conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession.

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Republicans has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the rest of us and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.