Public education in the United States is not broken. Our social system is broken.

JAY: So what’s wrong with that? I mean, Mitt Romney would probably argue that the government-run system’s dysfunctional, so why not let the parents pick winning and losing schools and let schools kind of be run by a marketplace that parents get to run?

NAISON: Well, my argument is public education in the United States is not broken. Our social system is broken. If you look at—if you take out poverty as a factor, our public schools compare favorably with those—with almost any other nation in the world. It’s our unconscionably high child poverty rates, it’s our high rates of imprisonment, it’s our astronomical rates of youth and minority unemployment which create a context where schools in poor neighborhoods are under intolerable pressure. And by decentralizing education money, you’re going to make the problem worse, because whenever you privatize in the United States, what you do is de-skill professionals and increase the wage gap between CEOs and workers. So in communities which desperately are trying to hang on to their middle class, you destroy public education and privatize and you’re going to end up with the black and Latino middle class further diminishing, with wages and work conditions for all teachers to diminish. And that produces not only bad consequences for those neighborhoods; it produces bad consequences in terms of consumer demand for the whole of society. [Italics added]

NHS Bill and the destruction of UK healthcare

The recent passage of the NHS Bill in the UK is setting the stage for a privatization of the long established and well run national healthcare system.  In this case well run refers to the quality of care patients in need receive, regardless of their ability to pay.  The move by the Conservatives to privatize the NHS, directly contradicting their 2010 campaign promises, comes in the face of huge public and medical profession opposition.  The current government of the UK is changing a system that has better public health indicators (life expectancy, child mortality rates), universal access based on need of care instead of ability to pay, and about half the administrative costs as compared to US and moving it in the opposite direction; towards the US model!

 
Expect opposition to this to only grow among the people of the UK.  The ruling elites are only adding fuel to the fire that is erupting the world over, the recent student and public worker protests in the UK a prime example.

Dr Éoin Clarke writes: [T]he map above shows the areas where patients have been affected by the NHS carve up since the passing of the NHS Bill. I have included the logo of the private company profiteering from the carcass feeding.

A map of England showing the areas affected so far by the NHS carve up.

The Movement Has Neither Won Nor Lost In Egypt by Samir Amin

Samir Amin on the correlation of forces in Egypt today and identifies the current phase as the beginning of a long period of democratic change with its ups and downs.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

The Movement Has Neither Won Nor Lost In Egypt …, posted with vodpod

Blackwater, Privatization, War and Fascism

I have to preface this entry with a little explanation. The following is basically a reaction I wrote the other night to the latest controversy to deveop over the use of private contractors in US military ventures abroad. I just let the words flow out of my head and I have decided to leave them in their original format without and editing or further investigation of details that could add relevant content to the article.

The Major problem with the Blackwater corp. and other mercenaries is not that they are above the rule of seemingly any law, it is not that they act if often reckless means killing without regard or investigation, it is the fact that they represent the privatization of war. Another ugly head of the military-industrial complex has appeared, or perhaps reappeared is a better term, for mercenary armies are by no means a new invention. But the mercenary army acting under the guise of the capitalist system is a rather new development that has many ramifications beyond its counterparts from antiquity and the middle ages. At the heart of the matter is the neo-liberal objective of broad privatization of all aspects of life, from health care to the military to natural resources to public infrastructure to social security. Nothing is to be left untouched. And when I say neo-liberal I mean the group of neo-cons that made up the core of the Bush administration and still to day posses broad power, although perhaps not as much as in the past. The policies and programs of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz among others have been implemented with these ideological goals in mind. I have to make the distinction here between the neo-liberals in charge of the US now and the neo-liberalism as it was first developed by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economists. Although Friedman and his followers were devoted to privatization, they left a few things off the table that they considered to be untouchable. One of these things was the military/defense forces. This is where Rumsfeld enters the picture. His reorganization of the Defense Department has centered around the idea of privatizing as much as possible, a step that the father of neo-liberalism hesitated from advocating.

Well lets fast-forward a couple years and now the US is engaged in a war in Iraq and Afghanistan and seriously looks to be contemplating a third front in Iran. Blackwater has played a key role in this process. Allowing the US to embark on its imperialist adventures while at the same time avoiding the tremendously unpopularity of the draft. These neo-cons were around for Vietnam, hell a lot of them worked in the Nixon administration, they saw what happened in regards to public and military protest and civil disruption due to the conscription army. With a private military force at their disposal they are free to just hire more and more mercenaries to make up for any shortfall in the traditional armed forces.

The problem is that Blackwater and others, as a private company operating under the free market capitalist system, are driven by profit. It is there goal as a company to generate profit and growth; it is what drives competitive capitalism. And what is Blackwater’s business? They describe themselves as professional warriors. So lets that the next logical step; what kind of environment does Blackwater need to ensure contracts? (Contracts handed out by governments, namely the US government, which means the taxpayer is paying for it, according to congressional hearings the US pays for 90% of Blackwater’s revenue) Well the answer is almost self evident, they need chaos, they need war zones, they needed continued conflicts. They also just happened to be in a position to help extend conflicts, since they have armed personnel in the middle of said conflicts. Do you see the problem? Providing security to their clients in a war zone is suppose to let their clients accomplish whatever it is that they want to do in a secure environment, in this and most cases the US government with the objective of building a nation that is free of conflict. Well if the US succeeds in this endeavor, and it is nowhere close at the moment, then Blackwater is out of contracts and the business fails. I see three paths out of this dilemma for Blackwater. 1 – rely on the US to keep engaging in other conflicts, hence a continuation of the market and new contracts are signed. 2 – take steps to ensure the current conflicts they are involved in stay conflicts; hence they keep the contracts they have. 3 – Increasingly fill the void left by the neo-liberal privatization of the military begun by Rumsfeld and take over more and more sectors of the American military that have traditionally been subject to public funding. Number 3 is interesting to think about in a historical context, especially that of the ancient world where the empires of different states share many similarities with the US empire. The classic example is Rome. It began is ascendancy and conquest with the military might of its legions, whose ranks were filled with roman citizens. Over a period of time the Romans themselves lost the will to fight in the legions and left the tasks to others, first other italic people, then other peoples of the empire and finally to the barbarians coming from northeastern Europe and the steppes of Asia. Using money earned from the pervious conquests, the rulers of Rome depended more and more on others to do the work for them with the belief that it would lead to the same results, and it did, for a while. The ‘barbarization’of the legions had its effect though. Some parallels can be drawn from this comparison if closely examined.

My guess is that the way things are going now it is going to be a combination of all three paths that Blackwater takes. The company is certainly taking some public knocks now, only because it is the largest and most visible at the moment, but there are other private mercenary companies that are operating in Iraq that the public doesn’t hear about. If Blackwater ends up collapsing due to it being a target because it is the leader in the industry or because of its own mistakes, rest assured another company will rise to take its place.

That is unless we as a government and much more importantly as a people rethink exactly what the implications of employing private mercenary companies to do our fighting. Profit drives the private company and the mercenary companies business is war. This is a completely different level of the M-I-C than say a nuclear weapon producer like Westinghouse. The market for nukes isn’t going anywhere at the moment or anytime soon and there doesn’t have to be active warfare going on for the company to sell its weapons. In fact war, at least of the thermo-nuclear variety is highly unfavorable to Westinghouse; if it happens there will be no one left to buy any more weapons (or make them). Conventional war might actually stimulate the nuke market though, certainly proliferation and international instability does, so that is still a huge problem. But with Blackwater and others like it the mere presence of international instability and tensions is not enough; they need war/chaos to be taking place. There is no place for Blackwater in a world that is free from large conflicts.

As already noted this is a capitalist system is built upon the drive for growth and profits by companies. It is fundamentally against Blackwater’s interest for a stop to the warfare initiated by Bush. Well that’s not quite fair, he didn’t initiate it he only intensified it greatly. The military doesn’t fundamentally need warfare, as it is a public service, although of course it pushes for it. But defense forces can be scaled down in times of peace, however painfully the political steps may be. But the intertwining of government with private corporations that derive profit from war and destruction is a dangerous scenario. Blackwater is only one of the companies, others such as Halliburton profit off of different results of war, but war remains the key. This growing closeness of private business is incredibly dangerous as it takes the power away from the people and puts in the hands of the companies. It is they who financially support the politicians and in this sense determine who is in control. Who better than those who favor policies that will benefit the companies? It is instructive to note the Eric Prince, CEO of Blackwater, is a Republican backer and his family has major ties to the party and the Bush campaign. Dick Cheney ran Halliburton before becoming VP. These companies and individuals supported the ascendancy of the neo-cons and they have reaped the benefits many times over. We are witnessing before our eyes the move towards the corporate state. This my friends is the move towards fascism. It happened in Germany in a democratic republic. It happened in Spain after a civil war. It happened in Chile after a military coup. There are many paths to fascism and they by no means follow an easily mapped out path. But they do follow a general direction that has end results that we can point to. One is the emergence corporate-state. Another is the growth of executive authority. Another is political repression and terror on the local population. We are seeing some of these factors begin to play themselves out. If we do not put a stop to it then it is only a matter of time before the hammer falls. Do you want to be under it when it does? – 04.10.07 Buenos Aires