privatization

At this site I have already reviewed scholarship and recent history with which I would otherwise seek to illustrate my position. For the sake of brevity I will refrain here from submitting the entire indictment again.
However, the “Greatest Show on Earth” is starting to roll into a town near you — thankfully not one near me — and with it the usual battalions of charlatans and hypocrites will also come, those waving what George Carlin so poignantly called “America’s greatest theatrical prop” (aka as Bible, Holy Scripture etc.)

All across America, from West Quoddy Head, Maine, the easternmost point, to Cape Wrangell, Alaska, the westernmost point, a distance of 3,625 miles, people are confronted by politics, Democrats and Republicans, but do they know the two parties merged into a neoliberal juggernaut some time ago? It’s Purple Politics, a de facto single party.

One doesn’t have to be a brilliant social analyst to see that the contemporary world order is doomed, destined to start visibly crumbling within the next decade or two at the latest. The neoliberal system, in fact the corporate capitalist system, is radically unsustainable. It is too unstable, too universally rapacious, too humanly exploitative and environmentally destructive, too demoniacally self-consuming–for capitalism can profit from its self-immolation!–to last much longer.

In the early hours of Thursday morning, July 16, the Greek Parliament passed a host of austerity measures in order to begin talks on a potential third bailout of 86 billion euros. The austerity measures were pushed onto the Parliament by Greece’s six-month-old leftist government of Syriza, elected in late January with a single mandate to oppose austerity.

Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, in an article in the Guardian entitled “Germany won’t spare Greek pain – it has an interest in breaking us”, frames the Greek tragedy in clear terms thus:

A historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate of the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored last week’s landslide “No” vote and secretly agreed a raft of repressive, impoverishing measures in return for a “bailout” that means sinister foreign control and a warning to the world.

Bill Clinton and Paul Ryan agreeing that the privatizing Ryan budget is the way to go. Neo-liberalism in action, but you have to look behind the curtain to see it.by Gaius PubliusI recently did a piece about Greece that implied a number of similarities to Ukraine's recent upheavals. There I said:

Have the people of Greece been singled out for particularly harsh punishment by its international creditors for daring to elect Syriza? Are they being used as a warning to other countries not to emulate Greece? The economic argument for demanding more cuts and austerity no longer makes any sense.

It was to be expected, and nothing more clearly illustrated the gap between the uncaring rich and the 99 per cent.

Just before leaving office as president over fifty years ago, Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned against the potential power of the military-industrial complex, a formidable union of defense contractors and the armed forces.  In the 1950s, Eisenhower saw retired generals, heroes of WWII, moving into industry board of director slots: for example, Douglas MacArthur went to Remington Rand, Lucius Clay, Continental Can, and Jimmy Doolittle, Shell Oil.