350,000 Greeks, mainly the young and professionals, have fled Greece, and the decreased birth rate cannot sustain the population. Greece's economy has contracted 25% due to austerity. Under a controlled government and a controlled media, the people have no idea what happened to them and, therefore, cannot act in their own interest. [...]
Reading the daily headlines, it’s easy to forget that the corollary of a civilization in precipitous decline is a world of creative ferment, a new world struggling to be born. If you could have a God’s-eye view of all the creative resistance rending the fabric of political oppression from the U.S. to Indonesia to Colombia, you would surely be persuaded that all hope is not lost.
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and [humans are] at last compelled to face with sober senses [our] real conditions of life, and [our] relations with [our] kind.
— Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto
India is under siege from international capital. It is on course not only to be permanently beholden to US state-corporate interests but is heading towards environmental catastrophe much faster than many may think.
Just as everyone falsely assumes that Iran’s economic history followed the standard colonial model (it didn’t), that their political cleavages are the same as the West’s (they aren’t) and that Iran trails the West in modern political thought & democratic structure (they don’t), it is little wonder that Westerners assume that “privatization” simply must be the same as in the West (it isn’t).
The weekend edition of the Financial Times dated April 7/8 featured a story in the House and Home section under the title ‘Barcelona hits the Brakes.’ The story describes the negative effect of last October’s Catalan independence referendum on Barcelona’s real estate market. The Times cites data from the Spanish property website Idealista. During the summer of 2017 (Q3 2017) properties in the city gained an impressive 018 percent compared to the previous year.
QUESTION: If a school is educating a child, whether it’s a private school or a charter school, doesn’t it deserve public dollars?
RESPONSE: Public and private mean the opposite of each other. Public and private are antonyms.
From the standpoint of Russia’s dilemma, this is an important column. Putin’s partial impotence via-a-vis Washington is due to the grip that neoliberal economics exercises over the Russian government. Putin cannot break with the West, because he believes that Russian economic development is dependent on Russia’s integration within the Western economy. That is what neoliberal economics tells the Russian economic and financial establishment.
As the capitalist elite continues to pour ever more resources into its crusade to dismantle society, it’s important to keep a tally of the damage done—if only to direct popular attention to where it’s needed most, and to where the Left’s own resources are needed most. High on the list of capitalist priorities, and thus of priorities for left-wing resistance, is the goal to privatize everything from education to nature to policing and soldiering. With that in mind, here’s a list of some recent “negative externalities” of privatization that I’ve culled from news sources.
