It gets more maddening every day. Essential human needs are being packaged into products to be bought and sold. The right to food and water, education, health care, public spaces, and unrestricted speech shouldn't be based on who can pay the most, or on who can generate profits with the slickest marketing pitch.
The free-market capitalism that drives our economy is a doctrine of individuals pursuing profit. Nothing else matters. An executive for Roche, a healthcare company, said "We are not in the business to save lives, but to make money."
With privatization of the common good we risk losing both our heritage and our humanness.
1. The Taking of Public LandAttempts to privatize federal land were made by the
Reagan administration in the 1980s and the Republican-controlled
Congress in the 1990s. In 2006, President Bush proposed
auctioning off 300,000 acres of national forest in 41 states.
The assault on our common areas continues with even greater ferocity today, as the euphemistic
Path to Prosperity has proposed to sell millions of acres of "unneeded federal land," and
libertarian groups like the
Cato Institute demand that our property be "allocated to the highest-value use." Mitt Romney admitted that he didn't know "what the purpose is" of public lands.
Examples of the takeaway are shocking.
Peabody Coal is strip-mining public lands in Wyoming and Montana and making a 10,000% profit on the meager amounts they pay for the privilege.
Sealaska is snatching up timberland in Alaska. The
Central Rockies Land Exchange would allow Bill Koch to pick up choice Colorado properties from the Bureau of Land Management, while neighboring Utah Governor Gary Herbert sees
land privatization as a way to reduce the deficit. Representative Cliff Stearns recommended that we
"sell off some of our national parks." One gold mining company even
invoked an 1872 law to grab mineral-rich Nevada land for which it stands to make a
million-percent profit.
The
National Resources Defense Council just reported that oil and gas companies hold drilling and fracking rights on U.S. land equivalent to the size of California and Florida combined. Much of this land is
"split estate," which means the company can drill under an American citizen's property without consent. Unrestrained by government regulations, TransCanada was able to use
eminent domain in Texas to lay its pipeline on private property and then have the owner arrested for trespassing on her own land, and
Chesapeake Energy Corporation overturned a 93-year-old law to frack a Texas residence without paying a penny to the homeowners. Most recently, the
oil frenzy in North Dakota has cheated Native Americans out of a billion dollars worth of revenue from drilling leases.
Away from the mountains and the plains, back in the cities of
Chicago and
Indianapolis and
L.A. and San Diego, our streets and parking spaces have been surrendered to corporations until the time of our great-grandchildren, with some of the
highest profit margins in the corporate world.
2. Water for SaleThe corporate invasion of the water market is well underway. In May 2000
Fortune Magazine called water "one of the world's great business opportunities..[It] promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th." Citigroup is on board, viewing water as a prime
investment, and perhaps the "single most important physical-commodity based asset class."
The vital human resource of water is being privatized and marketed
all over the country. In Pennsylvania and
California, the American Water Company took over towns and raised rates by 70% or more. In
Atlanta, United Water Services demanded more money from the city while prompting federal complaints about water quality. Shell owns
groundwater rights in Colorado, oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens is
buying up the water in drought-stricken Texas, and water in
Alaska is being pumped into tankers and sold in the Middle East.
A 2009 analysis of water and sewer utilities by Food and Water Watch
found that private companies charge up to 80 percent more for water and 100 percent more for sewer services. Various privatization
abusesor failures occurred in California, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.
Of course, water monopolization is a global concern, and a life-threatening issue in undeveloped countries, where
884 million people are without safe drinking water and more than 2.6 billion people lack the means for basic sanitation. Whether in the U.S. or in the world's poorest nation, the folly of privatizing water is made clear by the
profit-seeking motives of business:
(1) Water corporations are primarily accountable to their stockholders, not to the people they serve.
(2) They will avoid serving low-income communities where bill collection might be an issue.
(3) Because of the risk to profits, there is less incentive to maintain infrastructure.
3. Owning Human LifeMonsanto and their agro-chemical partners call themselves the "life industry."
In 1980 a General Electric geneticist
engineered an oil-eating bacterium, effective against oil spills, and in the first case of its kind the Supreme Court ruled that "a live, human-made micro-organism is patentable subject matter." Fifteen years later a
World Trade Organization decision allowed plants, genes, and microorganisms to be owned as
intellectual property.
The results, not surprisingly, have been disastrous. One-fifth of the
human genome is privately owned through patents. Strains of influenza and hepatitis have been
claimed by corporate and university labs, and because of this researchers can't use the patented life forms to perform cancer research. Thus the cost of life-preserving tests often depends on the whim (and the market analysis) of the organization claiming ownership of the biological entity.
The results have also been otherworldly. In 1996 the U.S. National Institutes of Health attempted to
patent the blood cells of the primitive Hagahai tribesman of New Guinea. U.S. companies AgriDyne and W.R. Grace tried to gain
ownership of the neem plant, used for centuries in India for the making of medicines and natural pesticides. Other examples of
'biopiracy': The University of Cincinnati holds a patent on Brazil's guarana seed; the University of Mississippi holds a patent on the Asian spice turmeric.
Most tragically, tens of thousands of
Indian farmers, charged for seeds that they used to develop on their own, and forced to repurchase them every year, have been driven to suicide after experiencing crop failures and ruinous debt.
Monsanto is at the forefront of GMO seeds and litigation against vulnerable farmers. To date the company has won over half of its
patent infringement lawsuits. The Supreme Court is currently weighing the arguments in
Bowman vs. Monsanto, which asks if a company can have a claim on a farmer whose crops were derived from a seed already paid for. More significantly, the question is whether a company can claim the rights to a form of life that has been nurtured by communities of farmers for centuries.
4. Owning the AirIn polluted Beijing, wealthy entrepreneur
Chen Guangbiao is selling "fresh air" in a soft drink can for about 80 cents.
While Americans are not yet dependent on (real or imagined) breathing supplements, we have relinquished public access to the air in another important way: the
1996 Telecommunications Act led the way to a giveaway of the transmission airwaves to the broadcast media. Through an effective lobbying campaign the communications industry gained all the benefits of a lucrative public space without even a licensing fee. Objected
former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, "The airwaves are a natural resource. They do not belong to the broadcasters, phone companies or any other industry. They belong to the American people."
Closely related is our right to freedom of expression on the Internet, which has been repeatedly threatened, despite the presence of existing copyright laws, by aggressive proposals like the
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Privacy is at risk with the
Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), passed in the House despite objections by Ron Paul and others who recognize the "Big Brother" implications of government monitoring of Google and Facebook accounts. The
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has facilitated the monitoring of foreign communications in the name of anti-terrorism.
A 2011
UNESCO report offered this worrisome insight: "..the control of information on the Internet and Web is certainly feasible, and technological advances do not therefore guarantee greater freedom of speech."
5. Children as ProductsLeading capitalists like Bill Gates and Jeb Bush and Michael Bloomberg and Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee, who together have a
few months teaching experience, have decided that the business model can pump out improved assembly line versions of our children.
Charter schools simply don't work as well as the profitseekers would have us believe. The recently updated
CREDO study at Stanford concluded again that "CMOs (Charter Management Organizations) on average are not dramatically better than non-CMO schools in terms of their contributions to student learning." Approximately the same percentages of charters and non-charters are showing improvement (or lack of improvement) in reading and math. In addition, poorly performing charters tend not to improve over time.
Nevertheless, charters remain appealing to poorly informed parents. The schools like to represent themselves as equal opportunity educational options, but the facts state the opposite, as many of them have
strict application standards that ensure access to the most qualified students. Funding for such schools drains money out of the public system.
Children are viewed as products in another way -- on the
school-to-prison pipeline. Many school districts employ "school resource officers" to patrol their hallways, and to ticket or arrest kids who disrupt the academic routine, no matter the age of the offender or the nature of the "offense":
-- A twelve-year-old was
arrested for wearing too much perfume.
-- A five-year-old was
handcuffed for committing "battery" on a police officer.
-- A six-year-old was called a
"terrorist threat" for talking about shooting bubbles at a classmate.
Along with these bizarre instances is the frightening precedent set by a private prison, Corrections Corporation of America, which despite having no law enforcement authority was allowed to
participate in a drug sweep at a high school in Arizona.
An Antidote?A successful society doesn't derive from a few Ayn-Rand-type individuals. It's the other way around, as philosopher
John Dewey reasoned in the 1930s. It's easy to forget that our country's greatest success was due to a collaborative effort in the years during and after World War 2, when advances in manufacturing and technology made us the strongest economy the world had ever seen. It was a shared success. The common good was not for sale.
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