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Government for Profit |
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While the people in this country are deeply divided on most political issues, the one thing that they are not divided on is the fact that our government has become dysfunctional. We are on the verge of losing our national sovereignty as government representatives attempt to erase our borders and merge our government with Canada and Mexico; importers are bringing products from Communist China that are poisoning our children and pets; importing drugs that are contaminated and/or contain no active ingredients and the volume of imports is so great that the entire U.S. transportation system is being redesigned to accommodate the imports; American businesses are being put out of business by unfair foreign competition allowed by trade agreements written for the benefit of multinational corporations; the value of the dollar is dropping and it’s position as the world reserve currency is being replaced by the Euro; government debt is skyrocketing; inflation is rising and wages are falling, we’re engaged in a war in Iraq and the war mongers want to expand it to almost the entire Middle East; and U.S. credibility is virtually gone and our integrity is destroyed.
To understand how we got into this mess, one must go back 30 years to the days of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Free markets and privatization were the mantra of the day. The theory was that for almost anything the government did, private corporations - profit or non-profit - could do it better, cheaper, faster, and more efficiently.
It was argued at the time that industry was hindered by over-regulation, the civil service system was too rigid, government couldn’t move fast enough for changing times, and that government was bloated and over-burdened by demands for services - primarily for the underprivileged and unproductive sectors of society.
The steps taken to address the problems identified in the 1980’s have been to de-regulate corporations, sell off public assets, eliminate civil service positions, reduce, eliminate or privatize government services and functions, restrict the power of government to interfere in the ‘free market’, contract out government functions and services and to ‘control results, not processes ses'. 1
It’s indisputable that the government we have now - the one we all agree is dysfunctional is the result of the Thatcher-Reagan reforms instituted over the 3 decades of Free Markets and Privatization’. So the question is - why did free market reforms for government fail? Ironically, the answer is embedded in the question itself.
The reforms have redefined government as a corporation, our country as a market, and citizens as consumers or customers. The Constitution has been trashed. The already wealthy and powerful have become all-powerful and obscenely wealthy. The power of government has been shifted to private corporations who view citizens as factors of production to be controlled and regulated by government rather than the inverse. And rather than investing in productive enterprises, corporations invest in politicians to ensure the status quo. And in an absurd twist, the wealthy and powerful who are benefiting from the market-based governance model are the funders and leaders - through front groups - of the patriot and religious movements. Their goal is to get the victims of the criminal enterprise - the citizens of this nation - to break it apart - an action which will ensure perpetuation of the criminal enterprise. Their success will be the full breakdown of government and it will ensure the feudalist system of control for people who were once citizens, demoted to consumers, ultimately destined to be slaves.
Vicky Davis Vicky L. Davis was a Computer Systems Analyst/Programmer who spent 20 years designing and writing computer systems for large corporations and state and local governments. For 15 of those years, she worked as a Contractor, which gave her exposure to a wide variety of different businesses and their internal applications and operations. She has traveled extensively and has lived in nine states in the course of her life’s adventure.
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