While George W. Bush, the Congress, and the media
have us looking south to the “invasion” of America by
impoverished illegal immigrants or looking east to the “endless
threat” to America from hordes of fanatical Islamic terrorists,
there’s another, very real but very quiet, siege taking place on our
government. It’s coming from within. Far from being a movement of desperate poor people,
this assault on democracy is being mounted by extremely wealthy and
powerful guys in pinstripe suits. Theirs is a corporate assault on our
public resources, public institutions, public functions — and the
very idea of the common good. They fly the flag of
“privatization,” and their goal is to take over our public
sector, essentially eliminating it and substituting corporate governance. In an important book titled The Fox in the Hen House, Si
Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich document the startling extent to which this
takeover has already happened. Corporate lobbyists, corporate-funded think
tanks, and corporate-owned politicians have been pushing privatization
(which is nothing but a euphemism for corporatization) for decades, with
Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton willingly turning over
public purposes, assets, and control to these private, anti-democratic,
profit-seeking interests. As Kahn and Minnich show, the privatizers hit the
mother lode with the Bush-Cheney regime. With their extremist,
anti-government ideology, the Bushites are gleefully selling out the public
good by selling off whole chunks of our government. We know about their
push to privatize Social Security and schools, but few are aware of the
massive turnover of power to corporations in such areas as the military and
our parks, prisons, and social programs. To help keep our democracy from being devoured by the
corporate foxes, check Kahn and Minnich’s Web site, at
www.thefoxinthehenhouse.com.
This article appears in Jun 15-21, 2006.
