Ron Paul's comments yesterday, that government shouldn't own property reminded me that in today's schools a history teacher needs to make his lesson relevant and not just an exercise in memorization of dates, names, and battles for the standardized testing to come. In this case it is the similarities between England's Enclosure Acts and the Right Wing Republicans demands for privatizing everything from schools to the army.
In England, enclosure is the process of ending traditional rights held in common. This meant that the nobles just came in and took the common land away from the peasants and declared it theirs. In short sweet simple terms, with all the verbal and historical cammoflage removed, enclosure is a case of class robbery.
The wealthy land owners used their control of government to appropriate public land for their personal use and profit. The result was an unemployed and starving underclass that could become the fodder for cheap labor for the colonies or later for the sweat shop death trap factories of the industrial revolution.
Privatization is the process of transferring ownership of a business, enterprise, agency, public service, or property from the public sector to private business. So called Big Government really just means government that still works for citizens not corporations. The results of privatization in America are a rise in unemployment and a starving underclass that can be exploited the world over for cheap labor in a global system where huge corporations are replacing national governments ruling for profits not the common good or the will of the people.
Privatization of government for profit does not work and one look at our privatized political system is living proof. The whole idea of corporations as people too is nothing short of privatization of the social functions of governance and it leaves most of the people slaves to a system where human rights and dignity are not the end goal, but profitability and the only goal of public morality is deciding whether something makes a profit or not. Profitability in this system is what provides a right to life.
Multi-national corporations want control of governance so they can sell us services, such as health care, education, and air and water rights because these are essential for life and for a quality of life so people are not able to do without them and we can be exploited and the right to life will be a complete function of wealth as will your value as a person in society.
In addition, if government is still in the hands of the people, we might get tired of non-stop wars attacking and taking the raw materials from other nations under phony pretenses, so corporations want to own goverment so they can use the services for their bidding. Witness our first privatized wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terror is just the cover for oil.
Privatizing the school has nothing to do with education reform. It is once again about control and profits pure and simple. Control the curriculum and you control many people's minds. It doesn't hurt that we spend almost 1.6 billion dollars on our education in various ways just at the federal level. You don't want an education system teaching egalitarian principles when you are establishing a corporate dictatorship.
The commonly held parts of our society are much of what made us a democracy. You need a free and open education that teaches critical thinking for democracy. You need democratic work places to have a democracy, and the people must have access to the political levers of power to have a democracy, and government must work for the benefit of most of the people to have a democracy. Privatization is just another name for corporate dictatorship and the rule of money.
The rule of wealth is no more justified than was the divine right of kings. The only thing you have done, in the case of privatization, is privatized God and made banks your holy temple and Wall Street the 21st century Vatican or Mecca. Your only problem is that you have not explained why the rest of us should obey your laws and passively just accept our fate.
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