Captain Future's Log

Fox in the Henhouse, Wolf at the Door

Sure, we're all sick to death reciting the tragic actions, bold and destructive deceptions and mind-boggling mistakes of Bush Corps, and sick to death of hearing them. But we aren't being inundated only by Bush-bashing as politics or as Internet sport. There is real damage being done. One by one, our public institutions are being dismantled, corrupted and destroyed. Our ability to respond to the challenges of the future, which could become crucial at any moment, are being greviously wounded if not utterly demolished.

Think Katrina. Think FEMA. And if anyone believes that private corporations are up to the challenge, they've earned an all expenses paid vacation in Iraq, where the privatization of war and intelligence gathering has resulted in one disaster after another, even given that it was a fool's errand to begin with.

A lethal combination of ideological dogmatism, cronyism and corruption has led to psychotic priorities and actions. The evidence is hitting hard every single day.

The worst is that it affects institutions and offices that even ideological, politically and economically corrupt and crony-prone leaders of the past have been sane enough to leave alone. Like public health. Transportation. The Army.

Iraq is the playground for psychotic priorities based on ideological dogmatism and a truly frightening ignoring of facts that contradict those priorities and assumptions when they conflict with the ideology. The tragic harm has been done to the people of Iraq, to American soldiers (and those of other countries) and families, to American prestige, and by creating new reasons for terrorism and a huge training ground for terrorists---all of this damages our present and our future.

We also saw what the Iraq war has done to our National Guard and its ability to do its historic job that Americans depend on the Guard to do, when its personnel and equipment were in Iraq instead of Louisiana and Arkansas in the aftermath of Katrina. Now there are fears for what it is doing to the armed forces.

Bob Herbert wrote this in the NY Times: "The Army, for example, has been stretched so taut since the Sept. 11 attacks, especially by the fiasco in Iraq, that it's become like a rubber band that may snap at any moment. ..Last December, the top general in the Army Reserve warned that his organization was "rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force" because of the Pentagon's "dysfunctional" policies and demands placed on the Reserve by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. As one of my colleagues at The Times, David Unger of the editorial board, wrote, "The Army's commitments have dangerously and rapidly expanded, while recruitment has plunged."

What happens when psychotic priorities are wedded to this administration's penchant for cronyism? Again we saw that in Katrina, and now we're seeing it in the potentially greater challenge of avian flu. As Jeremy Scahill reports in The Nation and on Democracy Now!, Bushcorps has "systematically de-funded" public health programs, specifically those that would prepare the nation for an avian flu threat, and provided massive funding for research into technologies to "fight a possible anthrax or smallpox attack, which almost no one in the public health or national security community was saying was an imminent threat, except people close to Dick Cheney." Specifically, Scooter Libby.

According to Dr. Irwin Redlener, Director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, also interviewed on the same DN program by Amy Goodman, we are completely unprepared for any sort of health emergency.

Why not? "... the influence of politics and ideology and strategies to promote a particular point of view, undermining something that should have been above and beyond any kind of political consideration...The problem there, of course, is that the whole health care system is so fragile and so eroded over this last couple of decades that we don't even have that capacity in place right now to make anybody feel very confident that we can handle the number of people who might be affected by a pandemic flu. "

One reason for this now is that these efforts are being run by a Bushcorp crony, Stewart Simonson, who has no credentials other than being an ideological Republican. 'I mean, every single administration in American political history has put cronies and pals and donors into political positions," Dr. Redlener said. " But normally, typically, those people get – you know, they become the ambassador to Liechtenstein or the deputy undersecretary of commerce, where, in effect, it really doesn't matter who's in those positions. What's striking about this administration, since they got into power, is the placement of people into critical positions, where the national security or the public health is at stake."

Here as in all actions by Bushcorps the cronyism and neocon foreign policy is all in the service of the ideology that began reshaping America in the Reagan administration: the destruction of public institutions, to be replaced by "private" corporations, with the purpose of profit, not public service or the public good.

This is clear in Bush's new flu initiatives, and Republican backed legislation called Bioshield 2. It would, said Scahill, "remove all corporate accountability and liability for pharmaceutical companies that manufacturer vaccinations -- vaccines that hurt people or kill people, and secondly it creates a federal agency that would be the only agency exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. "

"This whole thing has gotten so bizarre and Byzantine, "added Dr. Redlener," and permeated with this sort of electrifying high intensity politics and economics that the real goal of all of this, which is to literally make us safer in the event of a pandemic or any kind of major disaster, that gets lost in the shuffle. You can't even sort it out now. So even issues like the Bioshield bills, which are terrible bills, basically, for a variety of reasons..."

One of which is that this proposal does nothing to ensure there are mechanisms to produce vaccines and anti-viral medications when they are needed. In other words, the entire public purpose.

Bushcorps relentless push for privatization made news this week as well when the administration fired the president of Amtrak because he wasn't going along with their plans to break up and privatize pieces of the national railroad transportation system.

According to the New York Times, the man they fired, David Gunn, " is known as a rail-turnaround artist. He was brought in to fix the New York City subway system in the 1980's, and provided leadership in the construction of the subway system in Washington. "Just two months ago he was praised by the chairman of the same governing board that fired him: "Mr. Gunn has done, as far as I am concerned, a splendid job." He said Mr. Gunn had "righted a ship that was listing and about to spill over."

But Gunn wouldn't agree to their plans. "They want at least one transportation mode that is totally free market," Mr. Gunn said. But highways, airports and ports are all federally subsidized, he said, decrying "all this angst over an operating deficit of 500 million bucks for the whole country, and the bulk of money going into capital or infrastructure."

What's this relentless privatization about? "...the largest transfer of public wealth to private pockets in the history of this country, says Si Kahn, co-author of The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy, interviewed this week on Democracy Now! He continued:

"We're seeing this in Iraq, where the goal of this administration is to see how much of the money that should be going to all sorts of other issues and other causes can be put into private pockets. Think Halliburton. Think Lockheed Martin. This is what is going on, and it is the undermining of public space, of the public good, of public welfare, is a deliberate strategy to undermine the ground that belongs to all of us: the common wealth, the commons, those things that create public good, that create a humane society."

Added his co-author, Elizabeth Minnich: "The most important thing to emphasize over and over again is precisely that shift from the public, that which belongs to us, services, goods, values that we have held dear, that we have government established to protect and to provide for us, being opened up to for-profit exploitation, in which case two things key happen. One is, goods that are supposed to be for the people, that we set aside, that we established as rights for the people, which is democratic to the core, being taken over by for-profit corporations for private pockets, dispersed away from the people most directly affected. This is anti-democratic in the extreme. "

But it's been consistently sold as simply a more efficient way to provide services the public wants and needs, using the invisible hand of competition, the magic of the marketplace, instead of bureaucratic waste and abuse.

And it's all a lie. "The whole notion that gets repeated time and again is that the privatizing corporations can do a better job," Minnich said. "People ask us this every time: 'But aren't they more efficient?' No, they do not do a better job. "

"And efficiency," Kahn added, "in corporate terms, means efficiency in generating a profit. It means efficiency in returning the maximum amount of money to the corporate directors and executives and to the majority shareholders."

And the result is, as everyone who say The West Wing debate knows, that wasteful government delivers health care through Medicare with administration costs of under 2% of revenue, while private health care insurance corporations typically devote a third or more to administration, not to mention lobbying and advertising.

We have done worse than letting the fox guard the henhouse, these authors say, we've invited them inside. Is there any wonder that our health care system is shambles, our privatized prisons and schools are a scandal, our privatized war is beset with expensive failure and lack of accountability for hired killers and torturers? Or that public institutions bled dry by ideologues of privatization can't meet their challenges? How can we be surprised when there are no chickens left?

Critics may claim that alarmists have been crying wolf over failures caused by ideologues, corporate greed and privatization, but we made it through the 80s and we're still here.

Eight years of Clinton slowed it down. But in 2005, after just five years of G.W. Bush, they should be reminded that even in the cautionary tale about the boy who cried wolf prematurely, the story ends when his cries are ignored, but unfortunately for everyone, the wolf finally comes.