Welcome to the former Bedford Falls. George Bailey has jumped off the bridge. Potter owns everything. Clarence, angel 2nd class, has failed to get wings, and has been busted down to the heavenly equivalent of Feldwebel for his incompetence.
And what of our beloved little National Village? We now have a foretaste of what’s headed our way.
It’s called Privatization. The institutions that we all jointly own (just like the savings-and-loan) as citizens will be crowbarred, hacked apart, and sold piece-by-piece, for chump change to a select few. If Trump and his cronies get their wish, as now seems inevitable as the Supreme Court gets locked up (or locked down), there will be a full scale assault on the Post Office, Social Security, Medicare, Public Education, Public Health, Public Safety, National Parks, and Public Lands, just to name the obvious ones.
And no one will have the power to stop this ripoff, least of all in the courts.
The Republican rationale given has always been that these institutions are simply a waste of taxpayer dollars, they’re boondoggles, and that private ownership always results in greater efficiency. For whom? I guess you can say that monopolies are efficient in a way for some. Or more to the point, in dictatorships, and their first cousins, authoritarian regimes.
This supposed efficiency is a chimera: no, make that a fraud. There’s simply no proof. The proof, in fact lies, in the other direction. Just one example, take Medicare: the public parts of the program have administrative & overhead costs of around 2%, whereas the private part D costs range between 10-18%. Our bureaucrats do honest work, and it works.
This mass privatization, by the way and no mere coincidence, is exactly what happened in Russia in the mid 90’s, or as we now call it, the rise of the Oligarchs. And what was the result of all this “streamlining”? Epic corruption, of course. Between 1993 and 2015, Russia’s population actually dropped by 5 million in a healthcare crisis. And for all its vast resources (like, say, titanium) and vast territorial expanse, Russia’s GDP ranks below Italy and Brazil. The only growth industries are Kompromat, and Disinformat, or as we like to say, Fake News.
This is where we are now certainly headed. A government of the corrupt, by the corrupt, for the corrupt.
It’s a Horrible Life.