While reading his very interesting book (for the few of you who haven't already read it),
What's the Matter with Kansas? : How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank, I came across this
passage while the author was talking about a utilities rigging scandal in Kansas:
The company even proposed a deal at one point in which the debt piled up in all these corporate adventures would stay with the plodding public utility back in Topeka, where those plodding Kansas ratepayers could pay it off, while Wittig himself would run the sexy unregulated acquisitions. You know the routine: Socialize the risk, privatize the profits. Along the road to this moment of enlightenment the organization picked up a "chief strategic officer," a stable of company jets, and a new name: Westar.
This has got to be one of the most underplayed issues in the American discussion about socio-econo-political current events.
Look at the current landscape. United Airlines bails on its pension plan, crushing the savings of tens of thousands of former employees. Meanwhile, the fund managers, toward whom the blame is directed for moving the funds from bonds to an uneven stock market, got their full pay. Socialize the risk, privitize the profits.
Or look at Enron. Not only did it bail on it's responsibilities to it's employees, but the money it so proudly bilked from grandparents in California is another example; cash immorally taken from the pockets of the middle and lower classes to feed the already wealthy.
Or consider Bush's attempted privatization of Social Security to return this money to the hands of the money manager. Or the employment explosion on K Street in reaction to a Congress that's put a large "For Sale" sign in front of the Capitol building.
Our economy is moving along at a reasonable, although unstellar pace. Similarly, employment has remainined stable in its lackluster performance. At the same time, CEOs and corporate profits continue to break records. Where do people think this money is coming from? Pure capitalization?
The new Gilded Age truly is upon us as the middle and lower classes fight to maintain a modicum level of living standards while the top most tiers of the economic ladder continue to amass obscene amounts of wealth. And all the while, our political and economic leaders are cheerleading a corporate structure that time and time again rewards failing CEOs as stockholders (who aren't employeed at investment banks) or regular Joe's are handed the mess.
And now they want to privatize the water utilities, education, and, of course, the entire sovereign country previously known as "Iraq".
"These are the free markets," they clamor.
No, these are not.
The game is rigged.
And it continues to amaze me that people all over this country continue to vote Republican as a sign of contempt for supposed Democratic elitism. Has a more successful flip-flam ever been laid upon an unsuspected public anywhere? The poor and powerless throughout the mid-west continue to vociferously support their red candidates, the same people who continue to push the migration of glacial amounts of capital out of our pockets and up the economic pillar.
A friend in the banking industry once told me that she didn't want the penalties to be too harsh on the Bernie Ebbers of the world.
"Why," I asked.
"Because someday I'd like to be them. Without the going to jail part."
Society is the animal on which the leeches feed. Socialize the risk, privatize the profits.
I will cynically point out that this person is stauchly Republican to the point where we hardly speak anymore.
