19 August 2012

Privatization: How Capitalists Killed the American Dream

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(This is a six-part series – the story on which I have been at work since mid-June – printed here in its totality. Due to the inexplicable failure of my blog-server's software, I am unable to highlight text as access-ports to URLs. Instead I have listed links for reference and additional reading after each section, the URLs arranged alphabetically by sub-topic. My apology for the inconvenience. –LB)

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I. Capitalism in Action: Student Loan Debt as the New Slavery

THE EVER-MORE-PROHIBITIVE COST of higher education is a perfect, perfectly teachable example of how capitalism has slain the American Dream and murdered the American Experiment in constitutional democracy.

But the One Percent's hired liars and paid facilitators – Ruling Class journalists, corporate-owned academics and Democrat/Republican politicians – are doing their damnedest to keep us from learning its bitter lessons.

By now we all know how entire U.S. generations are enslaved by skyrocketing student-loan debt – a sum that already tops a trillion dollars and far exceeds our $804 billion credit-card debt.

As most of us know, the debt is so huge because the politicians have let the greedy Wall Street bankers turn formerly low-cost, non-profit student loans into outrageously expensive, maximum-profit moneymakers.

Most of us also know the One Percent's politicians have decreed that student-loan debt – unlike mortgages or credit-card debt – cannot be escaped by declaring bankruptcy. A substantial portion of student-loan debt is not even escapable by death or suicide. The result is a financial ball-and-chain that shackles students and their extended families – spouses, parents, grandparents, even children – until the loan is repaid.

Moreover, in the global economy and its permanently downsized U.S. workplace, repayment of such loans is difficult if not impossible. Student-loan debtors are forced into a lifelong equivalent of medieval serfdom, relentlessly victimized by creditors who – again thanks to the Dem/Reps – can garnish all income (welfare stipends or Social Security pensions included), even if the garnishment leaves you unable to feed your children, pay for medical care or keep a roof over your head.

As Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren noted in 2005, “student-loan debt collectors have power that would make a mobster envious.”
 
But not even Warren, now a Democratic candidate to represent Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate, has dared acknowledge what actually happened: that student lives were sold like slave futures by the Dem/Rep whores in Congress and the White House – peddled to the Wall Street aristocrats in return for campaign contributions.

Meanwhile, the same Dem/Rep harlots who granted the Ruling Class de facto restoration of slavery have effectively abolished our (former) constitutional right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Now the One Percent's tyrants and their obscenely well-paid enablers are protected by legions of thugs – the Gestapo-minded sadists of the newly militarized state and local police – who stand ready to pounce on anyone who dares muster in public protest.

What's behind the so-called “student debt crisis” is the methodical conversion of public education into yet another capitalist scam. What once was a taxpayer-funded government service that benefited the entire nation is fast becoming a profit-reaper that benefits only the One Percent.

The process that has turned the former collegiate gateway to the American Dream into the cell-door of an American Nightmare is called “privatization.” It is a benign-sounding euphemism for the unapologetic savagery behind the new U.S. paradigm of local, state and federal governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for the rest of us.

Even Suze Orman, formerly an irrepressibly optimistic spokeswoman for capitalism and the Ayn Rand lifestyle in general, now admits that under privatized student loans, “you do not have any rights whatsoever.”

Orman's remarks are reminiscent of Karl Marx's observation in Das Kapital: a teacher, Marx wrote,  “is a productive laborer (who) works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.”

In today's increasingly privatized higher education system, the school proprietors and the bankers with whom the school is typically allied extract their riches not by forcing teachers into intellectual sweatshops but rather by the exploitation of students. The faculty members – themselves dependent on money siphoned from students and their families – function as the proprietor's surrogates. 

As always under capitalism, somebody – in this case the students – has to be victimized for the system to work as intended. Now though the victimization is so intensified – by the banks, by the schools, by the permanently downsized economy – its brutality has become undeniable.

“So you better think twice,” says Orman, “when you think an expensive education is what's going to get you a job when there are no jobs out there to be had.”

Such is the one “change we can believe in”: obscene enrichment of the privileged few, its irremediable result the relentless and permanent impoverishment of all the rest of us, exactly as illustrated by the financial lockout imposed by privatization on colleges and universities.

References and additional reading
Big money as stacks of 100-dollar bills http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

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II. Privatization as Capitalism's War on Government

GROVER NORQUIST, FOUNDER and president of Americans for Tax Reform and one of the most outspoken proponents of privatization, says “our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.”

Norquist founded AFTF in 1985, purportedly at President Ronald Reagan's request, to propagate the Reaganoid doctrine that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”

Since then, many of us have been duped into believing the downsizing of government is a good thing.

But let's look at some of privatization's alleged accomplishments.

It is privatization – corporate profit at the expense of student learning – that is destroying public school K-12 education. It is privatization that has turned U.S. prisons into for-profit slave-pens. It is privatization that is wrecking our local, state and national infrastructure. And it is privatization that is robbing our cities of vital long-term revenue, reducing them to future slums.

Privatization is the hidden agenda behind the Democratic Party's final abandonment of the New Deal, the ultimate betrayal of the poor via the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, the so-called welfare “reform” that hurled the nation's lower-income population under the capitalist steamroller.

Like the Dem/Pub “health care reform” enacted 14 years later, the legislation was more than anything else a huge payoff to the capitalists.

Privatization and Prayer: The Case of Charitable Choice, an undated study (probably 2002) by Sheila Suess Kennedy, assistant professor of law and public policy at Indiana University, acknowledges that another (intentional) consequence of the privatization of social services is that it frees providers from oversight – including constitutional restraints against using federal funds to proselytize Christian theocracy and/or discriminate against non-Christians.

“When we refuse to recognize that contractors are government agents,” Kennedy wrote, “we lose the right to hold them to constitutional standards.”

The resultant brutality of privatized welfare is exposed in a new report by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Its findings are unequivocally damning: “In 1995, for every 100 families with children living in poverty, 68 received cash assistance...to help meet basic needs; by 2010, for every 100 families that were poor, only 27 families received such assistance. Moreover, for families still receiving cash assistance, median benefit levels have plummeted — falling 20 percent since (1996).”

As noted, the most obvious motive behind privatization is Dem/Pub pandering to capitalist greed – the malicious desire to turn public services into profit centers – invariably at the expense of the users, be they students, parents, motorists, transit riders, whomever.

But the push to privatize is equally enabled by the intensifying Ayn Rand selfishness of the entire U.S. population. Thanks to the widespread dissemination of Rand's malignant ideology – required reading in many (if not most) U.S. high schools – what was once exclusively the philosophy of the One Percent has metastasized throughout the citizenry.

The Randite metastases is an incalculably huge bonus to the down-with-government cult because it has spawned a generation of federal, state and local employees who are now nearly as likely as any Wall Street executive to be self-centered sociopaths. The bitterness engendered by the public's encounters with such officials, who unfortunately include welfare workers, cops and even teachers, intensifies the popular demand for dismantling government.

Meanwhile Randism has destroyed the social contract that formerly united us – citizens of all ages and castes and sometimes even of all races and creeds – in communities that were at least marginally functional. But we as a people have rejected such mutual interdependence and are now reducing ourselves to Moron Nation anarchy. 

Indeed we have adopted a vindictive, morally imbecilic ethos that can be summed up in two words: “fuck you.”

References and additional reading
Privatization:
to promote theocracy:  http://www.uchastings.edu/site_files/cslgl/prayer.pdf (especially p. 23)

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III. Killing Pierce Transit: Privatization or Randite Rage?

THE RUINOUS DEFEAT of a transit-preservation ballot measure in Tacoma and its environs last year provides a disturbing look at how Randite maliciousness trashes our communities.

It's a classic example of how a government agency is discredited, downsized and destroyed. The result – whether the destruction is a carefully scripted precursor to privatization or merely a tantrum by voters goaded to self-destructive rage by their own powerlessness – is invariably the same: further deterioration of our already diminished quality of life.

Pierce Transit, which operates in Tacoma and Pierce County, had sought a tiny sales tax increase – three-tenths of a percent (a mere three pennies on a ten-dollar purchase) – to maintain bus and van service on approximately 900 miles of city streets and county roads. 

PT's three most heavily traveled routes follow the main vehicular arteries of the city and its adjacent municipalities. Before the anti-transit vote, buses were scheduled on these routes every 15 minutes during peak hours; they operated from 4:30 a.m. to 1 a.m. weekdays, 7:30 a.m. to midnight Saturdays, and 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Sundays. Thirty-six other routes ran from approximately 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., with maximum service typically only twice an hour. Though these schedules were woefully inadequate by East Coast standards, they were considered more than sufficient, even generous, by notably miserly West Coast transit criteria.

Barring traffic jams (the primary obstacle to buses and their great disadvantage compared to rail), PT had built an exceptionally good record for running mostly on time.

The system was – and remains – vital to the region's poor: surveys indicate nearly 50 percent of its ridership has no other means of transportation.

Fully half of Tacoma's people were officially lower-income even before the downsizing of the economy. Many are working poor. With their rotten or missing teeth, crudely repaired eyeglasses, worn-out shoes and ragged clothing, these miserably underpaid men and women give the buses a distinctly Third World atmosphere that better-off persons typically find repugnant. Nevertheless the era's soaring gasoline prices are prompting substantial ridership increases, with many of the newcomers clearly from higher-paid levels of the Working Class.

Caught between the proverbial rock of recession-shrunken sales tax revenues and the metaphorical hard place of fast-growing passenger loads, PT's directors felt they had no choice but to ask local voters for more money.

But the same politicians – elected mayors and council members appointed to the PT board to represent Tacoma, Pierce County and other municipalities within the transit agency's service area – then ran a campaign so astoundingly bad it seemed intended to guarantee defeat. Its amateurish advertising, often marred by misspellings, was pegged to the slogan “Save Our Buses” and its jeer-provoking acronym SOB.

Never mind a “sob” is an outpouring of grief – the last thing you want in association with even the smallest proposed tax hike. Never mind “SOB” is the everyday acronym for “son of a bitch.” These and other vehement objections voiced by an adamantly pro-transit former New York advertising professional were ignored; his offer of voluntary assistance was rejected. The ridicule-attracting initials – which could as easily stand for “scrap our buses” or “suck our butts” – became the signature of the doomed campaign.

Meanwhile, the entire nation seemed primed to reject any government endeavor. Despite overwhelming evidence the Wall Street criminals and their political enablers are committing the greatest robbery in human history, Ruling Class Media had manipulated Ayn Rand ideology and Moron Nation ignorance into nationwide conviction the robbers were heroes not villains.

According to this newest and most brazen of capitalist Big Lies, the true perpetrators of the ongoing economic collapse are those of us who are unemployed, elderly, disabled or otherwise chronically needy.

The nationwide frenzy thus provoked began well before 2011. It combines Randite sadism with Teabagger bigotry to spawn an outpouring of malice and contempt frighteningly reminiscent of how the Nazis slandered the German Jews as a prelude to the Holocaust.

In this volatile climate, PT's ballot measure touched off a firestorm of bitter envy against unionized transit workers – people who still had jobs that paid better than Wal-Mart wages – and unabashed hatred against lower-income people, especially those of us dependent on PT buses. Mass transit was denounced as welfare, municipal unions were condemned as bands of thieves, bus riders were reviled as parasites – “takers not makers” – and the minuscule tax increase that would have saved the service was resoundingly defeated.

While the presumably more enlightened Tacoma residents voted yes by six percentage points, 56-44, Teabagger-influenced Pierce County suburbanites turned out in sufficient numbers to veto the proposed tax hike, in some obviously Randite precincts voting against it by as much as 66 percent.

Paradoxically, Pierce County and Tacoma each remain relatively strong domains of unionism, with workforce representation at 26 and 28 percent respectively. Washington itself reportedly ranks fourth nationally in union membership per capita, with New York first, Alaska second and Hawaii third.

At least theoretically, the rabid anti-unionism of the transit measure's opponents should have brought union voters out in force. But in the recent Wisconsin recall election, 38 percent of the private-sector union households voted against against public-sector unions. A similarly vindictive betrayal – an expression of envious rage at workers who still have adequate paychecks and dependable health insurance – might well have occurred here also.

In any case the result has effectively destroyed Pierce Transit.

Though after the election PT staffers estimated the forthcoming service shutdown would amount to 35 percent, in truth the cutback has been closer to 50 percent – 100 percent in some areas. Peak-hour service on the three primary routes was reduced about 30 percent and is now scheduled every 20 minutes, but the buses are often late. Ten routes were eliminated entirely, severing an untold number of people from jobs, health care and shopping. Service on all other routes was downsized radically, typically to no more than one bus per hour.

Daytime buses are now often impossibly overcrowded – standing-room-only passengers jammed into body-to-body intimacy that would be intolerable even by the mass-transport standards of Tokyo or New York City. Wheelchair-bound disabled people cannot fit into the sardined mass and are often left behind. Yet ridership is still increasing, once more boosted by skyrocketing fuel prices inflicted by the petroleum speculators on Wall Street.

In an attempt to restore service to pre-cutback levels and avoid further downsizing of operations, PT will try again in November to enact the tiny, even-a-pauper-could-afford-it sales tax increase that was defeated last year. But the odds for its passage remain notably poor.

Indeed the agency itself may have already ensured the measure's defeat. The opening paragraphs of the initial press releases, dated 30 May and 11 June 2012, say not one word about desperately needed service restorations. Instead they announce PT's intent “to utilize (its) remaining taxing authority” and raise “the final 0.3% sales tax” it is allowed by state law – phrasing so inflammatory it probably guarantees rejection by the voters.

As if it had been scripted well in advance, the kill-transit hatemongering resumed immediately. The News Tribune, the local Ruling Class daily – a typical McClatchy rag as venomously anti-labor as the old Voelkischer Beobachter – promptly denounced the proposed increase as surrender to Amalgamated Transit Union Local 758's rightful insistence on living wages.

So provoked, the paper's reliably Randite readers once more began churning out predictably toxic screeds against impoverished people, PT, unions and mass transit in general.
“They transport the poor at the expense of taxpayers,” complained taxedenoughintacoma, and they do it only “to keep the greedy union members over paid.”

“I say 'Close up Pierce Transit,'” wrote whitman411 in an exemplary demonstration of the Randite social conscience. “After all, when did mobility become a constitutional right?”

Meanwhile a credible source says the influential Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce will fight the measure – a surprise since most local chambers of commerce are dominated by merchants who regard mass transit as a welcome enhancer of profits. But Chamber President Tom Pierson did not respond to a request he confirm or deny the report and explain the chamber's stance, while his subordinates insisted no one else was authorized to discuss the matter.

Local advocates for elderly and disabled people say privately they fear the system will be reduced to its three main routes – all the other routes shut down – with potentially murderous impact on those who have no alternative means of transport.

Which leaves me wondering – as any investigative reporter should – if there is some undiscovered Randite cabal working to destroy the transit agency entirely, perhaps to clear the way for undisclosed profiteers to launch an as-yet-unannounced, minimum-service, maximum-fare bus company.
References and additional reading
Pierce Transit press releases: http://www.piercetransit.org/press.htm

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IV: Beyond Privatization: What's Really at Stake?

THOUGH PRIVATIZATION is peddled as a means of cutting the costs of governance, a recent study by the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight tells us it does exactly the opposite.

Privatization raises costs, reduces the availability of services and throws people out of work. It lowers wages, and it invariably increases fees and prices. At the same time it puts more money in the pockets of the One Percent, who then use their expanded riches to buy more political favors rather than to create more jobs.

In other words, the pitch by which privatization is peddled is another of the Big Lies that have become the defining characteristic of Dem/Rep politics.

Hidden behind this deception is a more subtle Big Lie – the spurious notion the privatizers are somehow, beyond their profiteering, motivated by public-spirited desire to ensure governmental efficiency and accountability and thereby restore our ravaged quality of life.

Instead, the result is (again) directly contrary to what is claimed: the contractors take advantage of the system at the expense of the public and create a shadow government of potentially despotic power. That such a regime is unfettered by constitutional restraints has already been noted in Part II.  

Perhaps then we should label the privatizers what they truly are: modern-day privateers.

Much as shopping malls have privatized formerly public space, banishing protest and effectively nullifying our First Amendment right to free speech and assembly, so does privatization insulate the privateers from aggrieved citizens. Said a recent victim of privatized electrical generation: before, “when something went wrong I had a political right to go into the electricity office and demand you either do the right thing or I will do a sit-in.” But today the office is owned by a corporation. Protesters would be arrested for trespassing. Customers do not even have a guaranteed right of access.

Applying the biblical principle of “by their deeds shall we know them,” we discover the purpose of privatization is not merely to shrink government small enough to “drown it in a bathtub” but to disempower us – we the people – to such an extent we are robbed of our former ability to regulate the circumstances of our own lives.

Privatization of government is thus disenfranchisement. Our reduction to the abject powerlessness that defines slavery is its ultimate purpose. It is literally the overthrow – usually by stealth, sometimes by violence – of every humanitarian principle expressed by democratic governance. And it is the newest, most cunning Ruling Class strategy to emerge from the long and bloody history of class warfare and our we-the-people struggle for democracy.

A major factor in the privateers' success is the extent to which we have been cleverly blinded to the purpose of government. This is a pernicious byproduct of our dumbing-down – our methodical moron-ation into Moron Nation – by the capitalist propaganda with which we are deluged in our schools and through Ruling Class media. The preamble to our Constitution makes it clear the founders regarded government as the means to accomplish collectively what we cannot do as individuals. But privatization is quickly making government the apparatus by which the Ruling Class imposes and expands its power while reaping an ever-more-oppressive profit from its subjects.

The Canadian scholar John McMurtry recognizes better than most what is being done to us. In 1998 he warned that corporations are being deliberately “freed from accountability to any other interest, government or citizen body” even as individuals, communities, entire nations are being denied “their collective rights to protect their lives and resources.”

All of this unprecedented enslavement of peoples and seizure of property is motivated by the Ayn Rand might-makes-right principle – the belief those with the most money are entitled to rule the world whether we the people accept it or not. It's the 21st Century equivalent of the divine right of kings.

Privatization is therefore the equivalent of conquest: it reduces us to the powerlessness of conquered peoples – think of the French beneath the boot-heels of the Nazis – even as it elevates the privateers to the omnipotence of conquerors: remember how Hitler's generals strutted through the ruins they had made of Rotterdam.

Meanwhile we are taught – those of us who were granted higher education in the vanished era of the American Dream or are wealthy enough (and thus politically reliable enough) to be allowed such learning today – to look for similarities between the last centuries of the Roman Empire and the plight of our own world.

No doubt one of the reasons the Ruling Class favors the Roman example is its implicit hopefulness. 

Though it took more than a thousand years, the barbaric darkness that descended on Western humanity after 476 C.E. eventually lifted. Within a few more centuries, society returned to urban norms the Roman citizenry would surely recognize as direct descendants of their own modes of living, even unto the characteristic struggle between patrician (the One Percent) and plebeian (the 99 Percent) and all the attendant violence, graft and corruption.

The message – terminal climate change not withstanding – is that life will someday be good again. All we need do is obey our leaders – follow the doctrinal hybrid of Ayn Rand, Rick Santorum and Rousas John Rushdoony that has become ideology and creed of the quasi-official United States Christian theocracy – and once more it will be “morning in America.”

But the Jesu-Randites believe the smiley-faced American dollar-sign sun will not rise again until the extermination of everyone tagged by those labels that transform “the” into a prefix of banishment: “the unemployed,” “the disabled,” “the elderly,” “the homeless,” “the mentally ill” etcetera ad nauseam – all of us to be murdered not in publicly embarrassing death camps but by the sorts of abandonment that can readily be blamed on the victim. “He froze to death; she starved; the children died of pneumonia.”

The real killer will be genocidal termination of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment compensation and any other New Deal remnant that helped us stay alive, the Pierce Transit bus system included.

Which is the other purpose behind privatization. Steal Medicare or public transport from us – we the taxpayers – then sell it to the capitalists, let them add it to their profit-makers and price everybody but their fellow One Percenters out of the market and into the graveyard.

That's already been done to higher education, and now it's being done everywhere else.

Just as McMurtry says, “we face a turn of history in which corporate-financed and publicized political parties serve corporate masters in a fast-track replacement of the democratic rule of law across the world.” “This new economic fascism,” he adds, “is the international linchpin of what is in the end a totalitarian project for world rule.”

References and additional reading
Privatization:

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V. Hurricane Katrina and Nixon's Forgotten Declaration of War

THE DELIBERATE ABANDONMENT of New Orleans and all its lower-income people to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina shows us how unapologetically brutal the United States has become in the 32 years since President Richard Nixon's curiously unrecognized declaration of war against the 99 Percent.

Nixon voiced his declaration in early 1973, no more than a week or two after his second inauguration. A decade of political murder had put President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy in their graves, the rebellious Counterculture of the 1960s was nearly suppressed, and William Randolph Hearst Jr. believed Nixon would finally “bring us together,” fulfillment of the slogan by which he won his first term.

But when Hearst interviewed Nixon for the obligatory what-will-you-do-now story, the president promised not reconciliation but revenge.

Nixon said We the People had it much too good. He implied we had become like spoiled children, that our rebelliousness was mere brattyness. And now like some vindictive biblical patriarch, he would punish us accordingly. His second term would restore national discipline by imposing policies that would inflict maximum national hardship.
Months later the first Arab oil crisis, which we now know was engineered by Nixon and his henchmen, marked the beginning of the end of the American Dream.

Though the Nixon interview appeared on page one of every Hearst newspaper in the nation, few understood its significance.

Schooled in class struggle as I am, I recognized the importance of the story, clipped it immediately and kept it for the next ten years in a file-folder labeled “Nixon (Hearst interview)”with a growing collection of relevant notes and supplemental articles. But it was destroyed by the 1983 fire with all my other reference files. 

Though I later tried least a half dozen times to get a replacement copy of the text, all these efforts failed. Even a search by the legendarily skilled research department of the New York City Public Library was unsuccessful. Seemingly the report has vanished down the Orwell hole.

Nevertheless, if one seeks a public starting point for the transformation of the United States into Sweatshop Nation – our forcible dumbing down to Moron Nation ignorance and the Pavlovian reconditioning that has turned so many into Randite fascists – Nixon's statement to Hearst is undoubtedly the pivotal moment.

Which brings us back to New Orleans and the atrocities of August 2005.

Most African-Americans properly view the abandonment of the city and everyone in it who was not wealthy enough to purchase their own escape as a new form of anti-Black, anti-poor genocide: death by deliberate neglect rather than by the politically awkward mechanisms of death camps and formal ethnic cleansing.

But no more than a quarter of the Caucasian population acknowledged the obvious racism in the fuck-you response of the federal government to the city's plight. Many whites irrationally blamed its poor people, as if the disaster were divine retribution for poverty, and said they deserved not just abandonment but the harshest forms of coercion – clearly a preview of the belief that now increasingly insulates the One Percent from blame for the criminal downsizing of the economy.

Only a few Caucasians – self included – recognized the genocidal component in what was done to New Orleans. Blacks however saw it clearly. They viewed the city's abandonment as the expression of a terrible new norm of increasingly brazen racism and socioeconomic hatefulness – another wrenching example of the moral imbecility that increasingly defines U.S. domestic policy.

Frighteningly, most of the U.S. population remains indifferent to – or unaware of – the dire implications of the deployment of for-profit Blackwater mercenaries in New Orleans. These men, probably the most feared professional killers on the planet, were hired by the federal government to forcibly disarm the New Orleans citizenry because – as private employees of a for-profit company – the Blackwater thugs were exempt from Second Amendment restraints against the confiscation of legally owned firearms.

Blackwater's effort to subjugate New Orleans residents into mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – the true circumstances of a disarmed and therefore defenseless population – is an especially egregious example of the privatization motives discussed in Part I and Part IV. Here again we see privatization's darker purpose: the deliberate nullification of constitutional rights that amounts not just to methodical disenfranchisement but to invasion and conquest.

The Blackwater troops are thus revealed to be the modern U.S. equivalent of the Nazi SS, the private army of the German Nazi Party, precisely as Blackwater – since renamed Xe – is the private army of the capitalist Ruling Class. This role is brought into sharp focus by the fact a major part of Blackwater's New Orleans mission was disbanding local efforts at collective survival and reconstruction, typically by terrorizing communities and arresting any activists who might have inspired collective awakening and consciousness. The purpose underlying these Blackwater tactics is obvious: community solidarity is anathema to capitalist exploitation.

Another parallel between the Nazi SS and Blackwater/Xe is the latter's close relationships with the Department of Defense and the eerily Nazi-like Department of Homeland Security – a disturbing echo of SS affiliation with the Reich Security Department (SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt) and the German General Staff (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht).

Given how Blackwater operated in New Orleans beyond all legal and constitutional restraints, activists have no doubt this American SS will be unleashed against anyone who dares participate in organized resistance to capitalism.

References and additional reading
Atrocities in post-Katrina New Orleans: http://www.workers.org/2005/us/katrina-0922/
Katrina racism: “Tragedy in Black and White,” http://www.pkarchive.org/column/091905.html

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VI. Maybe the Best Government in Human History 

“It was ever thus” – or so we are rebuked by the capitalists whenever we protest their tyrannosauric behavior.

But the ancient civilization and culture we label Minoan reveals the capitalist claim as a Big Lie and – more importantly – has left us undeniable proof of a collective act of mercy that stands in breathtaking contrast to the abandonment of New Orleans.

Minoan society was destroyed by a combination of natural disaster and invasion approximately 3600 years ago, beset by so much cumulative ruin the exact dates of its downfall remain controversial. Nevertheless its people – we have yet to discover the names by which they knew themselves – left us a compelling example of society and government that seems to have combined remarkable efficiency with unapologetic humanitarianism and done so effectively enough to prevail for at least 1500 years – nearly three times longer than any other nation or empire since.

The most startling proof of how the Minoans combined efficiency and altruism comes from evidence unearthed by archaeologists on the Greek island of Santorini. The Minoans built a seaport there – a thriving metropolis that, like other Minoan cities, contained neither slums nor mansions. Its residents enjoyed the allegedly “modern” conveniences of multi-storey housing, central heating, indoor plumbing and hot water on demand.

Carefully paved streets and brilliantly engineered water and sewerage systems suggest, as do the well-maintained road networks on adjacent islands, a level of governmental responsiveness we in the Ayn Rand/Grover Norquist era can only imagine.

We do not know what the Minoans called their island. Early Greek sources imply it might have been Callisté, “most beautiful,” after a goddess of the same name – surely appropriate given the goddess-centered character of Minoan society. Classical Greeks and Romans knew the island as Thera (“untamed”). The present-day Santorini, a reference to Saint Irene, comes from the Middle Ages.

The Minoan seaport is adjacent the modern town of Akrotiri and is so named, but what its inhabitants called it has yet to be discovered. Apparently it is the remnant of a much larger city that was obliterated when the volcano vaporized the original island, leaving a seven-mile-wide crater in the Mediterranean Sea. At the outer edge of the blast – geologists now regard the explosion as the worst such disaster in our species' 100,000-year history – the Akrotiri site was deeply buried in ash and, like Pompey, preserved in nearly original condition.

But it was the obvious evacuation of this city – the fact it had been emptied of its inhabitants and most of their movable belongings – that provides the most telling evidence of the unique quality of Minoan governance. 

W. Sheppard Baird, who writes extensively and with refreshing skepticism about Minoan archaeology, notes that “apparently all of the people and their valuables were transported elsewhere before the main eruption.” Other sources concur: the evacuation was obviously well organized and included not just the people but all their pets, livestock and even houseplants.

As the abandonment of New Orleans and its residents to Hurricane Katrina so vividly demonstrates, such a feat is beyond our ability today. It is also far beyond our post-Nixon instincts and inclinations – never mind we smugly think of ourselves as infinitely better than the Minoans not just in technology but in every other possible way as well.

Yet the evidence at Akrotiri suggests the allegedly “primitive” Minoans were our moral superiors, which is no doubt why their accomplishments are not more widely known or discussed.

There's also the fact the archaeologists of Western Europe and North America, financed as they are by the capitalist One Percent, are quietly but forcefully forbidden to speculate on how the Minoan commonwealth was governed. Even so, the evacuation of untold thousands of people with all their animals and most of their possessions in boats propelled only by wind and human muscle is undeniable proof of a humanitarian-minded administration acting in solidarity with an organized community – evidence of a consensus-based society that has no peer on Planet Earth today.

Hence the growing belief – hotly contested of course (but ever more plausible as our species confronts extinction by terminal climate change) – that Minoan civilization represents the apex of human achievement.

Drawing on multiple sources, Baird gives us a haunting glimpse of the possible magnitude of the Minoan economy and the society it supported. “If the hypothesis that the Los Millares culture ('Culture of the Thousands') in Spain which has been radiocarbon dated to well before 3000 B.C. was actually an Aegean Minoan gold and silver mining colony is validated...(the Minoan commonwealth) was really a vast Mediterranean maritime empire...much more like Plato's description of Atlantis.”

Vast indeed: there is evidence, vehemently rejected by U.S. academics but nevertheless compelling, the ancient copper mines on Michigan's Isle Royale were a Minoan operation.

It is difficult, save in works of fiction, for us to imagine a single event so apocalyptic it would destroy an entire civilization. But bear in mind that even in the 1970s, the force of the volcanic explosion was estimated as equivalent to the simultaneous detonation of 25 or 30 hydrogen bombs – an attack that would wipe out any nation so targeted. Though the H-bomb comparison seems to have vanished from the literature, each new recalculation thrusts the explosion's magnitude ever higher. And there's no question the debris flung into the upper atmosphere was a preview of nuclear winter, altering the global climate for at least a decade, perhaps a hundred years, possibly – based on evidence of persistent famine throughout the Mediterranean – for several centuries.

Most of the more widespread damage was inflicted not by the blast itself, but by the resultant tsunami, a wave that by many estimates may have been as much as 400 feet high and destroyed coastal cities throughout the Mediterranean. As Baird argues, the explosion may also have produced a pyroclastic fireball of genuinely thermonuclear size and intensity. Like an incalculably huge napalm burst – as if the very air had turned to flame – it seems to have flashed across 90 miles of open ocean and set all of western Crete ablaze. The death toll is scarcely imaginable; the psychological trauma inconceivable save perhaps to those who survived Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Such were the wounds from which the Minoan commonwealth never recovered.

So perished the most long-lived economic and political system in human history.

The Minoans did not surrender; they were conquered, enslaved and exterminated. The destruction of their culture took the conquering Mycenaean bandits another two or three centuries to complete – an approximate time-frame that, indicatively, coincides with the end of mining operations on Isle Royale. Then descended an epoch of violence and starvation that lasted nearly 600 years, the Greek Dark Age.

But heartrending as it is to imagine a people at least as civilized as ourselves hurled suddenly into inescapable barbarism, what has this distant tragedy to do with present-day privatization and its relentless thrust toward global tyranny?

Routinely suppressed here in the capitalist world is the fact a majority of Eastern European archaeologists believe Minoan society governed itself by an early form of communism – as Marija Gimbutas described it, “communism in the best sense of the word.” Its core principle – apparently a prototype of “from each according to ability, to each according to need” – produced what was possibly the most universally prosperous economy our species has ever built.

Nor was primitive communism unique to the Minoans. It was the original economic and political ethos of tribal governance everywhere on Earth: note the example of our own First Nations peoples, particularly the Iroquois, whose communistic principles are the (forgotten) cornerstone of the U.S. Constitution.

Apparently the Minoans retained their own distinctly similar tribal ideals as they evolved into an urban nation, refining them – probably deliberately – to accommodate their society's increasing complexity as the head of a trade network at least as large as the Roman Empire and probably spanning the seven seas.

The same archaeologists who believe the Minoans were pre-Marxian communists – “community-ists” would surely be a more descriptive term – reject the capitalist-mandated labeling of surviving Minoan structures as “palaces” and instead identify them as administrative offices and food-distribution centers. Their conclusions are strongly supported by the ruins of Minoan cities – ruins that, as noted, show neither slums nor mansions and therefore suggest both economic democracy and egalitarian society. 

Combined with the mass evacuation evidenced at Akrotiri, all available data points to government that served the highest human purpose: enabling people to do collectively what they could not accomplish as individuals. 

In this context the centuries of tyranny that followed the Minoan collapse can be viewed as an ultimate form of privatization – collectively owned public property and community rights of self-governance forcibly seized by individual warlords whose regimes were the prototypes of today's criminal gangs and corporations.

Then as now, the seizures were motivated by greed. The reward was land and loot: profit whether measured in gold, silver, precious stones and foodstuffs or labor extracted from newly enslaved peoples.

Thus – in the solidarity of selflessness evidenced by the evacuation of Akrotiri compared to the later suppression of such values in the violent darkness that descended after the Minoan collapse – we see a microcosm of the struggle between the humanitarianism of democracy and the Randite savagery of despotism whether kingly or corporate, feudal or fascist. 

Such is the primary conflict of our time. Marx and Engels called it class-struggle, increasingly desperate Have-nothings oppressed by increasingly greedy, increasingly malevolent Have-everythings.

The Occupy Movement described it as the tragically broken 99 Percent ever more brutally tyrannized by the ever-more-ruthless One Percent. Ultimately it is the clash between freedom and slavery – the former the maximum assertion of our species' potential, the latter its utter negation.

As it was with the Mycenaean gangsters whose blades reduced disaster-weakened Minoan society to bones and artifacts, so it is with today's Ruling Class. Government – once an agency for our collective betterment and nurturing of our entire society – is being shrunk to a goon squad exclusively for the protection of the conquerers.

We the people are the modern equivalent of the women and children and men of the Minoan commonwealth. We are flung into poverty and homelessness, and the destruction of everything on which we formerly relied makes our circumstances not only irremediable but unspeakably traumatic.

Ours has become a nation of children who have no expectations beyond misery. It is a realm of men and women whose souls have been wounded by war and scarred by the insatiable greed of their bosses. It is a domain of food banks and lines of tattered women who used to be teachers and civil engineers and social workers and clerks and librarians and cops who have not worked since 2008 or 2009 and because there are no jobs now four years after the great capitalist downsizing are beginning to realize  there will never be jobs again. Their despair is palpable. You can see in their eyes the silent secret terror they will soon have to sell their bodies merely to feed their children. They are the modern sisters of the proud independent women we see on the ancient Minoan frescoes – free women who imagined they would live at least as comfortably as their mothers and grandmothers but after the volcanic debacle and the Mycenaean invasion were forced to beggary and prostitution.

Privatization – the betrayal and disenfranchisement of the people by the politicians who sell our assets to capitalist overlords – is the modern equivalent of the Mycenaean onslaught. Each expresses the same dynamic: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue.

Here again we see the ultimate purpose behind shrinking government so small it can be "drowned in a bathtub." It is not just to make money for the capitalists and their Dem/Pub co-conspirators. It is to ensure the One Percent a comfortable survival, to guarantee its self-protection by limitless power and bottomless hoards of wealth before terminal climate change turns most of our planet to wasteland – the rest of us be damned.

In other words, the purpose of privatization is to replace government as we knew it; to rule the world with the same zero-tolerance despotism that now rules the workplace; to forever abolish government by, for and of the people – and above all else to make certain it perishes from the earth.

That's why the privateers – the conquerors – are as relentless as cancer. 

Give them another 50 years – probably less – the state as we know it will have withered away, but not into the democracy foreseen by Karl Marx. Not even Marx with all his prophetic wisdom could imagine how evil capitalism would become – how it would spawn a slave-world maintained by the most mercilessly zero-tolerance system of surveillance and coercion ever devised, the Nazi-like helmets of its soldiers and police a subtle tribute to Hitler as the father of modern technologically imposed tyranny.

While the post-disaster Minoans had the possibility, however small, of escaping their slavemasters, today's enslavement offers no such exit. There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The American Dream is dead; the corporate aristocracy now imagines itself the real-time equivalent of the fictional Borg: already we are conditioned to believe resistance is futile. 

The hour is late; darkness encroaches. Let us raise our fists in declaration of our solidarity and rise up in humanitarian defiance.

References and additional reading
Minoan civilization:
“communist in the best sense”: http://www.sibyllineorder.org/history/hist_marija.htm
had modern conveniences: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santorini
in North America (copper mining): http://www.philipcoppens.com/copper.html
Google “Thera,” “Santorini,” “Akrotiri” and “Minoan Civilization” (without quotation marks) for additional information.
Marxist archive (the best English translations of ever Marxian document ever written, a priceless gift uploaded by the dying Soviet Union as a final gesture of revolutionary defiance): http://www.marxists.org/
primitive communism (description): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_communism

©Loren Bliss 2012: permission to quote or reproduce is conditional upon attribution to the author and link to Outside Agitator's Notebook.

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