Privatization

Republican Privatization checklist: Health care, Schools, Prisons, Post Office.

Maybe I shouldn't be so harsh on the Republicans, after all, they couldn't take advantage of us so much if the Democrats weren't there to bow down to them.  It would seem to me that the Democrats are only there to make it seem like someone is there to help us while they help out the Republicans, but that's a completely different story.

If you don't know about Health Care privatization, you haven't been paying attention.  To sum up quickly, they're trying to take away medicare and medicaid, claiming we don't have enough money for them.  However, we spend 59% of the federal budget on defense, so I think it's clear what we need to cut.  If it isn't clear, also consider that 42% of all money spent on defense in the world is spent by the U.S.A.  So who exactly are we defending ourselves against?

Next, they're trying to privatize schools.  They're doing this through PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers).  It's really a two step plan.  The first step is to standardize all testing throughout the country using standardized PARCC tests--which will probably be easy to accommodate everyone.  The next step is to take the lowest scoring public schools and convert them into private schools.  PARCC, by the way, is also a private company, so you know with so many private companies, at least a couple people are stuffing their pockets in this operation.  The travesty in all this is that it's designed to fail.  No matter how the schools do, the lowest are going to be converted.  It's a guarantee.  To make things worse, the highest scoring schools will get money, which will only serve to increase the gap between the best and worst schools.  From there it becomes a cycle where they can keep cutting out the lowest performing schools by comparing them to the better schools that they keep pumping money into, and pretending that the worse schools are getting worse when it's really the better schools are getting better.  Then, after many years of this, almost all the schools will be private and the lobbyists will be so strong, that the few remaining public schools will have a tough time surviving.  The republicans will be eager to kill them, and the democrats will stand there and say, "What could we have done?"  "Who could have seen this coming?"

Then they attacked the prisons.  It was easy too.  Start putting people in jail for everything they can.  There are even some stories of kids going to jail because of things they did in school.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWDB5uRW6p8 .  (The Young Turks, as always, do a great job covering this.)  Then once, they have the jails filled up, they start making the prisoners do work, and take in the profits themselves.  They can either do this by making the prisoners work for free, and cashing in on their labor, or by setting up a prison economy, making the prisoners pay for things, and making them get money from relatives when they run out.  These are all private prisons doing this too, so the republicans are just once again finding ways to help their constituents.

And finally they're going after the United States Post Office.  Sure the Post Office might be outdated, but it still has it's purposes and when you need it, you're glad it's there.  But the republicans gave the USPS a strange pension system, essentially forcing the USPS to pay its employees pensions for decades, and bankrupting them.  On top of that, companies like UPS will make the USPS deliver the mail in the areas where it isn't profitable to do so, like in small isolated towns.  Now the republicans have the nerve to go out and tell you that the USPS is failing and needs to start shutting down.  Again, it's all to please the private corporations.  After all, they don't care about you, they care about their bosses--the companies that pay them.

Well, so much for the liberal media.  Already you can see them presenting the Post Office story from an angle of, "We all loved the USPS, but what could we have done.  It's all because of e-mail and that's all there is to it."  But no, there's more to it than that.  Money has got to come out of politics soon, or the middle class will get crushed, and at this point, I'm not sure anything short of a constitutional amendment will help us.