Replacing Accountable Democracy with Unaccountable Corporatism.

Privateering is a special blend of privatizing and profiteering. Privateering is the surreptitious destruction of the government’s capacity to carry out its critical moral missions of protection and empowerment.

Privateering results in the loss of public accountability and the transfer of wealth from the public coffers to corporations. Each instance of privateering that diminishes the governments moral responsibilities damages the foundation of a democracy.

Privateering requires the following key components:

• Someone in government, an enabler, that is willing to eliminate a government/public function.
• Surreptitious means used by enablers like budget cuts, executive orders, signing statements, reassignment of regulators, purposeful lack of enforcement, putting lobbyists, who look the other way, in charge of government agencies, no bid contracts, etc.
• Someone in private industry, a provider, must accept the government function.
• Surreptitious (no-bid) contracts between the enabler and provider.
• Transferrable functions like military functions, monitoring food and drugs, product safety, interrogating terrorists, disaster relief, or providing good public education for all Americans.

Privateering has significant consequences:

• Profit becomes a key part of the process. When conflicts arise between profit and performing the transferred public function, the public will suffer.
• The public becomes a captive market and profit will grow to whatever the market will bear. Some may not be able to afford the cost.
• Wealth is being transferred from tax payers to wealthy corporations while services that should have been provided by the government are reduced or eliminated altogether.
• Each act of privateering removes accountability to the public and hacks away at the foundation of our democracy.

If you take privateering to the extreme, the government’s entire moral mission to protect and empower all citizens will be transferred to private enterprise which will only protect and empower those that can afford their higher, profit enhanced, costs. Our “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” will be subjugated to profits. We will all pay what is asked or do without. Worse yet, corporations will become a surrogate government – but with no accountability to the citizens.

One notorious example of privateering is a military for the highest bidder – Blackwater/Xe. Xe has tens of thousands of mercenaries and pays them in the neighborhood of $450,000 a year. They claim they can put as many as 20,000 ‘troops’ on the ground on short notice. Xe has made billions of dollars on the Iraq Occupation and two thirds of that has been through no-bid (surreptitious) contracts. All of this, and more, happened while excessive amounts of public wealth were transferred to an unaccountable corporation.

Privateerng has also eliminated or replaced non-profit governmental drug, food, and environmental inspectors with high paid inspectors employed by the corporations who’s products they are inspecting. According to George Lakoff’s The Political Mind, these biased corporate inspectors have “fudged reports” for Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer, and Merck and citizens have died as a result.

As privateering has grown during recent decades, citizens have been poisoned by peanut butter and spinach. Again non-profit based government inspectors are eliminated or replaced by Congressional budget cuts, while leaving food inspection to food importers and producers where profit supersedes public protection.

Additional privateering has eliminated or replaced inspectors at the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). The result is the importation of millions of toys containing lead based paint.

Privateering is the primary culprit in our nation’s health care. Only here, instead of destroying it as an existing non-profit government function for protecting citizens, it is already in private hands – hands that deny care to assure a profit. T. R. Reid reported in 5 Myths About Health Care Around the World, that of all the democratic nations that provide health insurance for their citizens “The United States is the only developed country that lets insurance companies profit from basic health coverage.”

Privateering is destroying our democracy by eliminating our government’s moral mission to protect and empower all of its citizens. Privateering is redistributing our common wealth from supporting all citizens to supporting corporations. Privateering is supplanting our government’s public moral mission with privatized protection and empowerment of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.

Source: http://dailycensored.com/2009/10/13/replacing-americas-accountable-democ...