Thought this would be of interest, and certainly relevance!
Ted
-------- Original Message --------
> ----------
> From: Frank Scott
> Sent: Friday, November 2, 2001 8:05 AM
> To: brc-news@lists.tao.ca
> Subject: [BRC-NEWS] Markets 'R' Us, Not Them
>
> [Admin Note: This article by Frank Scott was written BEFORE
> September 11th, but the material is still quite relevant and
> frankly, it's kind of spooky when you read the reference to
> Bin Laden and CIA ineptitude. I'm pretty sure the FBI paid
> Mr. Scott a visit already. Frank, you still there? Frank?!]
>
> http://www.coastalpost.com/01/9/12.htm
>
> Coastal Post
>
> September 2001 [Volume 26, Number 9]
>
> Markets 'R' Us, Not Them
>
> By Frank Scott <frank@marin.cc.ca.us>
>
> A bipartisan coalition of Reaganoids and Clintonites has
> strengthened the contemporary chorus chanting the mantra of
> free market religion to "get government off our backs".
> Liberated from this burden, part-time citizens have become
> full-time consumers, groveling at the shrine on the mall and
> incurring ever more debt. This, in pursuit of freedom only
> available to those who "shop until they drop" to a kneeling
> position at the altar of the private market.
>
> The rule of capital has become furious in its assault on
> anything public. Under the euphemistic label
> "globalization", which makes the theft of everything sound
> progressive, this speed-up of private domination is the most
> regressive and dangerous problem facing humanity.
>
> It mounts the pressures of daily life, raising the bills,
> lowering the state of mind, clouding the consciousness and
> fouling the atmosphere. Followers of fashion become
> casualties of commerce, always out of style and never having
> content; bigotry and inhumanity lead to identity politics
> and the victimology of the status quo, rather than
> collective politics and the psychology of social change;
> needed shelter for workers near their work becomes town
> houses for the affluent far from any towns; reality is
> experienced more on streets and roadways, and less in homes
> and communities; and new labels preserve old outrages by
> expanding markets for law, with hate crimes selling at the
> justice mall alongside - love crimes?
>
> The most ridiculous policies pass nearly unquestioned.
> Faith-based charity? Why not, since the other kind was
> destroyed, and it was never more than a prop for the status
> quo. Star Wars space defense, even without a Soviet Menace?
> Sure, since Bin Laden or another poster-boy for corporate
> militarism might attack from his base in, uh, wherever he's
> hiding, spied on by our multi-billion dollar Keystone Kops
> in the CIA and NSA who never know anything until after it
> happens.
>
> The rush to privatize everything has further sickened an
> already diseased social organism. Instead of ridding our
> nation of ghettos, we add to their number by creating moving
> versions called highways. On these wastes of real estate,
> millions are in motion but locked up in time, using
> substantial parts of their lives to phone, eat, listen and
> shop while driving. These were things that people used to do
> at less than 65 miles an hour, assuming anyone can reach
> that speed on our cluttered freeways.
>
> Our individualism, once a strength, has become a collective
> mental illness. How else to explain a transport system that
> moves one person at a time, in more than a ton of resources
> each, powered by fossil fuel, creating pollution,
> congestion, designed rape of the environment and a death
> toll that would be intolerable if we controlled our senses,
> let alone our politics.
>
> What public system would be tolerated that kills hundreds,
> cripples thousands, and causes property damage in the
> millions, every single day? Our private transit system is
> dumber and deadlier than any president. Once, we lived
> closer to our toil, or had public transit to get us there;
> now, we live miles from our work, in suburban bliss that has
> helped create community ugliness and dysfunctional culture.
> We have to provide our own transit, pay for it in dollars,
> health and stress, and consider ourselves blessed to have
> such freedom. The triumph of private capital, or the loss of
> public sanity?
>
> As more government is perverted in service to the market,
> the obsession with our economy's private parts focuses on
> molesting our best public program; Social Security. However
> primitive it is compared to the social democratic programs
> of more civilized nations, this system of protection for
> retired workers has been an oasis of humanity in a desert of
> alienation. Anxious to get their hands on a pot of public
> gold, fanatics of finance insist that it will go broke if
> not privatized, unconsciously indicting the whole system
> with such charges.
>
> Despite fairly common knowledge that Social Security can
> survive 35 more years without any change at all, and that it
> possesses more than a trillion dollars in government bonds,
> they insist it's in danger and can only be saved by - guess
> what? Private Investment! Bow your head, stare at your
> crotch, mumble a market prayer and try not to think about
> the deflated stock market, hosts of laid off workers and
> rising consumer debt. Let's have workers rely on the Wall
> Street gambling casino for the little they now gain from
> what should be called Social Insecurity, but will seem
> marvelous by comparison with what we get if we allow it to
> be stolen by these thieving corporadoes.
>
> It should be clear by now that the massive injection of
> private capital into the public bloodstream has created an
> epidemic of waste, poverty and death, threatening the world
> with increased personal, social and environmental problems.
> This single-minded pursuit of private profit will bring more
> public loss the longer we allow its domination of human
> affairs.
>
> Only the immune system of a democratic citizens movement can
> cure this disease and solve the political problem of
> minority control of global economics. As that immune system
> seems to get stronger, the resistance of profiteers from the
> disease becomes more deadly. Like the mad doctors of pulp
> science fiction, they will stop at nothing to protect their
> private monster from an aroused public who understand that
> it means their ruin.
>
> The global demonstrators against international finance are
> trying to wake the world to this menace, and show that the
> public can be, must be greater than the sum of its private
> parts. This new movement has started a march on the castle
> of capital, and stopped obeying the robber barons within its
> walls. It's time for the rest of us to join them, in spirit
> if not in body, or both will ultimately be lost.
>
> Copyright (c) 2001 Frank Scott. All Rights Reserved.
>
>
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