do.rflex wrote: > Americanize Me? No Thanks > > > ..... When governance is hijacked by the likes of Bush and Brown > there is only one possible outcome: massive, intractable, endemic > corruption permeates the whole system. Stories following up on the > Katrina catastrophe show that nothing has changed. Billions have been > wasted, stolen or remain unaccounted for. The tragedy has been used as > a useful crisis to dispossess thousands of New Orleans' poorest > residents, privatize the education system and ensure that the wealthy > get the benefit of public money. > > Stay clear of the collapse > > We can watch from this side of the fence as our neighbours > self-destruct and we can have sympathy for the scores of millions who > will suffer so that a tiny elite can become super-rich. But moving in > with them won't help them. And it could destroy us. Mimicking their > culture of fear, their self-destructive individualism, their suspicion > of others, their isolation from the rest of the world, their > minimalist decaying government, and their passive acceptance of > extreme poverty will just help perpetuate their decline. > > ~~ Murray Dobbin > More at link: http://thetyee.ca/Views/2008/04/21/Americanized/ Last night I watched the movie "Alien Versus Predator - Requium" on BluRay and in the featurette the director points out that their motivation for the movie was to explore something they had noticed in the original movie "Alien" in that the ship that discovers an alien spacecraft is a corporate ship and that in the entire movie there is no mention of a government in that time in the future. IOW, everything is privatized. So they explore in the movie how it got that way. Interesting. Also I recall that "Outland" was really about how corporations used their people as slaves in that movie's case for mining.
We really need to revolt to keep such a thing from happening. They're trying privatize everything especially municipal water systems. There are just some things that need to remain in the commons including our water, highways, mass transit, etc. There are things that are not wise for government to run that are better handled by "small businesses" (not large ones) and fill the need of those individuals who prefer to work for themselves. Plus it takes too much of a bureaucracy to try to run everything. The way things are going we'll wind up with one big corporation running everything (GE?) and that would be nothing more than corporate socialism.
