PRIVATIZATION AS CRIME?

Peacemaking is an interesting blog published by Harold E. Pepinsky, PhD, Professor Emeritus (Criminology), University of Indiana. While I disagree with much of what Dr. Pepinsky says in this post, I do agree that in some cases the selling off of state assets does not serve the public well.

My state of Texas is cash-strapped like all the other states and is trying to sell off some public lands to private developers. I think that the sale of public lands for private development is a really bad idea, but other sales of some state assets may well be justified.

As for class warfare, it needs to be vilified because it is simply playing the have-nots against the haves for political purposes while doing really nothing to help the less fortunate in this country.

THE MOVEMENT TO PRIVATIZE
By Hal Pepinsky

Peacemaking
December 2, 2011

The movement to sell off state assets to for-profit corporations at bargain basement prices took hold when Margaret Thatcher became British prime minister in 1979. I ask my criminological self how to label this privatization movement, and I call it criminal in its real world effects.

From my own Anglo legal tradition, this movement constitutes organized robbery of state resources. That is, politicians force sale of public assets with threats that unless public services are sold to private investors, no one will feed and satiate the political appetite of youth who compete for jobs with their elders. And so prevailing politicians from Ms. Thatcher forward have accelerated global ripoffs of state services.

When I lived in Magomeni Makuti on the outskirts of Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam in 1990, young girls walked community streets during the day because their families could not afford the school uniforms required by the International Monetary Fund to secure IMF loans. Now in my country and in Europe in particular, financial “technocrats” are requiring Greeks and Spaniards and Italians and Portuguese and Irish to sell off state assets and workers to whatever private corporate bidder comes along to reduce this or that national debt. What a racket!

I don’t believe in personal blame or punishment. How many of us who can afford it invest in Wall Street to pay for our retirement? Privatization is steeped in innocence and “best evidence” of how to achieve “stability” in our ever-changing world. Still, privatization is a crime.

“Socialism” and “class warfare” have been politically vilified in my country since before Karl Marx started writing. During the Cold War in my country politicians pointed to the Soviet Union as a drab and intrusive alternative to “neoliberalism.” Now when in my part of the world public sector workers are singled out for privatization (as in public schooling), I seek appreciation of public ownership of social assets.