Screwed the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class (23 page)

Finally, instead of the cons' "trickle-down" program, we need to return to a commonsense, classical economy that makes sure the people have a solid middle-class income and that trusts the people to spend it wisely. That means we need progressive taxation, pro-labor policies, and a living wage.

Iraqis faced one of the cons' undeclared wars and lost. The American middle class is facing another undeclared war. We can do something about it.

Some aspects of government are just too important to hand over to the private sector.

Among these are the government's role in protecting life and liberty. Even the cons will say that the government has a role in defending citizens. But they just can't seem to help themselves. Since Ronald Reagan, the cons have been busy privatizing the most basic features of our government, including the military, the prisons, and our electoral system itself.

The cons ascribe to a religion of privatization. "Anything government can do, we can do better," they say. Even though corporations have to skim money off the top to pay dividends to their shareholders, pay their CEOs' huge salaries, and pay for the corporate jets, fancy headquarters, golden bathroom fixtures, and advertising and marketing, somehow the cons think corporations can do things more efficiently than a government that has to pay only civil servants. It defies logic, but they keep repeating this fundamental article of faith-based economics.

The second-largest army in Iraq is not the United Kingdom's but the thirty thousand or so private contractors hired by the Bush administration.

Corporations are now providing services that the army used to do. The cons tell us that private corporations are much more efficient than the army at providing services. Yet these corporations bring people over from the United States and pay them more than $100,000 a year, whereas the army starts privates at $15,282.
¹
It doesn't make any sense economically.

Nor is using contractors more efficient in terms of getting the job done better and faster. In the foregoing introduction to
part III
, we saw that corporations have failed miserably at doing their jobs in Iraq. And it apparently takes more of them to
not
do those jobs. From 1999 to 2002, the U.S. government eliminated 48,000 civil service jobs while adding 730,000 contract positions.
²

Privatizing the military is just another way for the cons to transfer hundreds of billions of tax dollars from We the People to the corporatocracy.

Because the army can't actually command private contractors, there's no real accountability. According to Michael Scherer, who wrote on this topic for
Mother Jones
, "A report the GAO [Government Accounting Office] released said a number of the weapon systems the U.S. has deployed need contractors to maintain them. Generals have no idea which jobs are being done by contractors. If the contractors walk off the job, that would hamper the military eff ort. There's no accountability."
³

The Bush administration has even given up trying to make these corporations accountable to the government. Scherer points out that the government has shifted oversight of the work that private contractors do to the private contractors themselves. For example, Scherer reports,

The U.S. government has its own agency that buys oil for the U.S. military called the Defense Energy Appropriation Center. But the Pentagon didn't give the contract to import oil for Iraq to that agency. They gave it to Halliburton. When you ask them why they gave the contract to Halliburton, they say, "Well,
Halliburton drew up the energy plans for us." Halliburton designed the contract they awarded to themselves.
⁴

This lack of accountability doesn't just affect the financial cost of using private contractors for military work. There's a cost to democracy as well.

As anybody who's been in the military can tell you, the old cliché is true that the job of an army is to "blow things up and kill people." The nature of an army includes licensing people to kill other people. This license to kill is governed by national laws and by international treaties.

Private corporations, however, are under few such constraints when they act as a mercenary army on behalf of a government. While the government pays the corporation, the same laws and treaties do not govern it as they would an army of the government. A private corporation is not answerable to We the People. To the contrary, laws and Supreme Court precedents say that private corporations can hide things behind the secrecy of "corporate personhood," claiming Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment "human rights" in ways that governments never could.

When you combine that lack of oversight with the profit motive, you get situations like the horrendous torture at Abu Ghraib, a process that, according to people who were there, was heavily influenced by the presence of and the orders from "private contractors." At least a thirty-strong team of interrogators at the prison, for example, were employed by CACI International, which is based in Virginia.
⁵
According to the grunts who were convicted, private contractors told them to come in and do many of the things for which they went to jail: private contractors were in charge of many of the interrogations.

And there's nothing we can do about that. As Human Rights Watch notes, "These contractors operate in Iraq with virtual impunity—exempt by the terms of their engagement with the U.S. military from prosecution by Iraqi courts, outside the military
chain of command and thus ineligible for court-martial, and not subject to prosecution by U.S. courts."
⁶
They act outside the law.

If you are going to give someone the legal power to kill, you want those people to be under the absolute control of We the People.

Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich, authors of
The Fox in the Henhouse
, say that we are witnessing "a second American revolution, by the corporations, who are trying to upset the balance of power that has served us so well. We are talking about government by, of, and for the corporation."
⁷

The privatization of America is especially pernicious when it comes to prisons. Most people don't know that there are prisons for profit. Anyone can build a prison without government authority. In
Lockdown America
, Christian Parenti tells us that corporate jailers now control roughly a hundred thousand prison beds nationwide in over a hundred different facilities in twenty-seven states.
⁸

And that's a real problem for American liberty. As Kahn and Minnich explain, "If prisons are motels with bars, then from the corporate perspective making money is all about filling beds and providing food service. So corporations lobby aggressively to get as many people as possible locked up."

There are two insidious consequences of the privatization of our prisons. The first is that the quality of treatment and rehabilitation—which should be the first goal of imprisonment in most cases—has declined.

There are some people—a very small number—whom we put in prison because we really and truly never want them to be a part of society again. The vast majority of incarcerated people, however, are put there as a way of saying, "Don't ever try that again!" Once these people serve their time, we hope they will have learned their lesson and we invite them to return to society.

The prison system must have an element of punishment to it—that being intrinsic to a person's being deprived of liberty—but it must also have an element of rehabilitation because these people will end up back in society among the rest of us. The first problem with privatization, however, is that the private prison industry does not have any financial incentive to rehabilitate prisoners. It's much easier and cheaper for private industry to warehouse people than to provide them with education, job training, and drug or alcohol treatment.

It's much cheaper for society, however, to pay for rehabilitation programs. A study by the RAND Corporation shows that every dollar spent on treatment instead of imprisonment saves $7 in state costs. That's because treatment is significantly more effective at reducing drug use than is jail or prison.
⁹

It typically costs a minimum of $20,000 per year to keep someone in prison.
¹⁰
On the other hand, if someone is out in the workforce, even if they've got a low-paying job, not only do they not cost society anything but they are now paying taxes. They are contributing to society. Our goal as We the People should be to have as few people in prison as possible, not as many as possible.

The second, and even more dangerous, problem with the privatization of our prisons is that the private-prison industry has become one of the major lobbyists in Congress for harsher penalties for relatively insignificant crimes. For example, the "three strikes" law doesn't mainly catch murderers and rapists. It catches the guy who shoplifts three times at the corner store or is caught abusing drugs three times. Now he's imprisoned for life.

There's a long history of corporate interests lobbying for harsh marijuana laws (for example), ranging from the initial laws pushed by the cotton growers (who saw hemp as an economic threat) to more recent laws pushed by drug-testing companies and private-prison companies. They're lobbying for heavier and harsher penalties because that means more money for them. And they are succeeding. That's one of the reasons why the United
States has locked up more than 2 million people—more people in prison both in absolute numbers and on a per-capita basis than any other nation in the world.

The cons will say that all these people should be in prison. Yet former governor Gary E. Johnson of New Mexico, a Republican, has pointed out that "in 1980, the federal government arrested a few hundred thousand people on drug charges; today we arrest 1.6 million people a year for drug offenses. Yet we still have a drug problem."
¹¹

Vince Besser, writing in
Mother Jones
magazine, tells us that "Nationwide, crime rates today are comparable to those of the 1970s, but the incarceration rate is four times higher than it was then. It's not crime that has increased; it's punishment. More people are now arrested for minor offenses, more arrestees are prosecuted, and more of those convicted are given lengthy sentences."
¹²

The simple fact is that when you privatize something, you create an incentive for that business to do more of what it does. If the business is warehousing people, that business will look for new customers. The way that the private-prison industry gets new customers is by encouraging lawmakers to criminalize more behaviors and by increasing the punishment for those behaviors already criminalized.

Van Jones, of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, points out:

If what we want in urban America are peaceful streets and safe communities, the strategy we are pursuing is stupid. We are de-funding community programs and schools. We are de-funding what will keep kids out of trouble. We are funding prisons instead.

It's been demonstrated statistically that every day a young person spends in prison, they are more likely to cause trouble when they get out. Prisons make our communities less safe. We all want community safety, but not a prison industry that is profiteering off making our community less safe.
¹³

The first step in reducing crime is to take back our prisons from private industry. And we should work to reduce sentences when it is safe and reasonable to do so. With the money we save from warehousing people, we can pay for rehabilitation programs, turning people who deplete the community's resources into contributing members of society.

The ultimate crime of privatization is the privatization of our vote. In 2004 more than 80 percent of the U.S. vote was counted by three private corporations: Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia.
¹⁴

At the founding of this nation, we decided that there were important places to invest our tax dollars: in things that had to do with the overall "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" of us all. Over time these commons—in which we all make tax investments and for which we all hold ultimate responsibility—have come to include our police and fire services, our military and defense, our roads and skyways, our food and drug supply, and our air, water, and national parks. But the most important of all the commons in which we've invested our hard-earned tax dollars is our government itself. It's owned by us, run by us (through our elected representatives), answerable to us, and most directly responsible for the stewardship of our commons.

And the commons through which we regulate the commons of our government is our vote.

That commons of our vote is now in danger. We have already seen several instances in which private control over voting may have been used to influence an election—or at least created the appearance of such influence.

Before stepping down and running for the U.S. Senate, Chuck Hagel (now senator from Nebraska) had been the chairman of the board of AIS, the owner of ES&S, a voting-machine company that had just computerized Nebraska's vote.
¹⁵
In 1997
the
Washington Post
said that Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election."
¹⁶
According to Bev Harris, author of
Black Box Voting
, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely black communities that had never before voted Republican.
¹⁷
Hagel was the first Republican in twenty-four years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska, nearly all on unauditable machines he had just sold to the state.