Headline, August18, 2013

PROGRESS : 

'''CONAN THE BARBARIAN !! = 

CONAN THE CONTRACTOR !!! '''

It was not until the mid-19th century that America's urban governments, by setting up local police forces, managed to make an ordinary person's safety a matter of real public responsibility. This was a major advance, though perhaps only temporary.

No one with money relies on such guarantees any longer  -nor did they in Rome; where police forces as we know them were virtually nonexistent. More and more people have withdrawn into protected enclaves. Private security is a major growth industry.

In 1960 there more police officers than hired security guards in America; whereas around the 90s and even later private guards outnumbered the police by 50 percent. Individuals may owe nominal allegiance to a town or state, but their true oath of fealty is to Securitas or Guardsmark.

One of the chief obligations of any government is simply to dispense justice    -to resolve disputes, oversee legal business, mete out punishment. These functions were once held in private hands. After a stint as a public responsibility, they are now migrating back. Lawyers and clients increasingly shun the civil courts  -congested, expensive, fickle-  and instead buy themselves some private arbitration, provided by a growing cadre of profitable  ''rent-a-judge''  companies.

As for the criminal justice system, those sentenced to prison may very well do their time in a private facility, run on behalf of state and federal government and operated by a company with some former public officials in its management to grease the wheels. Faced with rising number of inmates, and unwilling to raise taxes to build more public prisons, governments at all levels have found that the easy, cost-effective way is to turn the prison industry over to the private sector; to a behemoth such as the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America or to one of many smaller companies.

America's public colleges and universities are fast losing their public character. These institutions were created under the terms of an act signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, providing federal land grants to the states as basis for public financing of higher education. But state support is diminishing. Nationwide, state legislatures are picking up only about two-thirds of the annual cost of public higher education. For the University of Illinois the figure was 25 percent. For the University of Michigan, it was 18 percent. What makes up the difference in funding?

To a large degree it's money from private donors and private corporations, creating an incipient  ''academic industrial-complex'' at public and private institutions alike. You cant escape the signs. At the University of California at Berkeley, one administrator was officially known as the Bank of America Dean of Haas School of Business. But for a conviction or two, Rice University would have had a Ken Lay Center for the Study of Markets in Transition, endowed by the late former chairman of Enron.

Much money for universities comes with strings attached  -for instance, the power to push research in certain directions and perhaps away from others, and the ownership of patents deriving from sponsored research. Sociologists have term for what is occurring: they call it the ''externalization of state functions.'' Water and Sewage systems are  being privatized, as are airports, and highways and public hospitals. Voucher programs and charter schools are a way of shifting education from toward the private sector. Even the Protection of Nuclear Waste is in private hands.

Meat inspection is done largely by the meatpacking companies themselves. Americans were up in arms some years ago when they learned that DP World, a company in the U.A.E , would soon be in control of the terminals of half a dozen major U.S. seaports  -only to discover that the privatization of the terminal operations had begun over three decades ago, and that 80 percent of them were already operated by foreign companies, the largest of which was Chinese.

Serious proposals to privatize portions of Social Security have been on the table, and the new Medicare prescription drug plan effectively puts an enormous government program into the hands of private insurance and drug companies. Many services that used to be provided free of charge now must be paid for  -government by user fee. Detailed statistical data from the Census Bureau and other agencies were once available to everyone; now they're being sold, mainly for marketing purposes, and often at a price that only private corporations can afford.

The vaults of the Smithsonian were once open to documentary-film making regardless of provenance and financing. Now an agreement between the Smithsonian and the cable company Showtime has created something called the Smithsonian Networks, which has jurisdiction over, and priority access to, certain kinds of material. Is there any government function that can't be transferred to some private party?

A considerable amount of tax collection is now done in effect, by casinos, rather than raise taxes to pay for services, legislatures legalize gambling and then take a rake-off from the profits earned by private casino companies.

It's ''tax farming''  for the modern age, recalling the hated Roman practice of selling the right to collect taxes to private individuals, who were then allowed to keep anything over what they had agreed to collect for the government.

This Great Historical Post continues. Please do share it forward. And be assured that I would be covering, in due course, the developing world and the rest of the world.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of Afghanistan. See Ya all on the World Students Society-Computers-Internet Wireless :  '''THE SAM MAHAL''' 

Good Night & God Bless!

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