[Peace-discuss] GM as Conrail

[Ricky Baldwin]

Thanks again to Dave for sharing Greg Palast's article.

I'd also point out that the situation is becoming more and more like the old Conrail "con":

http://theclayeater.blogspot.com/

"...This is the wrong kind of restructuring, folks! This is the (now
discredited?) IMF all over again, just the opposite of what we need,
what we need being what we might call a Social Monetary Fund - that would fund job creation, not "job shedding";
expanded health care that would cover more people, not fewer; likewise
pensions. ...

... this has all happened before. Before 1975 there were a number
of old private, for-profit railroad lines running in the Northeastern
US. Only they went bankrupt. So the Government bought them, and
restructured them, downsized them, "shed" some of their operations and
the attendant workers, etc. At the same time, with the same Act, the Government began a program of "regulatory reform" - i.e. deregulation.  Several such "reforms" followed, but that's another story.

The long and the short is, by 1980 Conrail turned a profit (NB: as a government run enterprise it became profitable).  So the Government took the next logical step - claro.  It re-privatized the company, the largest sale of public stock in US history!

Get
it? Private enterprise not working - government/taxpayers assume debt,
invest billions to rebuild and repair - then hand it back to the
profiteers, this time with far fewer regulations, like, for example,
secret contracts, etc., etc.

They call this 'socialism'? The
smart guys have a better way to describe it: "Socialized risk,
privatized profit." What it means is, socialism for the rich, while the rest of us get to take our chances with wild west capitalism."
 Ricky


"Speak your mind even if your voice shakes." - Maggie Kuhn



      
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