Bankruptcy of State Governments And Privatization In The Time Of Covid

Remember those mad scientists make tiny shrunken people movies?  Mitch McConnell and friends want to privatize the public's assets and add to the piggy banks of the corporate overlords.

Senate Majority Leader, Republican, Mitch McConnell suggests that it may be better for states to declare bankruptcy than for the federal government to give them access to the federal money they need during the coronavirus crisis.

Library Defenders have seen this before.  It’s the same thing as with libraries.  It’s purpose is to privatize the public assets held by the states.  Here it’s being done the same way as with libraries in New York City: You withhold funds making up a story about what you do and don’t have money for and then use the disaster that your underfunding creates as your cover and excuse for selling off and privatizing the assets that belong to the public.  Citizens Defending Libraries has held forums on privatizing public assets and the playbook for how it works is posted here: Our Public Assets Under Attack- A Calamity of the Commons Unfolding That We Must Act Collectively Against- How best To Express It?

Once privatized, formerly public assets are no longer under democratic control and, in private hands, the private sector takes whatever tithing of profit it feels the market will bear.  When, for example, that means that when healthcare must be delivered to the public through the intermediary of a profit-taking insurance industry, it also follows that healthcare is delivered far less efficiently, far less effectively and at far greater cost.

The coronavirus crisis is being used as an opportunity to besiege other public assets– We are also witnessing an effort to, by selectively withholding funds, take down the United States Post Office.  As is obvious, the coronavirus has created financial need and financial stresses every which way, creating a need for financial support to be deployed almost universally at all levels, but we are witnessing an effort by those in the federal government handing out the dollars to target the Post Office, in particular, for such rescue and maintenance funding to be withheld, even though that office’s vital infrastructure is constitutionally mandated and normally self-supporting on a not-for-profit basis.  As a Bernie Sanders tweet notes, “How in the hell does Carnival, a cruise ship company that pays virtually no federal income taxes, receive a bailout, but the Postal Service, the most popular government agency in America, does not?”

A privatizing dismantling of the Post Office at this time would have certain other effects.  Right now, the Post Office provides one of the only options for private and secure communications in a world where almost everything happens transacted through the private monopoly profit dominated universe of a data-scraping internet.  Because it is secure and run by reliable, trusted employees subject to strict laws, the Postal Service can be used for voting (a remote voting mechanism especially important in a time of covid), whereas the prospect of easily hackable internet voting is a joke.  Or in the future, when Amazon has taken over for FedEx, UPS, and the postal service, will Amazon handle the delivery of our election votes?

Naomi Klein, with her video warning about how we must fend off “Coronavirus Capitalism” (a particular flavor of the “disaster capitalism” she has astutely described for years now) refers to the bad ideas that come out of the woodwork as “ideas that are lying around” and “seemingly impossible” can be implemented in a crisis when the public's disorientation can be exploited.  (She sanguinely counsels the same can happen with good ideas that can be implemented in a catalyzing crisis.)   The idea of dismantling the Post Office has been around for a while: After all, what good excuse was there for Congress in 2006 to pass a hobbling law specially applicable to only the Postal Service requiring the Post Office, in an absurdly short period of time, to pay worker pension and health benefits three quarters of a century in advance?

These privatizing ideas have been, indeed, been lying around. Bankruptcy for states has been lying around as something the power manipulators have been eager to implement for a while.  But its not because state bankruptcy would enable the “red states” through the “ascendancy” of a conservative federal judiciary to impose “priorities upon the budgets of the richer states.”  Like a lot of other things, privatization, is not, and should not be diminished as a red team/blue team issue, the kind of thing that is so constantly used to distract us.  It’s another thing the corporatists want, because the extraction of profit and substitution of private control for democracy are always the end goals of the corporate elites.

Yes, bankruptcy of the states would enable a bleeding and ransacking of the pension funds of public workers.  That would reduce the workers’ pay, change the terms of their employment, maybe even after the fact.  But the pension funds that could be drained along with good working relationships with state workers are just a part of the assets and infrastructure that could be subtracted from democracy and democratic control.  There are also: schools, colleges, school systems, roads, bridges, every building any government occupies, parks, playgrounds, lakes, fire houses, police stations, hospitals, housing, memorials, and (as is a target in Puerto Rico) the electric power delivery system and grid.  When schools go, so do troublesome teachers unions, and what might be a unpredictable proclivity to actually teach children to think critically.  Oh. Are we forgetting to mention “libraries,” because that’s what we started by talking about.

The way that the federal government has been printing and handing out money during a halted economy and how arbitrarily those decisions are made reveals the extent to which money and the assignment of wealth that is somehow measured in dollars is a fiction, something that’s clearly subject to what we decide the rules are today at this moment, rules that may not be the same tomorrow. 

It’s scary that we have stimulus bills crank up the press to print money that’s getting handed out disproportionately to the wealthiest, repeating the 2008 financial crisis mishandling of the economy.  The actions taken by government in 2008 was one of the greatest wealth transfers ever, increasing wealth inequality in America by pumping money into wealthy investment funds, banks, and corporations at exactly the time that asset prices were low and temporarily suppressed, prices for things like the homes of people in the Main Street economy.  Those assets and homes were then bought up by those hedge funds, banks and corporations.  Probably worst: It was paid for with taxpayer money.  The people who lost their homes paid the taxes that financed those tilted economy buy ups that deprived them of ownership.

While it’s scary, that we may be doing that again, it is also instructive, because its clear that where the money goes are just decisions, nothing more than that, just decisions about where we want the money to be, where we want to recognize it as being. When we were dealing with libraries as part of New York City’s budget we were dealing with just the most infinitesimal fraction of the budget when the fiction was being made up that there was no money to fund libraries so that they supposedly needed to be sold.  Now our fictions about where money needs to be sent during a stalled economy has us dealing with trillions of dollars.

If we are not careful, we will consent to recognize an even greater transfer of wealth to the wealthiest than in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.  The bankruptcy of states and the sell off of the Post Office would be just part of the privatization that would go along with it.