Not About History

Merriam-Webster: The Jig is Up (idiom)- (US, informal + old-fashioned)—used to say that a dishonest plan or activity has been discovered and will not be allowed to continue

The jig is up: where did you hide the stolen goods?

 

The jig is up. 

The National Education Association, energized by critical race theory and the 1619 Project- and by efforts in several states to restrict or prohibit teaching them- on July 3 at its national convention, adopted "New Business Item 39."  Randy Weingarten, president of the other major teachers' union, the American Federation of Teachers, vowed three days later  "Mark my words: Our union will defend any member who gets in trouble for teaching honest history. Teaching the truth is not radical or wrong. Distorting history and threatening educators for telling the truth is what is truly radical and wrong.”

Responding to controversy, the NEA scrubbed the provision from its website on July 6, though the union has helpfully, and courageously, chosen not to delete it from its Twitter feed.

Item C includes "it is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory." Presumably, the NEA means ".... by academic frameworks, including critical race theory, for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society." An English teacher on the organization's board would be a welcome addition.

A history curriculum- one hopes that it is limited to that- should consider academic frameworks for interpreting the impact of the past on current society. Alas, that is not the intent of the NEA, which in item B vows 

to provide an already-created, in-depth study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of society....

As I type this, blogger spellcheck informs me that "cisheteropatriarchy" is not a word, evidently because it is made up by the union's Ethnic Affairs Caucuses. (Yes, that's plural, as in caucuses, one being insufficient.)  Unfortunately, it cannot explain the connection of patriarchy, ableism, and anthropocentrism to ethnicity.

These are words created to support an ideological agenda so extreme and brazenly elitist that it includes several words- indigeneity, ableism, anthropocentrism, and the aforementioned cisheteropatriarchy- which most people have never heard of.  (For the record, I myself am in favor of being able to throw a football as Patrick Mahomes does. I cannot, thus am the victim of ableism, evidently.)

The key, however, is that the NEA speaks not of the history of the nation, of its founding and development, including slavery, lynching, discrimination, and the like. It refers- in the present tense- to the "forms of power and oppression at the intersection of society."  This educational demand is an integral part of the movement Wesley Yang labels "the successor ideology," which

is about: the end of due process, the rejection of even an attempt at objectivity, a belief in active race and sex discrimination (“equity”) to counter the legacy of the past, the purging of ideological diversity, and the replacement of liberal education with left-indoctrination.

It is not even intended to be an honest evaluation of our nation's history, to teach the past in all (or any of) its complexity. It is about  indigeneity, ableism, anthropocentrism, and the aforementioned cisheteropatriarchy, sins which the educational anti-isms believe define- not affect, but define- American society today. (The video below was posted on June 20, well before the NEA inadvertently exposed the myth of CRT as pertaining predominantly to history.)

Enter stage left the critical race theorists of the NEA, AFT, and their ideological allies begging a backlash. If their approach is adopted, there would  be a significant exodus of the middle class from public schools. Ironically, this has been a primary aim of the education "reform" movement, which has promoted vouchers, charter schools, and other privatizing schemes the past quarter century. 

Racial and economic segregation will be enhanced. (It's not coincidental that the father of critical race theory criticized the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.) The public school system will be plunged into crisis, an unintended, but very likely, consequence of a successful crusade by the teaches' unions. 

 

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Eat At Your Own Risk

Member of Freedom Caucus and of House Judiciary Committee and sex-crimes apologist:

.@SpeakerPelosi is counting impeachment votes. Here’s what President Trump is counting:

-266k new jobs
-54k in manufacturing
-Unemployment at 50 yr low
-Wages up 3%

Less taxes and regulation, more freedom for you and your family. Get gov’t out of the way, and the economy booms.

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) December 6, 2019

Less taxes and regulation, more freedom for you and your family. Also, more food poisoning. The Hill in September reported

A new rule, finalized today, would reduce the number of government food safety inspectors in pork plants by 40 percent and remove most of the remaining inspectors from production lines. In their place, a smaller number of company employees — who are not required to receive any training — would conduct the “sorting” tasks that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) previously referred to as “inspection.” The rule would also allow companies to design their own microbiological testing programs to measure food safety rather than requiring companies to meet the same standard. 

Equally alarming, the new rule would remove all line speed limits in the plants, allowing companies to speed up their lines with abandon. With fewer government inspectors on the slaughter lines, there would be fewer trained workers watching out for consumer safety. Faster line speeds would make it harder for the limited number of remaining meat inspectors and plant workers to do their jobs.

The experience from a long-running pilot project that involved five large hog slaughterhouses offers some insight into the possible impact of such radical deregulation. Consumer groups reviewed the government’s data from the five pilot plants and other plants of comparable size. They found that the plants with fewer inspectors and faster lines had more regulatory violations than others....

It’s not only consumers of meat who would pay a price for this misguided and dangerous new rule. There are more than 90,000 pork slaughterhouse workers whose health and limbs are already at risk under the current line speed limit of 1,106 hogs per hour. Pork slaughterhouse workers will tell you that they can barely keep up with current line speeds. They work in noisy, slippery workplaces with large knives, hooks and bandsaws, making tens of thousands of forceful repetitive motions on each and every shift to cut and break down the hogs.

The USDA is ignoring three decades of studies indicating that faster line speeds and the forceful nature of the work in meatpacking plants are the root causes of a staggeringly high rate of work-related injuries and illnesses.

In the Democratic presidential race, on the broad topic of deregulation (or its sister, privatization), there has been- as far as I know- no position paper by any of the candidates. and no forum, no town hall, and no debate questions. (If there had been, we would have heard about food safety inspections.) Its absence says a lot, whether about the media, the candidates themselves, or the false narrative that the Democratic Party is tempted by socialism and hurtling leftward.

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"Profits Over Children"

A long, long time ago- May of 2018, actually- Reverend William Barber of the Poor People's Campaign criticized the detention of children by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (an arm of HHS). He maintained "to target children this way is racism. What we're seeing now, we saw in the days of slavery, where children were separated and lost from their families."

The situation is now even more dire and Walter Shaub, head of the Office of Government Ethics in the second Obama Administration:

I don't want to believe the indifference Americans are showing (lots of handwringing, limited action) is because people don't care about other people's kids. That may be true. But maybe that's how good a job the govt has done in making them mostly invisible to us. Time to act!

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) June 25, 2019

Perception of the policy as both racist and cruel reached its zenith last week when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to the detention facilities as "concentration camps."

The indifference cited by Shaub probably would be actual support if the victims were not children, unaccountable for their actions whether their parents were sensible or foolish,  responsible or irresponsible.

(Pelosi on a controversial border funding bill: “It’s for the children, the children, the children. This is a very strong first step for us, for the children. It’s very exciting.”)

But maybe the limited response, the seeming acceptance of these conditions, has been in part prompted by the sense that the Trump Administration's policy is racist and cruel. The election of Donald Trump itself, buttressed by continuing support of over 40% of voters, suggests that tolerance for cruelty and bigotry is not insubstantial.

Blinded by the apparent barbarity- or at least callousness- of the conditions in the camps, the media and Democrats (the latter, depressingly) have largely missed another aspect of the policy, one which may even go to its motive.

In March, Bernie Sanders tweeted "no more private prisons and detention centers."  On June 21, Elizabeth Warren's campaign issued a press release/statement/paper which pledged that the presidential candidate would "ban private prisons and detention facilities; stop contractors from charging service fees for essential services; hold contractors accountable by expanding oversight, transparency and enforcement."

In the time it has taken me to write this post, other Democrats- cognizant that ending private detention centers would throw a monkey wrench into the Administration's immigration scheme- may have come out for ending this practice.

That would be a good start. But there is no (and then, limited) chance of being implemented until and unless there is a Democratic president. And the chance of that occurring is lessened if Democrats do not understand and convey to the American people that the Trump policy is less cruel and racist than it is an appalling example of crony capitalism. It's conceivable that Warren understands, arguing

While contractors getting paid taxpayer dollars cut corners to maximize margins, the government has turned a blind eye. Food companies make millions but serve bug-infested food to save cash. An investigation into a prison transport company that allowed at least five deaths and a sexual assault to occur under their watch has gone nowhere.

Someone, some people, or some agencies are making big profits off the suffering of children. The cost of maintaining these facilities, $670 a day thirteen months ago, is probably higher now. Fat cats are profiteering, stuffing their pockets in an Administration which is characterized by grifters. From there, it's a short trip to corruption- and an even shorter trip to convincing Americans there is corruption. It's faceless businessmen getting rich off their tax dollars.

It's highly unlikely that every company involved in the Administration's detention program, whether for phone calls, bank transfers, health care, other services, or the facilities themselves was chosen on the basis of merit. If Republicans counterattack and try to engage Democrats on this issue, the movie cliche applies: go ahead, make my day.

Or at least it would be a losing issue for the GOP if it's one which Democrats, aside from Warren and perhaps Sanders, choose to invoke. If they cannot or will not make that argument, our two-party system will more closely resemble a one-party system, both ideologically and in outcome.

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Stealth Attack

It was widely believed that such tweets as the following from President Trump were exclusively about Amazon, or at least Jeff Bezos:

I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2018

Guess again.  As the article begins, this New York Times article appears to be merely a frightening look at the autocratic rule Donald Trump has in mind for the USA if he survives his first term, runs for a second, and is re-elected.  Michael D. Shear of The New York Times reports

President Trump abruptly issued an executive order on Thursday demanding an evaluation of the Postal Service’s finances, asserting the power of his office weeks after accusing Amazon, the online retail giant, of not paying its fair share in postage.

In the executive order, issued just before 9 p.m., Mr. Trump created a task force to examine the service’s “unsustainable financial path” and directed the new panel to “conduct a thorough evaluation of the operations and finances of the U.S.P.S.”

The president does not mention Amazon in the order, but it is clear that he intends for the panel to substantiate his repeated claim that the financial arrangement between the Postal Service and Amazon, its biggest shipper of packages, is a money loser.

In December, Mr. Trump railed against the service on Twitter for being “dumber and poorer” by losing billions of dollars and not “charging MUCH MORE” to Amazon and other shippers. His Twitter attacks date back as far as 2013, when he scoffed at the service for planning to eliminate Saturday mail delivery — “our poor, poor Country,” he wrote — and raising the cost of stamps.

Postal Service experts and even Mr. Trump’s own advisers have privately urged him to back off the accusations, noting that the huge number of packages shipped by Amazon is actually helping to keep the Postal Service financially solvent.

While the service has consistently reported net losses for a decade, much of its financial woes are the result of a prolonged decline in the volume of marketing mail and first-class mail. The service makes money on packages, and Amazon is the service’s biggest single shipper of packages.

But the president has refused to believe those arguments, insisting in a tweet as recently as March 31 that “the U.S. Post Office will lose $1.50 on average for each package it delivers for Amazon.”

“That amounts to Billions of Dollars,” he continued.

Mr. Trump’s repeated attacks on Amazon have focused in part on the company’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. People close to Mr. Trump have said the president’s tirades against the retailer often come after The Post has published negative articles about him.





President Trump has continued his vendetta against the federal law enforcement agency- the FBI- and against the nation's intelligence agencies. However, he will turn on a dime if re-elected.  No personal or political enemy of the President of the United States of America will be off-limits as a re-elected, unrestrained President marshals the power of the federal government to establish one-man rule.

Trump rails against Jeff Bezos because he owns one of the two greatest daily newspapers in America. But it is more than a hint of what would come in a second term. In a cunning sleight of hand, the President is using his grudge against the free press to divert attention from yet another effort at privatization.  Shear continues

In the order, the president calls on the task force to examine various parts of the Postal Service’s business, including ones that appear to directly involve large parts of Amazon’s business.

That includes the “expansion and pricing” of the package delivery market and the service’s role in competing with other, private delivery companies. The task force should look at the decline in mail volume and the implications for the service, Mr. Trump said.

The order also calls for the task force to look at the service’s “universal service obligation,” which requires the service to deliver to everyone in the United States, given changes in technology and e-commerce.

Some parts of the order appear to hint at further privatization of the Postal Service, indicating that members of the task force should examine “the U.S.P.S. role in the U.S. economy and in rural areas, communities, and small towns.”

Like a Vietnamese village in the war US forces conducted there- or Medicare or Social Security, which Republicans have longed to cut in order to "preserve," "save," or "restructure" for "future generations"- the Postal Service must be destroyed so as to keep it. We learn

In the order, Mr. Trump said that the longstanding financial problems at the Postal Service demand some kind of action.

“A number of factors, including the steep decline in First-Class Mail volume, coupled with legal mandates that compel the U.S.P.S. to incur substantial and inflexible costs, have resulted in a structural deficit,” Mr. Trump says in the order. “The U.S.P.S. is on an unsustainable financial path and must be restructured to prevent a taxpayer-funded bailout.”

At the moment, arguably our best hope at maintaining relatively inexpensive first-class mail service is the incompetence of this Administration, for

It is unclear how quickly the task force will be assembled, or when its review might result in changes at the Postal Service that could directly affect Amazon and other shippers.

Early last week, the FBI executed a search warrant upon the home, office, and hotel room of Michael D. "Thug" Cohen, Donald Trump's "fixer." When news broke that the President had ordered a bombing raid on Syria, speculation arose that he had implemented a "wag the dog" strategy by launching the (limited) war to distract attention from the Special Counsel's investigation into his campaign's conspiracy with Russia and related matters.

That may have played a role, though with revelations coming fast and furious, almost any major action by this President could be viewed as a distraction. This includes Donald Trump's preliminary moves against The Washington Post and the U.S. Postal Service, both of which in a second Trump Administration would have a devastating impact upon the country he despises.



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Tax Scam Within The Tax Scam

What makes the Corporate Tax Scam of 2017, in the words of Ruth Marcus, "just to be really clear, worst piece of domestic policy in our lifetime?"

There are so many candidates, including the provision pertaining to real estate investment trusts, which USC professor of law, economics, and political science Edward McCaffrey explains

allows real estate investors to get a special 20% tax rate like other small businesses -- even without paying significant wages to anybody, unlike other businesses....

Take commercial real estate, to name a large and suspicious example. Real estate investors like Trump will see more generous depreciation schedules, continued deductibility for interest and lower tax rates on the business forms that hold their real estate, like real estate investment trusts -- all without having to actually hire workers.

Unsurprisingly, the private prison industry is anxious to take advantage of this loophole. Jamiles Lartey of The Guardian has found that Corevic, formerly Corrections Corporation of America, paid

an effective tax rate in the first quarter of 2015 of just 3%.

Lauren-Brooke Eisen, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice, said: “The way they are able to get away with that, is that they’re not allowed to keep a lot of cash on hand, they have to give it back to investors though dividends. But it allows them to have an incredibly low tax rate.”

According to Eisen, prison companies have essentially argued that renting out cells to the government is the equivalent of charging a tenant rent, thus making such business primarily a real estate venture. In her new book, Inside Private Prisons, Eisen examines the way this classification has boosted industry earnings.

When in February Attorney General Sessions rescinded the order issued by President Obama for the Federal Bureau of Prisons to phase out contracts with private prisons, it affected only the 18% of federal prisoners held in private facilities, not the 8% of state prisoners or 65% of immigration detainees held in private facilities (the latter controlled by the Department of Homeland Services).





Nevertheless, Sessions' move, the tax bill, and what Lartey characterizes as "the cosy (sic) relationship Trump has had with the industry overall" suggest increased use of private prisons, despite (or perhaps because), as the- Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates wrote (as reported in a separate Guardian article)

research had found private prisons “simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources” and “do not save substantially on costs” either. Essential government education and training programs for prisoners “have proved difficult to replicate and outsource” in the private sector, she said.







Well, that, and if there is a profit, there will be more and if there are empty beds, a way will be found to fill them. Beware, then, of (alleged) efforts at criminal justice reform- like this one from New Jersey Democratic senator Cory Booker- which are silent on the issue of private prisons, which encourage mass incarceration and discourage rehabilitation. The Corporate Tax Scam of 2017- which all Senate and House Democrats voted against, as did no Senate Republican- was a big Christmas present to the industry.

And then watch how some Republicans who voted for this horrendous piece of legislation will pose as criminal justice reformers in 2018, and recognize them for the poseurs they are.




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Adventures In Privatization- Tax Collection

Erin Arvedlund of The Philadelphia Inquirer reports

Beginning this month, the IRS has revived the use of debt-collection companies, and will start sending about 100 letters a week out to those with long-overdue federal tax accounts. If you are one of those people, your back taxes will be assigned to one of four private-sector collection agencies.

The controversial program — it’s opposed by the IRS agents’ union and Nina Olson, the national taxpayer advocate — will grow to 1,000 letters a week for each firm by the end of summer.

The IRS has tried private debt collectors before. Congress stopped the practice in 2009, and has now reauthorized their use. It's an experiment that will be closely watched by lawmakers. 

On a positive note, "through letters from both, you'll hear from the agency and a debt collector." Moreover, the chance of fraud is diminished because

Debt collectors can identify themselves as “contractors” of the IRS, but they can’t bully you. They must adhere to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. Like IRS employees, they must be courteous and respect taxpayer rights, the agency said in a press call with reporters.

Once the IRS sends you a letter, your designated private debt collector will send its own letter and a representative confirming the account transfer. To protect the taxpayer’s privacy and security, both letters are supposed to contain information on the tax amount owed.

Never send money.

The four debt collectors are authorized to discuss payment options. But any tax paid must be sent, either electronically or by check, to the IRS or U.S. Treasury.

It won't all stay with the US government because, Arvedlund writes, "the debt collectors can keep up to 25 percent of what they get back for the Treasury." Further

“Most taxpayers owing tax debt to the IRS simply do not have the ability to pay,” said Michael Gillen, of the law firm Duane Morris. “Such taxpayers need to protect themselves, not from the IRS, but from scammers.

"The use of private debt collectors to collect delinquent tax debts is a potential minefield for taxpayers with valid tax debts, given the proliferation of tax scams and the overwhelming presence of fraudsters posing as IRS representatives attempting to collect debts, Gillen said. "Such fraudsters will certainly try to capitalize on the use of private debt collectors.”

At first read, this public-private partnership would seem to have its advantages. But not so much. As Ann Hagedorn wrote for The American Prospect

Privatization, in sum, is effectively a fraud. When a product is provided purely via the market, and there are no public purposes involved, market accountability can work. Consumers can compare price and quality, and give their business to the vendor offering the best product at the most attractive cost. Alternatively, when government performs a function directly, there are public forms of accountability, such as congressional hearings and GAO investigations. But when a public function is privatized, the result is a muddled middle ground, where neither market accountability nor public accountability works well because of all the layers of intermediaries. Enthusiasts of markets claim that government is the domain of political corruption, while markets are transparent. But the actual track record of privatization shows that there can be at least as much corruption and deception in privatizing a service as in providing it directly. For all the rhetoric about public-private partnerships, our society works better when we keep public functions public and private ones private.

This was written in 2015, so it can't be blamed on Donald Trump. But a windfall for private investors posing as an infrastructure plan, undermining the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, shifting public education funds into private and religious schools and air traffic control to a non-governmental organization, plans to weaken the Veterans Administration system, and the likelihood of replacing government workers with federal contractors, demonstrate  there is little in this country Donald Trump won't try to privatize. And when it's a public-private partnership as with the IRS, failure will be blamed on government as rationale for even more privatization. Bet on it.


















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If Bernie Sanders Is A Socialist, I'm A Muslim.

Following the obligatory national anthem (althernatively, the Pledge of Allegiance), Hillary Clinton and Bernard Sanders squared off last night in Flint, Michigan before CNN's Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon.

The first nine questions, six from Cooper and/or Lemon and three from locals, were about the water crisis in Flint (excerpt below). The two candidates suggested all manner of measures to fix the problem, including rebuilding infrastructure, hiring residents to deliver water to other residents while the lead pipes are replaced, committing to economic development, having the CDC examine each child, an investigation to assess responsibility. And of course, that the governor should resign



.





If the suggestions were a little unimaginative, they nevertheless were sound and necessary. After hearing the candidates' plans, which would require a huge financial investment, Anderson Cooper asked how the proposals would be financed. No, of course, he didn't, instead opting for "This crisis in flint as you know, as everybody in the room knows was created by the government. Your policies are about expanding government. Why should people from flint trust that more government is the answer?"

This question, ignorant though it was, presented the respondents with a hanging curve. Nonetheless, Clinton didn't volunteer a response, which was unsurprising, given that she would have ahd to defend government.   However, Sanders the Socialist responded

That’s a good point, Anderson.

Listen, I suppose they can trust the corporations who have destroyed Flint by a disastrous trade policy which have allowed them to shut down plants in flint and move to China or Mexico. We could trust them I’m sure

Or maybe — you know, maybe, Anderson, tell you what — we should — maybe we should let Wall Street come in and run the city of Flint...

That was a fairly good reply, given that it coincided neatly with one of Sanders' two major themes, runaway corporate America- his only theme insofar as it is linked to campaign financing. But it could have been better. Sanders might have mentioned that the wheels were set in motion when the first of four emergency managers was hired to run the city government.   His successor ended the city's contract with the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department in order to join another water authority, which had not completed construction. The emergency manager then decided the city would get its water from the Flint River, When it became clear that the water was grossly substandard, the Detroit authority gave to the city an opportunity to switch back to its water, an offer the then-emergency manager (photot from Jessica J. Trevino/DFP) refused.

It's more complicated than that, as this timeline from the Detroit Free Press indicates. But there is nothing Sanders does any better than taking a complicated matter, such as corporate control of the economy, and simplifying it so the average voter can understand. But he stood through nine questions- albeit not all of them addressed to him- without once uttering the word "private."

"Privatization" is what Democrats helpfully call it, especially if the issue is Social Security. To many voters- especially independents and Republicans- it's "crony capitalism."  In the Flint water catastrophe, the state's Department of Environmental Quality discouraged the city from taking the necessary steps to undo its mistake and the Emergency Manager, concerned only with short-term costs, acted in complete disregard of the interests of residents and businesses.

It's not surprising that Mrs. Clinton did not correct the impression that government was solely at fault. It is, however, disappointing that Clinton, who has worked hard (and successfully) to maintain impressive support from the black community would not emphasize the tragic consequences of wresting control of city government from its residents to give it to a higher authority.  It is, moreover, disappointing that a self-described "socialist" would not mention any form of the word "private" during this discussion- or at any point during the debate.

 







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More Important Than A Distraction. But Not Much.

In the book "All the President's Men," it was "the key was the secret campaign cash, and it should all be traced." In the movie, it was the simpler, pithier "follow the money."

The Indy Star has reported "Business, civic and sports leaders who have strongly called for a fix to the divisive "religious freedom" legislation flanked Indiana Republicans as they announced sexual orientation and gender identity will be explicitly protected in the new law." The deal came about after two legislative leaders, Governor Pence's chief of staff, "and a small handful of business leaders, including Republican powerbroker and Indianapolis Motor Speedway CEO Mark Miles met continuously Tuesday and Wednesday.

Some revision of the law became inevitable when, as Charles Pierce comments

for a while, it looked like Arkansas was going to follow Indiana into the gorge of eternal peril. But then the CEO of Walmart announced that these religious liberty restoratives were inconsistent with Walmart's social conscience. (Apparently, he owns an electron microscope.) Then, in what I am certain is purely coincidental, Governor Asa Hutchinson not only came out in opposition to the Arkansas law, he threw it back into the legislature whence it had come to his desk.... Translation from the original WeaselSpeak: Good god, Pence is an idiot. Bring yo' bidness to Arkansas!

Whatever the details of the proposed revision, there is need for, as Joan Walsh put it, "a reality check." She lamented an "Indiana law that has gotten no pushback from the business community over the years: Its 2005 voter identification legislation that paved the way for a rollback of voting rights across the country."  Richard Posner, who wrote the district court decision upholding the law in 2007, since has expressed grave misgivings about his role and last year wrote the decision overturning Indiana's prohibition on same-sex marriage. However, Walsh notes

Some of the business community has evolved along with Posner. But it has not joined his effort to push back against restrictions on voting rights. It’s hard not to assume that’s because corporate America is not as concerned about the rights of potential “customers” who can’t afford $75 to obtain a birth certificate or other form of valid identification. By definition, the people whose voting rights are being curtailed don’t have the economic clout to call for boycotts against their states.

Business didn’t rise up over Pence’s last bone-headed wingnut move, either: reversing his administration’s plans to expand Indiana’s preschool programs to thousands of low-income children with tens of millions of federal dollars, just last October. Pence’s own team had backed the expansion, but he spiked the application, citing vague concerns about “strings” attached to the federal money.

Indiana is also the state, by the way, that just sentenced a woman to 20 years in prison for “feticide,” becoming the first state to imprison a woman for what it claims was an unsuccessful attempted abortion.

Her pleasure at the uprising over the Indiana law (and at the effort to impose a similar one in Arkansas) is mitigated by the realization

that corporate America’s benevolence only extends so far. It’s great that Apple’s Tim Cook, who happens to be gay, lent his voice to the protest against the Indiana law. But if Apple would pay the federal taxes it owes, we could vastly expand preschool programs nationwide. If corporate America would join the fight to restore the Voting Rights Act, the bill in Congress might have more than one Republican supporter (Wisconsin Rep. James Sensenbrenner still stands alone). If businesses punished the rightward drift of the Republican Party by withholding campaign contributions, we’d see more action on hiking the minimum wage and expanding infrastructure (two issues that used to be bipartisan), and maybe even fighting income inequality.

Creating a fairer tax system, extending preschool, maintenance (and expansion) of voting rights would be important steps in ameliorating inequality. So, too, would be heading off privatization. And as (bad) luck would have it, we have the example brought to us by Richard J. Eskow (photo from Katherine Welles via Shuttercock/Salon).  The Indiana Toll Road, sold to a Spanish and Australian consortium in 2006, is now up for bid amid toll revenues far below projections, as well as "long waits at toll plazas, bridges that haven’t been repaired in more than a year and rest stops that reek of urine." Eskow adds

Private companies also charge far more for water and sewer services than governments do. (Food and Water Watch found that their rates were 33 percent higher.)  Private prisons appear to cost more, as the New York Times reported, while the ACLU found that higher incarceration rates lead to windfall profits under privatized prison systems.

Nor is the inefficiency and greed limited to civilian life. The privatization of military housing has proven costly, according to the Government Accounting Office, and an Air Force major who studied the privatization of Newark Air Force Base stated (in a rather folksy way) that “the Air Force seems to be just flat out paying more for the same service it received under the old depot system.”

Privatization is often a bad deal for investors, too, as the Congressional Budget Office noted in 2012. The CBO studied eight highway projects and found that, with one exception, “private equity investors’ expectations of profitability for the projects have been unfulfilled.”

Under privatization, the goal is no longer to provide publicly funded services effectively and efficiently. Nor is the goal to make a profit for investors. The deal itself is the goal, because that’s where intermediaries make their profits.

Temper thy ardor- or, as Larry David would put it, curb your enthusiasm.  Although Walsh believes "the LGBT rights struggle is powered by righteousness," she admits that which can only be whispered: the movement is aided by "the fact that it doesn't cost businesses a dime." For the rest of us, things don't look so favorable.



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