I was watching one of those ads that are on constantly, about how we all need some private security system installed for mere pennies a day, to keep the bad guys from breaking into our homes while we're out working to pay for them and the stuff they contain. It's a pretty good ad. Features a frightened child being comforted by a visually perfect mom. And I sort of vaguely realized that this was the privatization of the police. You subscribe, you get protection. Otherwise, not so much, particularly as the police are more and more starved of funds and equipment. It's just like with schools, health care, etc. The notion of "common good" is shrinking to the size of a pin.
That's the plan:
http://www.truth-out.org/publicopoly-exposed/1310660473
Hopefully people will recall, before it's too late, that private security forces have been well tested in places far more dangerous--so far at least--than the U.S. The test results were not particularly comforting.
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Meanwhile, a relative moderate writing in the New Republic of all places offers some perspective on the people who are trying to hold our economy hostage via the debt ceiling issue:
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/91886/the-republican-crazy-not-act
From all the evidence, they really do think it's just like when a bread-winner gets laid off (something they saw in the movies, and mostly in black and white--and they never saw "Make Way for Tomorrow" of course). You just prioritize. You pay off these bills, and you make those bills wait. Natch. Meanwhile, in the real world, real laid off bread-winners, the sharp ones, are climbing telephone poles and cutting the third wire, the neutral, for the copper that's up to $3.25 a pound. For example I mean. The stupid ones cut the wrong wire. Kinda like how we went into Iraq to get the oil, dontcha know.
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