More details became available yesterday about the ongoing conservative plan to sell off a large number of the public assets that help bind North Carolina together and make middle class life attainable and enjoyable.
As we noted a few weeks back after a previous legislative hearing on the subject of privatizing essential public assets:
“The only problem with this vision, of course, is that it is an absurd fantasy on several levels. As humans have learned through centuries of trial and error (from the feudal era and before right up to the modern day criminal syndicalism of post-Soviet Russia), a world in which core public structures and services are privatized and controlled by a handful of wealthy oligarchs (or corporations) is no model for a just and healthy society.
It is instead a way to assure that democratic controls will be minimal and that opportunity will be controlled and meted out by the rich and powerful. It is, in short, a gussied up version of the plantation model of society – something that, given the obsession of so many on the right wing with telling and retelling the stories of old white men in wigs and knickers, may not be so surprising.
Perhaps even more importantly, it is a cynical model in which everything is commoditized; a vision of society in which wealth and profit and personal aggrandizement are the sole objectives and in which things like the common good, shared sacrifice and the simple and wholesome psychological benefits of public spaces and institutions that belong to everyone and to no one are casually tossed aside. It is, as is always the case with modern far right, a world in which “the market” is treated as a deity to be worshiped rather than as what it is: a powerful tool created by and for humans.”
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