We're on the Road to Nowhere

Privitization Versus the Public Good

I was in my car listening to the news about Amtrak’s financial woes when I came upon a railroad crossing. A huge freight train thundered past. Under a proposed plan by president Bush, Amtrak would become increasingly privatized. This notion of the benefits of privatization is a mantra, like the claims of the supposed liberal bias in the media, which is repeated so often by conservatives that to disagree sounds almost childish in its assumed naiveté.

The report mentioned that about 500 million dollars was necessary to continue operation of the passenger rail service. Some conservatives would have us believe that this country can’t afford to continue financing passenger rail service and we should allow the free market to determine its fate. Of course, these same people don’t expect our highway system to be self-sufficient. A tax is simply a cost. Car payments, insurance, repairs, etc. are all costs to the driver.

In Seattle the list of road repairs needed in the very near future make Amtrak’s current financial difficulties seem insignificant:

The Alaskan Way Viaduct—$3.5-11.6 billion
The #520 bridge between Seattle and Bellevue—$5.9 billion
I-405 widening—$10.9 billion

The sums this country throws at the military and the intelligence community every year cannot even be calculated to within $20 billion dollars. In fact, the military simply LOSES $1 billion dollars in inventory every year, yet we are constantly being told that we can’t afford to shrink classroom sizes in our nation’s public schools. There is talk of charging a user fee for our nation’s parks; in essence we would be privatizing them. I hesitate to even put public and medicine in the same sentence for fear of being attacked by every Chicago School disciple from the last 30 years. The people who completely dismiss the idea of public medicine and think the private sector is doing such a great job should look closely at a bill from a hospital.

As I listened to the debate about Amtrak on the radio, the freight train kept rolling past. I tried counting the cars but stopped at around 50--each car comparable in size to the load carried by a semi. All I could think about was that each car represented one less semi on the road, one less sleep-deprived driver weaving through lanes on a busy highway, one less diesel engine spewing soot across the country. All I could think about was that trains are a safe, efficient means of transport that this country has refused to support.

For those of you who don’t know this, Europe has decided that it can afford the infrastructure necessary for rail travel. European countries have decided that they cannot afford not to embrace this technology. Parts of Europe’s rail system are privatized but the majority of the system is under state control—much like our highways. If every American citizen got a chance to travel by rail in Europe we would be screaming for a similar network in this country.

President Bush, an ill-educated aristocrat who never attended a public school, would also like to weaken the public education system in this country. Public education, good public education is what makes a nation great. It is what made this nation truly great. What really gave America a quantum leap in history was the decision to give WWII GI’s a free college education (as well as cheap loans for the purchase of a home). Poorer citizens who never in their wildest dreams thought a higher education possible suddenly found themselves on campuses. My father was one of these first generation university students.

Public education is the single most democratic ideal that this nation has ever embraced and now we are talking about doing away with it? I have two words to describe Bush’s plan: THIRD WORLD. Call me a flaming liberal but to me the highest ideal to which a nation should aspire is equality--not commerce. Equality can’t be left to the private sector; it must be pursued vigorously by a government of the people.

This is a topic that I plan to discuss in more detail. If you want some reading on this subject I highly recommend the books of the brilliant Canadian visionary, John Ralston Saul.

Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
The Unconscious Civilization
The Doubter’s Companion