The newest revelations about fraudulent excesses by the private brokers
licensed by the state to oversee publicly funded daycare activities prove many things,
but one in particular: When the people’s business is turned over to private
caretakers, it is the private individuals who tend to get taken care of, not the people.
The grandiose graft committed by the proprietors of Cherokee Daycare
Services should not be regarded as relevant in a local sense alone. In fact, it
may represent our nation’s future, writ large, should the advocates of
privatization (or “outsourcing,” as it’s also known) have their way in matters ranging
from education to postal affairs to national security. Aside from the
philosophical issues that arise from such transfers of authority, there is the immeasurable
difficulty that those actually answerable to the people have in
maintaining oversight of those firms enjoying the taxpayers’ largesse. State government
officials, as well as the private accounting firms charged with keeping tabs
on Cherokee, have testified to the magnitude of the problem. And pilferage
and rake-offs that may have totaled in the hundreds of thousands
locally can be expected to add up to billions on a national scale.
Beyond the question of private rake-offs is the matter of reduced
efficiency. This got to be a specter last year during the congressional debate on the
crucial airport security bill. A few diehard Republicans in the House of
Representatives (led by that body’s two Dickensian eminences, Armey and DeLay)
almost prevented passage of the measure, which had been approved by the
Senate without a single nay vote. They held out for private security firms to have
a piece of the action, even though it was private security firms that had been
the problem in the first place.
Now the issue relates to the bill, passed last week and signed into law by
President Bush, that establishes a Department of Homeland Security. The public
is probably reassured by the very sound of the name and no doubt assumes
that it represents an expanded commitment to the idea of national security.
Various observers, including the valiant Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia,
have pointed out, however, that, on the contrary, the bill does not begin to
restore billions that have actually been cut out of legitimate security undertakings
by an administration intent on its all-important tax-cut agenda. Worse, it
provides obvious boondoggles to select corporations and gives the
administration authority to fire federal employees in favor of those employed
— and perhaps underprotected — by these favored firms.
Worst of all, the bill allows U.S. government contracts to be awarded to
firms that have moved the skeleton headquarters of their operations offshore solely
in order to avoid U.S. taxes!
The bill is loaded with such giveaways. It should have been labeled the
Great Corporate Welfare Bill, and it demonstrates anew the indifference — and
cynicism — its backers seem to show toward the country’s actual security needs. It is
one more illustration of the new tendency to establish a government of the
special interests, by the special interests, and for the special interests. Lincoln would
have been as outraged as we are.
