Public Private Partnerships - The Ties that Bind
by Tom Buchanan  08/09/02

The partnership between the government and corporations goes against the grain of individual liberty, the very foundation of our nation. There are many blatant examples of this corporatism or economic fascism. The model that we follow in this country was first practiced by Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany.

Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines fascism as "a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized, autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition."

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language defines fascism as “A system of government marked by centralization of authority, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism.”

When this country was founded private enterprise did not want government interfere in its affairs. The main purpose of government was to provide a place where we could be free to pursue our individual happiness. Over the years our freedom has been watered down by a careful government controlled plan of social engineering designed for us to think of the needs of the state first. The first need of the state is economic in nature. The beast must be fed in order for it to grow. This has been accomplished by corporate and individual income taxes.

The first and maybe the most important example of the public private partnership is the withholding of individual income taxes by businesses. It makes corporate America the official tax collector of the state. The public somehow enjoys this convenience and gets used to looking only at the take-home portion of their paycheck, every thankful that they don’t have to file and come up with a check to pay their taxes in a timely fashion.

Corporations need a kickback for this service to government and it comes in the way of tax breaks. Yes, one hand does wash the other.

Another example of a kickback is public education. We are educating our children to be nothing more than good loyal employees of corporations who mold the educational system to provide them with a pool of prospective employees who will have their taxes deducted from their paychecks to feed the government beast.

We are no longer educating our children, but rather indoctrinating them to accept the fact that their potential stops at being good little worker bees for a corporation that is in partnership with the government. It is commonly called the ‘school to work’ philosophy of education. The most obvious example of this is the mission statement of the Thompson Valley R2J school district in Loveland, Colorado. “In partnership with the community, Thompson Schools will educate all students to assume their current and future responsibilities as individuals, citizens, and members of the work force”.

What if corporations, in order to maintain their profitability in a world where we produce nothing decide that in ten years from now all jobs will be nothing more than low paying, non thinking jobs. The order will go out to the government that this is the caliber of employee that will make the best employees in the future. The education system will respond by turning down the dial that controls the intelligence level of graduating students yet one more notch.

We have been systematically deprived of our individual rights by an indoctrination of years of public education followed by yet more government sponsored social engineering once we are taken into the corporate world. The most obvious is ‘diversity training’. Almost everyone has been exposed to a continual bombardment of this socialist idealism that we must all just get along because we are all the same despite our differences in upbringing, physical attributes and philosophical views.

It started with feminism and a false belief that girls are the same as boys and if not, the little boys must be restricted from being themselves because it is not how little girls act. From there the government has designed a mold that we must all fit into if it [the government] was to be successful. Mediocrity is all the rage. No child should fail in school because they can’t keep up. So instead of excellence in education where we produce individual thinking citizens we produce non-thinking worker bees that gladly accept their place on the assembly line of corporate America so that Big Brother can be fed and grow. It is an endless, vicious circle!

The government is involved in higher education as well. Lately there have been outrageous cooperate scandals, Enron, Global Crossing and countless others no doubt yet to come. They all involved bilking investors out of millions of dollars by pumping up their profit out look and appearing much better off than they actually are. These greedy corporate raiders were only following the example of a government that manages to play the shell game of moving money around to the tune of trillions of our investments in government. The proposed solution is for government to cry foul and create new hoops to jump through. It is like appointing Al Capone to regulate the bootlegging industry during prohibition.

Examples of public private partnerships are abundant in all avenues of our lives. Recently there was a push to get build a hotel/convention center in our town. Research was done for the city by some pro-hotel organization. Their conclusion was that it would cost $34,000,000 and it would be economically feasible if the city put up half of the money. If it was economically feasible someone in the private sector would have done it long ago.

Government needs to stay out of the world of business and corporations need to stop dictating how dumb of a product they want our public education system to produce. Maybe then we can all enjoy more freedom even if the price we pay is that we truly realize we are all diverse and do not wish to be crammed into the same public private ideological mold.

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