Email List
Most Popular This Week
- Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
- Study: Monsanto's Roundup Herbicide Linked to Cancer, Autism, Parkinson's
- Picture of the Week
- 'The Gilded Age' Statistics Corporations Don't Want Workers, or Anyone, to See
- Bradley Manning is Off Limits at SF Gay Pride Parade, but Corporate Sleaze is Embraced
- Study: Monsanto's Roundup Herbicide Linked to Cancer, Autism, Parkinson's
- Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
- Report: Toxic Chemicals Found in Thousands of Children's Products
- The Life and Death of Words, People, and Even Nature
- You and Your Family Are Guinea Pigs for the Chemical Corporations
Popular content
Today's Top News
Nationalization: It's Not Scary, It's All Around You
Amidst the punditocracy's handwringing about the supposedly unprecedented possibility of nationalization in America, Paul Krugman this week reminded his New York Times readers that nationalization is "as American as apple pie." He noted that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has been nationalizing about two banks per week, and that the best way to save our financial system is to temporarily nationalize it. But before we get scared about the prospect of nationalization (ie. public/government ownership of major parts of the economy), let's remember: nationalization already pervades far more than the banking industry - it's all around us.
For instance, about 45 million Americans rely on public power utilities for their electricity. Those utilities are nationalized - that is, they are owned and operated by government (in this case, municipal governments).
Have you ever taken a subway, a commuter train like New Jersey Transit, a public bus or Amtrak? Have you ever sent a letter through the U.S. Postal Service? Then you've benefited from nationalized services - in those cases, mass transit and mail.
Then there's the health care system, with Medicare creating a quasi-nationalization model, and the Veterans Administration providing a fully nationalized system. And what do you know? Medicare is wildly popular, and the VA system is renowned for its quality.
These are just a few examples of nationalization in our midst. And as Harvard's Richard Parker notes in Newsweek, our country has a solid record of responsible nationalization during major crises. In his essay entitled, "Not a Dirty Word," he reports:
In World War I, the nations' railroads were successfully nationalized to sustain the war effort. In the 1930s, the Reconstruction Finance Corp. bought millions of shares in over 6,000 banks in order to rescue them. During World War II, government took control of the economy's entire pricing system for consumer goods-a more complex job than taking over several big banks-and did quite well at it, most economists agree. In the 1980s, the Resolution Trust Corp. seized hundreds of failed savings and loans in order to save the system. After 9/11, the government effectively nationalized the private-security firms at airports, and replaced them with the federal TSA.
So the next time you hear Rush Limbaugh or some teevee pundit blathering on about the economic crisis and claiming nationalization is dangerous and un-American, remember: nationalization is everywhere in America, and has been for a long time - and it has worked quite well when done responsibly.
- Posted in
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
69 Comments so far
Show All"nationalization.......has worked quite well when done responsibly."
Yes - when done "responsibly". We will see if our leaders today are willing to be responsible for the benefit of our citizens and country.
Being responsible could entail some self-sacrifice on their part; something they're not accustomed to. Let's see how many of them are willing to join the rest of us for the good of the country!
If you're against "Nationalization" you should refuse all the following:
Prescription drugs = a great many were developed with government funding.
Medical care = your doctor may have received government loans to go to medical school.
The internet = developed with government money.
Any store bought food = Industrial agriculture could not survive withot tons'o cash from Uncle Sam.
Free televsion = Media companies get licenses to use the public's airwaves, worth untold trillions of dollars, for virtually free.
AM/FM radio = Again, Rush Limbaugh is the biggest welfare queen. He lives off the free public airwaves.
The streets and highways = created and maintained with public funds.
Any food inspected by the FDA = refuse to eat it. Demand that a private company that receives no government funds inspect your food.
Beautiful :-)
You missed the Fire Dept., it's been nationalised for many years now. Back in the 1800s you had to purchase a shield that told the firefighters not to loot your home if they saved it from burning down. No shield, well the firefighters would put out the fire, and take everything not burned as 'payment' for putting the fire out.
It was kinda like how the usa now provides for health care.
Good catch.
However, MOST fire fighters in the US are volunteers. It's only the rich cities that can afford to man their company's. Volunteers used to get paid about $11/hr when on a call, but no longer (here in NM). We are given bunker gear etc, which is a sizable investment and a life-saver. And we do get life insurance and retirement after 20 years of service, but how many volunteers hold on for that long?
Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in their moccasins - Native American proverb.
The volunteers might have a better retention rate if they allowed the old way of doing things. Get a kitty if you rescue it, keep the furnature, jewels and appliances/electronics of the home where you put out a fire. (grin, I'm trying to make a joke.)
"Nationalization: You're Soaking In It!" would be a better headline.
· Yr Obd't Servant
If it's good enough for the Soviet Union, it's good enough for us! The government will help us! The Government is our Friend. The Government looks out for us. The Government cares about us. Big Brother is watching.
So get off the internet, if you hate government support so much :-)
The internet would have been developed faster and cheaper without the government. How long do you think they held ARPAnet as "classified?" What technology do you think they've developed that is being withheld TODAY that TODAY could save thousands from hunger, poverty, or disease? Computers were an inevitable invention. Networking was an inevitable invention. It's not like a dose of fairy dust and government magic brought forth the Internet out of the aether. The government is not a magic money pixie that rewrites physics on the fly in order to make new inventions possible - in fact, it patents and withholds inventions and keeps them from people as long as they can.
Eh, they're funding almost entirely military-related research these days, I doubt they're holding anything right now that could stave off those problems. And if the private sector had developed the internet, you think it would be as relatively free and easy to access as it is? No, they would have patented it and every single piece of equipment related to it, and it would be completely unavailable to anyone but the super rich. Well, of course then China would have pirated it and distributed it for almost free.
The private sector did develop the internet.
I connect through an Apple computer via a Westel modem to the AT&T network. If any of these give me problems, I could just as easily connect via a Dell computer over a Cisco modem to the Cruzio network.
And government regulation and funding for research has nothing to do with the compatibility and smooth functioning of all these various parts, the data lines being used, and the power used by these devices?
Oh but it does! I daresay my Playstation 3 would play much more nicely with Mac's iTunes if government patents didn't allow corporations to hide interoperability specs. I could probably even run Linux if government-enforced patents didn't protect hardware vendors from having to publically release their specs, and if the DMCA didn't make backwards-engineering a federal crime on par with terrorism.
Poor baby, and who wants those patents? Oops, private companies...so they can profit even more.
Who grants them? Who enforces them with implied violence? The patent system is the government colluding with corporations to ENFORCE monopolies at the end of the government gun. Again, the government is the source of our backwardsness?
And you know why? You know what the great big secret is that nobody seems to get? That Mao was right. Mao was right from the start -
"Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun."
ALL government authority is derived from violence. All the Fascists were right from the beginning. People do what they're ordered not because they want to, not because it's good for them, but because there's a sword hanging over their head. Instead of pointing that gun at someone else for a different reason, for a different agenda - I want to dispose of the government gun entirely.
And what's your alternative?
If you think about it, a negative attitude toward government is distinctly pathological. Since government is an inherent component of any society, hating government is like hating one of your own vital organs. It cannot possibly be healthy.
If anti-government types ran the show, I guess they'd end up having government workers wear armbands, or computer implants, so we can watch for their inevitable skullduggery. Children who express a desire to go into government service would be routed immediately to counselors. It would be like nirvana, with all humankind united in mutual hatred of government.
All in all, it's a bad idea to get your political ideas from the 1980s.
Anti-government types have run the show, under Reagan, Bush 1, and Bush 2. And look what happened.
>>If you think about it, a negative attitude toward government is distinctly pathological.
We should institutionalize anti-government dissidents in insane asylums! Just like they used to in the USSR. Anyone who does not love the Soviet Union is obviously a lunatic, since the Soviet Union is the greatest thing that ever happened to the common man.
Seriously - tool.
As to the next comment, about Reagan, Bush 1 and Bush 2 -
Expanding the size and scope of government and increasing deficit spending IS NOT SMALL GOVERNMENT CONSERVATISM GODDAMNIT. Why would you think it is?
Do you think small government is possible in an industrialized society? I don't, plain and simple. Back when the country was founded, sure, just about everything you ate or used cam from a few miles away. These days, count on them coming from across the planet. Going to trust that that Chinese capitalists won't sell poisonous fake baby formula, or will you trust a government agency to test it? (unfortunately they usually don't, because they have far too little money, manpower, and authority)
meh...twilight of the dammerung? i mean look at kitty hawk. all guvmint ever did w/airplanes was bomb other countries. if guvmint had stayed out of the airline biz, then....braniff would be flying today?!?? wtf???
*sigh*
You really need to look up the history of the BSD operating system, developed at the University of California, Berkeley, for one example. Or the Mosaic browser from UIUC.
Much of research for the underlying operating systems, the algorithms, that make the internet and computers possible were developed at publicly funded universities, such as UC Berkeley, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign.,
Take some classes in computer science.
The corporations will help us! The corporations are our friend! The Corporations look out for us! The corporations care about us! Soylent Green is People!
Corporations are not our friends, exactly. Some of them have hijacked the government to enforce monopolies detrimental to common folk at the barrel of the gun. But unlike the government, some corporations are good, some are bad. Unlike government, you can CHOOSE which corporations when looking for a good or service.
Obama's economic plan is as scintillating and brilliant as the Great Leap Forward. I hope it does not starve as many Americans as Mao starved.
but dammerung of the dammerung, *all* corporations depend on guvmint for their existence.......so no gov't, no corp. but you know, whatevs. guvmint bad, some corps good. uh huh.
Agreed for the most part, but I'll quibble with Sirota about the US Postal Svc. It once was a purely gov't entity, but has now morphed into one of those partly privatized, quasi-governmental hybrids, to the detriment of its patrons (we the taxpayers).
The problem with nationalism is that it cuts into corporate profit. It's great for the rest of us.
It's half funny, half sad that people expect that a government that massacres civilians in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Somalia - with nary a word in most cases, and a denial in the rest - is looking out for their best interests.
Trust me you chumps - your life is not worth more than the life of any murdered barbarian to the regime. They are not looking out for YOU, they are not interested in helping YOU any more than the dozens of civilians killed in our ally Pakistan THIS MONTH. If they thought they could perpetuate the military-industrial complex and make a little cash by bombing YOUR house, they would. If Obama had to prove his "tough guy" credentials to get reelected and the only way was to drop a Daisy Cutter in your neighborhood, you better believe he would just like his drones murder Pakistanis.
It has been the legal tradition for centuries, if not longer, that only government has the authority and legal power to kill. If you did it, it's simply murder. And don't think for a second any of us on here support the full of shit 'war on terror'.
But here's what you don't get -
You are nothing more than any other barbarian civilian to them. Your life has no more intrinsic worth to the powers in Washington than that of a baker in Waziristan. The moment it becomes politically opportune, they'll kill you and your whole family then get on tv and deny it ever happened.
The more money you give them, the more power you give them, the more secrecy you allow them - the closer the day comes where they can kill, kidnap, torture, or enslave you and yours without any fear of repercussion.
Good description of your average multinational corporate board of directors.
I'm hoping that's not his alternative to government.
Edit: ugh, it IS his alternative.
Seriously - I vastly prefer Snow Crash to 1984, and it looks like ultimately our choice is between the two with no third option. I'd rather live in a Mafia-run burbclave where I pay my taxes and can smoke my dope in peace, rather than a country where the Junior Anti-Sex League can pass Proposition 8 and prevent OTHER PEOPLE from getting married.
Perhaps you should watch Idiocracy, where water was deemed harmful to corporate profits and was banned from public consumption or from use in agriculture. And you're blaming government as a whole for the repression of conservatives?
>>Perhaps you should watch Idiocracy, where water was deemed harmful to corporate profits and was banned
I love that movie. But who banned it? THE GOVERNMENT! The government has a monopoly on political violence, only the government can ban something by fining you or shooting you if you do it anyway.
Corporations didn't ban hemp, the government did. And how did it accomplish this? By kidnapping or shooting anyone growing it. The government isn't some magnanimous friend in a high place looking out for us. It's a petty thug looking for someone to beat up.
>>And you're blaming government as a whole for the repression of conservatives?
My point is this: the government is inherently chaotic evil because its influence is expressed through violence.
There will always be groups of dedicated idiots to take the reigns of government and oppress people. See: Prop 8 banning gay marriage in California.
The problem here is the government has POWER OVER marriage. If the government had no authority in marriage whatsoever and it was nothing more than a cute if hokey religious ceremony, this wouldn't be a problem. But damn fools allowed marriage to become a legal contract, so now the government can dictate to us who can be married and who can't. The problem isn't marriage itself, or that there are groups of morons trying to get a backwards agenda enforced. The problem is that the government is so huge and so violent and reaches so many places that it becomes a tool for dictating to people how to live.
So less government in our lives. Then it can't dictate to us who to marry, what to smoke, what to drink, what to eat, where to go (Cuba!), what we can do with our bodies (pro-choice!), who we can have sex with, and on and on and on.
Everything you're complaining about, minus marriage, is done because GOVERNMENT is pretty much OWNED BY CORPORATIONS, which you seem to worship. You know corporations used to hire thugs (and Pinkerton detectives) to slaughter employees (in some cases, gunning them down with Gatling guns) who were striking or wanted to unionize? Guess who finally stepped in top protect employees from being murdered. The evil, evil government. Ultimately, government is answerable to its citizens, who have the right to resist oppression. Corporations are answerable to pretty much nobody. Corporate executives these days seem to ignore shareholders, so even that supposed safeguard is non-existent.
You're suggesting the same government that massacres barbarian civilians without a blink is interested in protecting us?
They are only protecting their agendas, not us. They won't even give working equipment to American boys and girls fighting the transnationals's wars overseas.
I understand your problem with corporations but it has arisen because America is and always has been a fascist country.
Why do you insist on seeing government as the same exact, unchanging thing throughout all of America's history? Technically we get a new government every 2 years with elections...which is how we've had over 110 Congresses now. You're suggesting that government under Bush is the same thing as government under Obama is the same thing as government under Washington?
Near abouts. Washington's wars against the Injuns and Obama's wars against the Ayrabs. Obama persecuting cocaine dealers after being a big fan himself, and Washington's brutal suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion.
Hmm, you got me there.
I am not sure who is the real monolith, the Corporate banking Cartel that controls the money or their puppets, all the various governments.
I think we are getting hung up on words here.
Words like nationalize have many different and opposing connotations like in "National Socialism".
You can argue that government is bad and no government is good, but reality and evolution rules anyway.
Maybe so. But unlike government, corporations are not a monolith. You've got AT&T and Microsoft. Trader Joe's, New Leaf. Your local bakery is probably a corporation to protect its owner from liability. Safeway, Food Lion. Google and Cisco.
Government is ALWAYS chaotic evil. Corporations run the whole gamut, from Lawful Good to Chaotic Stupid.
I do my best to choose to spend my money at corporations whose missions I agree with. Some things I go without, some things I can only get at Long's unfortunately. Most things, I get from Trader Joe's and New Leaf. Because I'd rather spend my money there than alternatives.
With government I have no choice. I have to fund the wars whether I believe in them or not. I have to fund the Department of Education even though I think it makes our kids docile and stupid. I have to fund all kinds of missions I despise at the barrel of a gun, rather than being able to CHOOSE.
Choose direct democracy
ni4d.us/
and you'll always have a choice.
So what are you gonna do at the barrel of a gun?
yo, twilite of the dammerung, much of what you say about gov't is true.
much of what you say about corporations is false.
they are both much more interconnected. they reinforce each other, exist b/c of each other, kind of like a yin yang thing, or "69".
i'm w/you about kicking back and smoking a bowl at the end of the day.
do you really think at&t is w/you?
Correction: The problem with nationalization is it cuts into corporate profit. It's great for the rest of us.
Why ask the government to nationalize banks when you could try joining a credit union for a change? Besides, banks are private entries and nationalizing them will only cost the taxpayers more money as if bailing them out weren't enough. Let them collapse so that credit unions can make their comebacks.
Terrance Mitchell
Redfield, South Dakota
Thank you thank you thank you!
Citibank and BoA need to die and burn in Hell for all eternity.
Let credit unions with responsible investment portfolios and excellent customer services step up and fill their shoes. We are institutionalizing failure instead of letting responsible success increase its market share.
See, we can agree on things. I am merely in favor of nationalizing banks so they can be sold off at a profit to restore the funds spend on them by the government and then some. Not to mention, seriously regulating them for a change.