privatization my ass

Well I guess there are several ways of measuring poverty, one is with that absolute line where anybody who falls below is poor and anybody who falls above is rich, but  you kind of have to keep moving it.  If you do that percentage thing than we always have the same amount of poor, though I suppose you could fiddle with the percentages, you could change them to tenths or thirds or whatever.

Here's something.  Me and my ilk hate throwing money at the military, but at some sense we realize we do need some kind of army, but we know you and your ilk love throwing money at the military, so we can feel it's ok to fight defense funding as hard as we like, because we know you guys will always make sure the military gets plenty.  Likewise you and your ilk know we want to throw money at poverty so you can feel free to fight those programs as hard as you like because you know me and my ilk will always make sure the poor get something.

Actually you seem to be more sympathetic to the poor than most of your ilk, remember what Ayn Rand said about the poor (You can feed them if you like, but I won't).  And actually the poor get short shrift anymore.  You could never launch anything like the war on poverty these days, because nobody cares much about the poor, it is all about the middle class.  But middle class is pretty vague, I think what they mean is most voters.

I suppose it's okay to have somebody not in the army peeling your potatoes, but i don't think they should be carrying guns around because they are just not going to be as loyal, and the worst thing that can happen to them if they fuck up is that they get fired, and not by the firing squad.

But during the Iraq war it seemed like we were paying plenty of mercenaries.  A lot of the neocons behind getting us involved didn't want to just topple Saddam, they wanted to create a whole new country, and as long as they were doing that they might as well make it a assize faire dreamworld, and privatization is part of the capitalist dream. 

I think on the face of it, it doesn't make sense.  If you have a crew of say street sweepers for your city, then you pay them and they get all of it.  But if you hire Al's Street Sweepers to do it for you, then you pay Al who pays his street sweepers and keeps a nice slice for himself.  I guess you save some money because Al pays his street sweepers peanuts, but then do you want the citizens of your city to be paid peanuts?  And generally, as Chicago has discovered, when you pay people peanuts they don't do such a good job. 

Speaking of cities, the word spoken most frequently in my city is Detroit, as in are we going the same way?  It's pensions.  For years we robbed the pension funds of our public workers and now that debt is catching up with us.  We have tried to weasel our way out of paying the pensions, but the courts won't allow that.  Our current Republican governor would never raise taxes, and I have to admit, the dems are not either, so our bonds keep getting downgraded costing us millions or billions, I forget which. 

Meanwhile out my window, the city is bustling, there are cranes everywhere putting up new buildings, so what is going on here?

I'm leaving for a Sulllivan bank trip and a get together with old pals in Denver tomorrow morning and I won't  be back until Sunday night so I guess we will have about a week to think about things before we return to the arena, I mean the discussion table.