Sailing Faith: The Long Way Home

So what does it mean – this idea of socialism.

On one hand, we have the tea party movement – you know, big government is bad, we pay too much in taxes, the president’s a black guy, the president’s a socialist, and then the dialogue moves into the ridiculous.

I was in Florida on Sunday, and learned of a tea party assembly last Thursday, and of a protest of NASA cuts on Saturday.

Let me get this straight. We want smaller government, and we want government funded jobs. Never mind that most of these jobs are with ‘private’ sector employers – they are still funneled through a socialist element in our society. Most of us are okay with that, and those marginal individuals and businesses not receiving government contracts, government grants, and government bailouts simply haven’t the voice to compete.  Especially when those ‘haves’ create such a loud clamor about socialism whenever an idea is proffered that would redirect some of our childrens debt away from themselves and toward those voiceless unfortunates.

So it goes in America.

This is not a new phenomenon, this granting of the collective ownership of the commons into the hands of corporations to distribute it as they see fit. Perhaps this concept is older than the railroads. I don’t know. What I do know is that with the railroads, we, as a society placed massive amounts of public property into the hands of a few individuals, upon which to build the railroads. We created the socialist corporation, disguised as private enterprise to serve our community, much like we expect NASA contractors to do, or Blackwater, or Halliburton, or KBR.

There seems a loud stink about the socialist aspect of taxpayer ownership of General Motors Corporation. I don’t remember the same odor emanating from the tax breaks, or highways and sewer construction, provided by governments to support a new General Motors plant. We call them externalized costs – a corporation’s production costs that we as a community are expected to bear.

For the sake of history, let’s examine the  Boston Tea Party – that party on which the so-called tea partiers of today want to fashion themselves around. It was here that a bunch of guys thought dressing up like Indians and tossing overboard a bunch of tea would make a statement against the the East India Trading Corporation for their own government-sanctioned control over the colonists livelihood and welfare. We today call such protesters anarchists.

The Boston Tea Party happened in 1774, a couple of years before anybody seriously considered no longer being a British subject. The Boston Tea Party was an act of protest over the control of the colonists’ lives and livelihoods by a government-sanctioned corporation.

Today, we fight wars with mercenaries (innocuously called “contractors”); we use our publicly financed military to defend the trade of private merchant vessels (in and around Somalia); we clamor for the opening-up of public resources for oil exploration – then reward the successful bidders with tax breaks for that exploration (basically giving them our public property for free) and for the privilege of selling it back to us, the original owners, on the private market; and make no mistake, the switch from analog to digital in our collectively-owned airwaves had little to do with quality, and much to do with increasing the available bandwidth so our illustrious communications corporations can sell us more of their valuable services!  The National Institute of Health provides funding for research and development of medicines, which we as consumers again have the opportunity of paying for at the pharmacy counter.

Privatize, privatize, privatize is the chant, and use the commons to that end.

Why is socialism less evil for the American Corporation than it is  for the American people, especially now that our Supreme Court has granted corporations personhood?

As a collective, we have bought into this. Don’t let anybody deceive you. When you witness your dying neighbor fighting with a government protected insurance company about his or her benefits, simply understand: we have the most evil form of socialism yet devised already in place. We love our corporations. We love rewarding them with commons property. We love the notion of dying at their mercy.

Socialism in America is not meant for people, but make no mistake, we are truly a socialist nation and I find that appalling.

I invite comments to prove me wrong, and hold as my deepest hope, that someone will do just that.