Ending Perpetual Privatization

Whether or not his hands are tied on future spending plans as a result of the Paulson bailout, I hope Barack Obama follows through on this:

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama moved to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility in a roiling economy, vowing on Monday to slash federal spending on contractors by 10 percent and saving $40 billion.

Urging members of his own party to be just as fiscally tough as the most conservative Republicans, Obama said the $700 billion economic bailout plan proposed by the Bush administration and congressional leaders is forcing a renewed look at federal spending.

As president, Obama said he would create a White House team headed by a chief performance officer to monitor the efficiency of government spending [...]

President Bush ran for office on a platform of efficiency in government, Obama said, noting that Bush instead has presided over a mushrooming federal budget and deficits. Under Bush, spending on contractors has more than doubled, from $203 billion in 2000 to $412 billion in 2006.

"We cannot give a blank check to Washington with no oversight and accountability, when no oversight and accountability is what got us into this mess in the first place," said Obama. He warned that even as the government moves to bail out the financial sector there are signs that special interests are looking to profit.

The rhetoric may sound fiscally conservative, but what Obama is really talking about is the privatization of everything. That includes letting private companies collect taxes instead of the IRS, letting private military contractors fight our wars instead of the US military, letting lobbyists and corporate interests run our foreign and domestic policy. And there's a pretty stark choice here, more than is conventionally described in the traditional media. The fact is that McCain has a belief in privatization as a way to drown government in the bathtub, and he certainly has not been shy in enriching those private contractors, even in the case of the earmarks he supposedly never pursues.



The fact that Sarah Palin supposedly rejected the bridge to nowhere while spending $25 million on a road to that same stretch of nowhere is similiarly discordant.

The federal government needs to do the job of the federal government. This idea that private interests are inherently more efficient has been proven a lie by the past eight years. If Barack Obama wants a legacy as a privatization hunter, I'm all for it.