It’s a kind of Republican two-step that’s come to dominate our culture. We take one step forward by proposing to widen access to higher education via an expanded online community college (in this case, in Nevada). What happens? The republican mind-set, ever ready to milk the government teat, argues that the new or expanded system ought to be out-sourced. We can’t get past our market fetish and to begin to think about the public good.
It keeps happening, too, despite the every growing pile of evidence that as long as we socialize costs and privatize profits we will all continue to grow poorer and poorer as the money pools among an increasingly small group. Increasingly, the Bush years have come to be called the “lost decade“– a full ten years of stagnation and violence, all rooted in the narrow narcissism of the private profit motive. It used to be simply called greed.
