CT Blue

A few days ago, I said I’d be putting up a series of posts comparing our present Age of Corruption, Plutocracy and Kakistocracy to the Gilded Age. Herewith, installment two.

Back around the 80s, the Republican Party began promoting itself as the party of new ideas. The ideas seemed to consist of inventive ways to prove that Billie Holliday was right, and that “Them that’s got shall have; Them that’s not shall lose”.

But in fact, most of those new ideas were simply recasts of old ideas; ideas that had proven disastrous in the past and have or will prove disastrous in the present.

I’ll concentrate on just one of those ideas here: Privatization.

There’s nothing innovative about the concept of privatizing what should be governmental services. Indeed, at some point, reformers must have spent a lot of time and effort de-privatizing various government services. In the Gilded Age, privitization took a number of forms, but the end result was the same as it is now. Those performing what should have been government functions took advantage of their positions to line their pockets, delivering poor services at greater cost in the process.

In many cases, this took the forms of fee based “services”, in which nominal government employees were paid primarily by fees they imposed on their “customers”. Before Chester Arthur became president, he was the beneficiary of the patronage largesse of the corrupt New York Senator, Roscoe Conkling, who got him appointed Customs Collector of the Port of New York. Customs Collectors didn’t simply get a salary, they got half of the penalty on goods undervalued for import. White, in The Republic for Which it Stands, cites an example of a penalty of $271,000 (a lot of money back then) on goods undervalued by a mere $6,000.00, which translated into a revenue loss of $1,600.00. Arthur and his cronies (with a kickback to Conkling) split $135,500. And Arthur was comparatively honest.

The fee based system also incentivized the continued enslavement of black males in the South. Sheriffs got a share of the fines assessed on criminal defendants. Since poor black defendants (and of course, they were always guilty)could not pay the fine, the sheriff’s “leased” them to work under brutal conditions where they were treated worse that slaves, since as one of the leasee’s noted, there was a difference between owning a slave, in which you had an investment, and leasing one, since “we don’t own ‘em. One dies, get another.” And die they did, in staggering numbers.

It’s hard to believe-well, no it’s not really hard to believe- – that this sort of thing goes on to this very day. Read thisand this, about two Southern sheriffs (two among many) who have starved prisoners (and you know they’re mostly black) so they could pocket “excess” food funds under a state law that actually authorizes the practice, thereby actually incentivizing starvation. It makes the almost universal practice of corruptly overcharging prisoners for phone calls seem benign.

In one of his final acts, Obama made an attempt to abolish the private prison system, at least on the federal level, but Trump, of course, reversed that. If you make your money imprisoning people, you have a vested interest in creating new prisoners, and in keeping them for as long as you can, so you do what you can to get more people in prison. They don’t whip or kill (at least as brazenly) their prisoners anymore, but the financial incentives in the private prison industry mimic the incentives that doomed generations of “free” blacks to a more brutal form of slavery than existed before the Civil War. And, as always, people of color are disproportionally affected today, just as they were in the Gilded Age.

Getting back to my introductory paragraphs, the whole “privitization” idea is not only not new, it’s pretty much how we started, and stank of corruption. We are now heading into an era where even the public schools will be privatized, something even the Gilded Agers, bless their little hearts, would never have countenanced. You couldn’t get more Gilded Age than Hartford (after all, that’s where Twain wrote the book), and it was during that period that the good folks in Hartford built a high school (HPHS, say it louder we’re the best!) that they intended to be the best, determinedly public, school in the nation. And it was! Once the charter school industry gets a lock on school funding sources, corruption in that sector will flourish, teacher salaries and quality will decline, and our educational system will be far worse than it is today. And depend on it, once they get their hands on the school systems, they will buy up the legislatures and school spending will go up, while school quality declines.