The Corporate / Government Enterprise System: privatizing profits and socializing risk ... by gimleteye

You can't help being angry reading the news today, with all the bile left over from the past year and the stock market taking off after so many small investors lost so much. There is a nation of angry Americans and not all of them understand, exactly, the source of so much passionate recriminations.

What America is left with, after the closest brush with an economic depression in seventy years, feels not so much a "recovery", as dregs rising to the surface of a polluted lagoon. Put this all under the header: privatizing profit and socializing risk. And make no mistake, policy makers and politicians have been socializing risk to taxpayers for so long that ordinary people are walking around like the zombies in "True Blood" under the spell of a supernatural creature waiting for the return of her god. Here's FPL-- aiming for a rate hike of 30 percent and new nuclear at sea-level in South Dade-- refusing to release the full list of individuals who have benefited from flying its corporate jet. The corporation has also refused to disclose the salaries of top executives. It stands accused of by-passing Florida law governing communications between regulators and the regulated. Among the names of its private jet service: Republican House minority leader John Boehner, Republican Rep. Connie Mack, Republican county commissioner from Broward, Jim Scott, and Republican former US Senator Mel Martinez. (FPL releases partial corporate-jet flight log, Miami Herald, Sept. 17, 2009). I'm guessing that after last November, a few Democrats added to the flight manifest. Perhaps not as many. Privatizing profit and socializing risk is also part of the story of the fiery debate of mayoral candidates last night; especially the horrendous deal struck by the city of Miami and the Florida Marlins for a new stadium that is scarcely needed except by the private baseball team that will be able to retain the vast majority of profits when it flips its shares to new owners; inevitable in one of the poorest, large counties in the United States.

Then, the most notable story of the day: Miami-Dade County is the number one spender in lobbying "of any other county in the country". (County is No. 1 spender in lobbying, Sept 17. 2009). There is a good reason that powerful lobbyists use county government as a private piggy bank: first, because they always have, and second, because there is a lot less lobbying work related to zoning than there used to be. That is particularly true of the sectors where two of the top recipients of largesse, Greenberg Traurig and Cardenas Associates, derived most of their local income: converting farmland and wetlands and open space to the masses of crappy housing that now loom as ghost suburbs here and everywhere. Make no mistake: these uber lobbying law firms are only the most visible top of the pyramid scheme that plays out into the ranks and teams of a lobbying culture that may be unrivaled for its tenacity and sheer employment numbers than any other city in the US. Playing the public interest was part and parcel of the lobbying culture that transformed the purposes of county government from protecting public health and welfare into facilitators of unsustainable growth; a key gear meshing up to the Wall Street Ponzi Scheme. We're amassing trillions in debt to bail out the perpetrators and having to face higher taxes to keep local government afloat. But all in all, the system that created this mess-- fabricated from the deliberate, willful miscalculation of risks-- remains securely in place. No one is going to jail. That's enough, for one morning's post-breakfast indigestion.