10. Privatization

Private prisons—and their lobby—are a big reason for high incarceration rates in the US, with higher rates still for people of color.

Privatization is the backdrop to the mistreatment of black and brown Americans, Americans whose roots go to Africa and those tied to southern neighbors, and, more than any to the misnamed original inhabitants of the Americas, the Indians.

Wars were fought and treaties made to gain Indian lands, but privatization is specifically written into the Homestead and Allotment acts, which divided common tribal lands into parcels sold cheaply to Euro-Americans.

It took a Civil War to break the country of laws that made African-Americans the private property of their slave-owners. It took legislation at local, state, and eventually at the national level to break the doctrine of coverture, under which a woman was legally considered the chattel of her husband.

Braceros from Mexico came to the US to work the fields during WW II, and then were sent home. There have been programs since, the “guest workers” commodities hired--and owned for a time--by private Americans, welcome and unwelcome at leaders’ whims.

Still, the country has often preached the common good.  African Americans and Indians eventually got citizenship and the vote; women got property rights and the vote. Roads became public, public parks developed, and public education—sometimes “separate but equal”—was gradually extended, until the recent era of public funding of private schools.

The last great surges toward public good were in the 30s. FDR’s answer to the Great Depression was to end individual American citizens’ agony through Social Security, bank insurance, the CCC and public works, artists painting post office murals, and writers writing state guidebooks.

Privatization has been the gospel since Reagan; this COVID exposes its failures—prisons, nursing homes, health insurance. We still have Social Security and Medicare, voices for their privatization now muted.
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