A very disturbing trend emerging in America is the growing privatization of government functions on the local and state levels in many municipalities and states.
An example is Chicago, which sold control of its parking meters and parking lots to private interests, and the result has been rising costs for travelers, consumers, and businessmen, making the cost of living much higher for the average resident or visitor to Chicago–all this for a quick fix on budgeting, but affecting parking for the next 75 years!
This is a horrible development, and it must be prevented, simply by people taking responsibility for higher taxes and lower services, but not just lower services!
If we continue to allow our infrastructure, as a state road in Indiana as an example, to be sold to private banks and corporations, it means that eventually all or most public services will be under the control of private business, which basically will be able to “blackmail” all of us, and destroy our democracy!
Many think already our country has become a plutocracy–rule of, by, and for the few–and this MUST stop, or else we risk a massive public uprising and riots on the level of what is going on in the Middle East!
Progressives want a return to democracy and the goals of progressivism, originally enunciated a century ago by Robert La Follette, Sr. and many others–political democracy, social justice, and economic regulation and intervention in the public interest!
What is going on today is the antithesis of everything this country is supposed to represent, and the movement to privatize everything must be halted dead in its tracks, as it is private corporations and banks and financial interests on Wall Street who have put us in the mess we are in, and now wish to finish the job of strangling American democracy!