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With increasing frequency I make an effort to link the "Corporate Takeover of Nature" issue to the larger issue I call "The Corporate Takeover of Everything." Today I'd like to link the "Corporate Takeover of Everything" to its larger context.
Pasted below are excerpts from a piece of writing coming out of London. I share these specific excerpts because while they may appear to be unrelated to the issue of public land management here in the USA, they provides an effective summation of key points found within my hundreds of postings on the very specific topic of recreation user fees and public lands management.
Years ago Wild Wilderness gave away thousands of bumper stickers that said "Fee-Demo is UNDEMOCRATIC."
I hope the final paragraph of the appended article makes it clear why we chose that particular message.
Scott
--- begin quoted excerpts ----
9/07/07
EXCERPTS FROM:
Total Capitalism - by Colin Leys
I recently received a circular from the Local Authority of the district
in London where I live, which addressed me as a "customer." I should
really be inured by now to neoliberalism's relentless penetration of
the "life world," but it took me aback all the same. I don't buy
anything from my local council; on the contrary, it is supposed to
represent me. I elect it, and it spends my taxes.
Under total capitalism the free market is the supreme value to which
not just national sovereignty and civil liberties, but all public and
private life, are increasingly subordinated -- to the point where the
distinction between public and private serves increasingly as a useful
fiction. Public transport, education, health care, social services,
scientific research, telecommunications, broadcasting, publishing,
pensions, foreign aid, land use, water, the public infrastructure, the
arts, and even policy-making itself (since it is increasingly entrusted
to private-sector personnel seconded into government ministries): all
become subject to market-driven policy-making in the name of
"efficiency" and are treated more and more as fields for profitable
private investment rather than as means to a better society.
For a public service to be transformed into a market, several
requirements need to be met. First, the service must be reconfigured
into a series of discrete elements that can be priced and sold -- in a
word, it must be transformed into a set of commodities. Second, people
must be induced to want to buy the service out of their own pockets,
normally by cutting the funding for non-market provision, so that its
quality and accessibility decline until people are ready to pay for a
market-provided alternative. Third, the workforce involved in
providing the service must be transformed from one working for
collective aims, with a public service ethic, to one working to produce
profits for owners of capital and subject to market discipline. Fourth,
the risk involved for the private corporations taking over the services
must be underwritten by the state, at great public expense. This
process radically changes the nature of services -- in some cases
abolishing them entirely -- and public services are no exception...
...public services then develop in the direction of private services,
i.e. with different grades of quality and accessibility, priced
according to the respective cost of each level of service provided. You
can still get a "full-service" service, but only if you can pay for
it. This is achieved initially through the introduction of fees for
"extras" of various kinds, but before long these extras come to include
things like school books and tuition, decent hospital food,
high-quality television programmes, and so on that were originally part
of the standard service provided to everybody.
So what began as a public service designed to fulfil a
collectively-determined social or political purpose ends up as a drive
to find mass-produced goods that can be sold profitably, while the
public is differentiated into a hierarchy of individuals, now as
unequal in this respect as they are in most others. The collective
needs and universal values which the service was originally created to
serve are gradually marginalized and finally abandoned. Total
capitalism seeks a totally individualized population, without
collective needs or universal values; for total capitalism there is, as
Mrs Thatcher put it, "no such thing as society, only individuals and
their families," spending their money in markets.
But can we have democracy without society -- without a modicum of
equality of status and condition, secured by universal public services,
and a significant degree of social solidarity based on this? It seems
unlikely.
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- Privatization 
