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 I have long used the issue of recreation user fees as a tool for exposing, and fighting, the wider reaching threats of neoliberalism and also what I have been calling "neofeudalism".
Starting with the creation of the Wild Wilderness website a decade ago, I have continuously warned that park and forest recreation budgets would, in the years to come, be slashed. I explained that this would be done in order to create a crisis that would eventually be resolved by privatization and commercialization.
A decade ago I coined the phrase "The Corporate Takeover of Nature" and as much as I had hoped to prevent that from happening, what I was really speaking about was merely the name of a battleground.
The war is over the "Corporate Takeover of Everything", and from the perspective
of Wild Wilderness, it is a war that is not merely being lost, it is being lost
with little meaningful resistance being offered.
Pasted below is an article by George Monbiot published yesterday in The Guardian (London) which explains as well as any brief article can, the nature of the neoliberal threat to our public lands, our shared infrastructure, our democracy and our lives. It needs no further introduction — and yet, for the sake of my peers in the conservation community, I wish to inoculate your thinking with one word. When you come upon it, I ask you to please momentarily pause and reflect. The word is "PEW."
Scott
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August 28, 2007
The Guardian (London)
How the neoliberals stitched up the wealth of nations for themselves
A cabal of intellectuals and elitists hijacked the economic debate, and now we are dealing with the catastrophic effects
By George Monbiot
For the first time the UK's consumer debt exceeds the total of its
gross national product: a new report shows that we owe £1.35 trillion.
Inspectors in the United States have discovered that 77,000 road
bridges are in the same perilous state as the one which collapsed into
the Mississippi. Two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, 120,000
people from New Orleans are still living in trailer homes and temporary
lodgings. As runaway climate change approaches, governments refuse to
take the necessary action. Booming inequality threatens to create the
most divided societies the world has seen since before the first world
war. Now a financial crisis caused by unregulated lending could turf
hundreds of thousands out of their homes and trigger a cascade of
economic troubles.
These problems appear unrelated, but they all have something in common.
They arise in large part from a meeting that took place 60 years ago in
a Swiss spa resort. It laid the foundations for a philosophy of
government that is responsible for many, perhaps most, of our
contemporary crises.
When the Mont Pelerin Society first met, in 1947, its political project
did not have a name. But it knew where it was going. The society's
founder, Friedrich von Hayek, remarked that the battle for ideas would
take at least a generation to win, but he knew that his intellectual
army would attract powerful backers. Its philosophy, which later came
to be known as neoliberalism, accorded with the interests of the
ultra-rich, so the ultra-rich would pay for it.
Neoliberalism claims that we are best served by maximum market freedom
and minimum intervention by the state. The role of government should be
confined to creating and defending markets, protecting private property
and defending the realm. All other functions are better discharged by
private enterprise, which will be prompted by the profit motive to
supply essential services. By this means, enterprise is liberated,
rational decisions are made and citizens are freed from the
dehumanising hand of the state.
This, at any rate, is the theory. But as David Harvey proposes in his
book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, wherever the neoliberal
programme has been implemented, it has caused a massive shift of wealth
not just to the top 1%, but to the top tenth of the top 1%. In the US,
for instance, the upper 0.1% has already regained the position it held
at the beginning of the 1920s. The conditions that neoliberalism
demands in order to free human beings from the slavery of the state -
minimal taxes, the dismantling of public services and social security,
deregulation, the breaking of the unions - just happen to be the
conditions required to make the elite even richer, while leaving
everyone else to sink or swim. In practice the philosophy developed at
Mont Pelerin is little but an elaborate disguise for a wealth grab.
So the question is this: given that the crises I have listed are
predictable effects of the dismantling of public services and the
deregulation of business and financial markets, given that it damages
the interests of nearly everyone, how has neoliberalism come to
dominate public life?
Richard Nixon was once forced to concede that "we are all Keynesians
now". Even the Republicans supported the interventionist doctrines of
John Maynard Keynes. But we are all neoliberals now. Margaret Thatcher
kept telling us that "there is no alternative", and by implementing her
programmes Clinton, Blair, Brown and the other leaders of what were
once progressive parties appear to prove her right.
The first great advantage the neoliberals possessed was an unceasing
fountain of money. US oligarchs and their foundations - Coors, Olin,
Scaife, Pew and others - have poured hundreds of millions into setting
up think tanks, founding business schools and transforming university
economics departments into bastions of almost totalitarian neoliberal
thinking. The Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the American
Enterprise Institute and many others in the US, the Institute of
Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith
Institute in the UK, were all established to promote this project.
Their purpose was to develop the ideas and the language which would
mask the real intent of the programme - the restoration of the power of
the elite - and package it as a proposal for the betterment of
humankind.
Their project was assisted by ideas which arose in a very different
quarter. The revolutionary movements of 1968 also sought greater
individual liberties, and many of the soixante-huitards saw the state
as their oppressor. As Harvey shows, the neoliberals coopted their
language and ideas. Some of the anarchists I know still voice notions
almost identical to those of the neoliberals: the intent is different,
but the consequences very similar.
Hayek's disciples were also able to make use of economic crises. An
early experiment took place in New York City, which was hit by
budgetary disaster in 1975. Its bankers demanded that the city follow
their prescriptions - huge cuts in public services, smashing of the
unions, public subsidies for business. In the UK, stagflation, strikes
and budgetary breakdown allowed Thatcher, whose ideas were framed by
her neoliberal adviser Keith Joseph, to come to the rescue. Her
programme worked, but created a new set of crises.
If these opportunities were insufficient, the neoliberals and their
backers would use bribery or force. In the US, the Democrats were
neutered by new laws on campaign finance. To compete successfully for
funding with the Republicans, they would have to give big business what
it wanted. The first neoliberal programme of all was implemented in
Chile following Pinochet's coup, with the backing of the US government
and economists taught by Milton Friedman, one of the founding members
of the Mont Pelerin Society. Drumming up support for the project was
easy: if you disagreed, you got shot. The International Monetary Fund
and the World Bank used their power over developing nations to demand
the same policies.
But the most powerful promoter of this programme was the media. Most of
it is owned by multimillionaires who use it to project the ideas that
support their interests. Those ideas which threaten their interests are
either ignored or ridiculed. It is through the newspapers and TV
channels that the socially destructive notions of a small group of
extremists have come to look like common sense. The corporations' tame
thinkers sell the project by reframing our political language (for an
account of how this happens, see George Lakoff's book, Don't Think of
an Elephant!). Nowadays I hear even my progressive friends using terms
like wealth creators, tax relief, big government, consumer democracy,
red tape, compensation culture, job seekers and benefit cheats. These
terms, all invented or promoted by neoliberals, have become so
commonplace that they now seem almost neutral.
Neoliberalism, if unchecked, will catalyse crisis after crisis, all of
which can be solved only by greater intervention on the part of the
state. In confronting it, we must recognise that we will never be able
to mobilise the resources its exponents have been given. But as the
disasters they have caused unfold, the public will need ever less
persuading that it has been misled.
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- Privatization 
