The corruption of small D democracy, the corruption of human rights, the corruption of civil rights, the destruction, actually, of civil and human rights, the destruction of the public sphere, the the deconstruction of government - or as Steve Bannon famously said, the deconstruction of the administrative state, in other words taking apart government.

Trump came into office promising to destroy the United States government, or at least, Steve Bannon was essentially saying that we're going to deconstruct the administrative state. And Trump is doing it. Look at all of the people who haven't been appointed to jobs, and the people who have been appointed to jobs who are aggressively doing things like taking apart the EPA, taking apart the CDC. The woman who was running the CDC was investing in tobacco stocks at the same time she was supposed to run the campaign to stop smoking. Maybe she decided to dial back the campaign and buy tobacco stocks. So there's that.

But the bigger issue is the one of privatization. And this is this is something that really started picking up steam under Ronald Reagan. Reagan fully embraced the idea that any job being done by a government bureaucrat could be done better by a corporate bureaucrat, so let's just replace all the government bureaucrats with corporate bureaucrats, right? And Reagan wasn't the first. Margaret Thatcher started this in 1978 in Great Britain and started outsourcing things, started privatizing industries that were owned by the government - the rails for example.

Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura wrote in The New York Times recently the headline "Britain Was a Pioneer in Outsourcing Services. Now, the Model Is 'Broken'."

-Thom


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