“Some wounds never heal of their own accord. One such wound is America’s legacy of slavery and racial injustice. It is the “original sin” that lies behind many of the continuing divisions in US society – and it’s time the country properly atoned for it. I used to be against the idea of slavery reparations on practical grounds. How would they be paid? Would recent African immigrants qualify for them? Would Oprah Winfrey? But like the Democratic presidential hopefuls who have recently taken up this cause, I believe we can no longer let such logistical questions stand in the way of action. Reparations would indeed be hard to execute, but our disunited nation requires “a concrete gesture of respect that makes possible the beginning of a new chapter in our common life”.  (David Brooks in The New York Times)

But what form reparations should take?  Some version of “40 acres and a mule”, (the promise made to freed men after the Civil War, later broken?) A lump sum? Savings accounts for poor children? Home-buying help in mainly black neighborhoods – these could cost trillions and most people would call them political non-starters,  a huge gift to Donald Trump.  The Democratic Presidential candidates are certainly in danger of shooting themselves in all their feet – no one has a thought- out plan ; they are simply perceived to be angling for the black vote.  (Based on an article in The Week, 16 March 2019)

 I have a specific idea: an “Attone for Slavery Fund”, a special African American education fund that would improve the buildings and facilities of schools mainly catering to blacks,  supplementing teachers’ salaries in order to attract the best teachers, and giving black children a better, more equal start in life.  The fund would be paid out of a tax on salaries over $500,000 a year ( this is a bit more difficult to loudly oppose than just an amorphous blanket tax on the rich for the sake of it).

A little move toward social equality.

Interserve is a giant UK outsourcing company, which employs over 65,000 people worldwide including 45,000 in the UK.  It has thousands of government contracts, including for hospital cleaning, probation services, school meals and the maintenance of military bases, benefitting from the Tory off-loading of the duties of a civilised modern government.

Interserve now has ended up with crippling debts of £631 million.  Its shares has been suspended and  has effectively gone into administration. The firm’s lenders  and bondholders will agree to write off £485 million of Interserve’s £631 million debt and inject £110 million of additional funds, in return for ownership of the company’s stock.  Current stockholder have lost everything they had in the company.

A similar government contractor, Carillon, went bust very messily in January 2018, triggering the collapse of hundreds of supply firms, and leaving the British government holding a tab for at least £148 million.

Interserve’s decline can be partly ascribed to an unprofitable foray into the waste recycling,  but the fact is that sub-contracting government services to companies required by their shareholders to make a profit and issue dividends simply doesn’t work and is the result of having right-wing governments manned by people with inherited wealth and full of ideological fervour about shrinking government, but having not a clue about business, profit, man management or anything else (See Brexit for typical actions by the same crowd!).   This  could be ( should be) the  swan song of a deeply flawed and dying business model that has made a very small few  rich while saddling future generations with huge debts and increasingly shoddy public services .  Conservative government cannot govern.

A scathing parliamentary inquiry last year accused successive British governments of using the Public Finance Initiative (PFI) to keep many of its current liabilities off balance sheet, Enron-style, while also awarding well-connected businesses and investors public work contracts.  At the moment it will end up having to pay private companies almost £200 billion, including interest to lenders, until the 2040s, just for existing deals, in addition to some £110 billion already paid. That’s for 700 projects worth around £60 billion.

Research last year by the weekly publication Construction News revealed that the average pre-tax margin for the 10 biggest UK contractors fell for the fifth consecutive year, to -0.9%, while their combined debt rocketed 24% year-on-year to €3.9 billion. Dividends have also been slashed, as evidence emerges of firms tightening their belts ahead of Brexit.  To make matter even worse, banks and investors, that had already incurred large losses on Carillion and are now having to take over Interserve’s business,  are likely to be even more reticent about backing the industry, particularly as it faces greater scrutiny from regulators as well as the rising risk of local authorities taking contracts back in-house. The ultimate irony is that some of the same banks that feasted on the absurdly high interest rates the UK government agreed to pay on its PFI deals — at times as high as  3.75 percentage points higher than the cost of government borrowing — are now themselves, thanks to Interserve’s collapse, public service providers.

The failure of a second major outsourcing player in barely more than a year provides strong evidence that the UK approach to outsourcing government activities was deeply flawed.

(Adapted and edited from an article by Don Quijones,  an editor at Wolf Street. Originally published by Wolf Street.   https://wolfstreet.com/

Thus does neoliberalism produce incompetence,  corruption and waste, allowing politicians  to say that they have been able to slash the size of the government !  This is supposed to be a good thing, so why is it that so many people, teetering on the edge of financial disaster, support a political party that is busy making them poorer, less secure and less well- served, helping only the rich and comfortable?  Truly puzzling.  As goes the UK so goes the US; only a matter of time.  Epicurus would despair; for him government was government for all the people.

So what exactly does the House of Representatives H.R.1  bill do that Republicans find so horrifying?

• It creates a national system for automatic voter registration and expands early voting and same-day registration.
• It makes Election Day a holiday for federal employees and encourages private businesses to also take the day off to encourage voting.
• It requires “dark money” groups to make their donor lists public and mandates that Facebook and Twitter disclose the source of funding for political ads that appear on their platforms.
• It institutes public financing for political campaigns.
• And it beefs up ethics rules to fight corruption and gerrymandering of constituencies.

Well sure, that would certainly terrify me if I were in the pockets of monied interests and had spent years trying to skew elections my way – but certainly not otherwise.

The Republican Party has  duly developed a new line of attack against H.R.1: They are calling the proposal “Russian government policy.”. Excuse me? I can think of nothing more American than protecting the right to vote, getting Big Money out of politics, and reforming our broken system.

The Republicans who thought up this original interpretation of the bill should not, however, be confused with decent Republican supporters who support democracy and the Constitution, and who must be embarrassed about the behaviour of the local and congressional politicians they are expected to vote for.

Epicurus would, I’m sure want to see America be made great again by cutting out the cheating and the twisting of the system out of whack.   Aside from anything else, if these politicians had a program that benefitted the whole country, not just special interests, then they wouldn’t need to gerrymander, use “dark money”etc.   Tell me I am wrong!  (I remember when the Republican Party was, relative to the old Democrat Party, the party of principle and support of the Constitution).  Epicurus stood for integrity, and so should we.