Jan

20

Private party, little to celebrate

Paul Vitello [Newsday]

Of all the government enterprises privatized now or in the future, none is ever likely to achieve the perfect bought-and-paid-for private status of our presidential inaugurations.

A presidential inauguration is less a moment for the country than it is a moment for those members of the country’s wealthy classes who seek to influence public policy.

This has been true for years, but it seems more and more so as the government falls deeper and deeper under the spell of private enterprise.

Except for the 20-minute swearing-in ceremony itself (which anybody can watch on TV or from the lawn of the Capitol), Inauguration Day is mainly a series of private parties for people who give large sums of money to the privately run Presidential Inaugural Committee.

This group raised more than $25 million. And it will spend it all on parties that give their black-tied and gowned guests the rough political equivalent of an opportunity, as one commentator said this week, “to spike the ball in the end zone”; to claim their piece of the victory.

Among the industries whose captains will be well represented at tonight’s parties are the usual American giants - banking, mining, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, health insurance, communications, utilities, military weapons, meat processing, big media. (Take a look at the list for yourself at www.inaugural05.com/donors/)

If you ask what victory it is they are celebrating, though, the answer is not likely to be the war on terrorism - the policy to which most attribute President George W. Bush’s re-election victory. That bloody business proceeds in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in secret prison cells around the world, without a sign of clear direction much less victory. The Bush administration finally admitted two months after the election that it had given up the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - an embarrassment papered over for now but likely to be remembered in history as the world’s first bait-and-switch war.

It’s not likely to be the economy, either, which, though it is recovering from recession, has yet to pick up enough momentum to dent an unemployment rate that’s persistently near 6 percent.

It’s not the victory over the deep cultural divisions in the land, which if anything have grown deeper during the Bush presidency.

It’s not about any victory over spending deficits, which have exploded under Bush.

Government, in short, has not done very well during the last four years in addressing the problems that face Americans.

And maybe, after all, that is what they will be celebrating, these titans of private enterprise - the signs of decline in the power of government.

Bush claims as his true political father not George H.W. Bush, the 41st president, but the 40th, Ronald Reagan, who famously said that “government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”

That was Reagan’s philosophy, and it is the driving force behind George W. Bush’s most ambitious domestic programs - from school vouchers, which opponents say could effectively eliminate the public school system, to the privatization of federal lands, parts of the federal bureaucracy, parts of the military; to his proposals to begin privatization of Social Security.

Even so-called “tort reform” is ultimately designed to protect private wealth from a government-run civil court system sworn to protect the public.

Most of all, of course, Bush has “privatized” federal spending through his massive, trillion-dollar-plus tax cuts, which have removed public money from the government and given it back to its private owners.

They, in turn, can now say thank you by buying wholesale an entire presidential inauguration.

Maybe soon, they will buy themselves a whole presidential term. If they haven’t already done so.

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