National Parks as a Microcosm of America’s Health

It was interesting watching the Ken Burns special on National Parks last week and hearing how many times they said they didn’t want such-and-such a park to become “another Niagara Falls”, privatized and commercialized, dominated by tacky additions such as colored lights.

Of course to some degree the attempt to preserve natural spaces with minimal commercial impact has failed. In dozens of America’s parks the corporation Xanterra absolutely dominates, controlling what types of lodgings, tours, and experiences many park visitors have, but it would be nearly impossible to travel to or through many parks without funneling most or all of your expenditures through them. Due to this massive monopoly they also control what prices you will pay, even if you look at another park.

I suspect that many of the recent fee and rule changes have been enacted to protect the parks’ commercial monopolies. For example, the rising and now exhorbitant fees charged outside photographers to run tours (technically any single photographer who might sell a photo from his or her visit, and even free groups such as Flickr photographers are required to pay extra fees and file reports) are to protect Xanterra’s monopoly.

I suspect that the same holds true for the proposals to ban cars in Yosemite Valley. We can’t have all those unwashed masses actually running their own self-paced tours (or being able to visit the park at all on a budget, lugging their own food or bringing all of the accessories necessary to bring babies and small children)! Much better to force them to board a bus in Modesto (seriously, that’s the long term proposal) and make them buy everything they need to get through the day from the reigning monopoly.

It’s so sad that the parks originally “for the people” have come to that.

I wish I could make our sleazy politicians and their bribes (excuse me, “campaign contributions”) simply go away. While 95% of the wealth has been transferred to 1% of the population over the past 8 years, the economy has been reduced to the rest of us circulating the remaining 5%. To survive. The more desperate and dependent we are, the better. We’re easier to control that way, easier to manipulate and milk us dry.

Cheap foreign labor has been imported to take our jobs, even during the worst recessions. Not only are some of the most educated and skilled among us far from immune, they’re the most expensive and therefore are the primary targets for removal. The most common classification of worker brought in under H1-B and l-1 visas are to replace our computer programmers. Half of the workers in high technology were forced out of the field by 2004. A healthy percentage of them were the most experienced workers, who were the most expensive, so as U.C. Davis computer science professor Norm Matloff has documented, work visa programs have accelerated and institutionalized age discrimination in America. Now less than 80% of Americans have full time jobs, and household income is down 10% in the past 2 years alone. So far. The government’s response? Bush quietly signed a treaty with Canada to get their help policing U.S. cities when the riots come. Canadians loudly opposed it, but news corporations in the U.S. didn’t even report it.

The issues of rising fees to protect monopolies and the associated elimination of or reductions in service offerings at reasonable prices in the National Park system are just a small example of our downward spiral.

It’s interesting to note that the right to bear arms was not for us to walk around shooting things on a daily basis, it was to protect American citizens from an oppressive government like the British. Remember “taxation without representation”? It’s back. Our savings and jobs were erased in the recent financial industry scandal, yet no one is in jail and we’re all footing the bill for recovery. Note that in spite of dozens of proposals to reform the system, due to massive bribes sent to “our” politicians, no substantive changes or new controls have been enacted. We’ve just rewarded the thieves. Expect a lot more of the same, until we all learn to throw every politician out of office who does not support campaign finance reform (elimination of those corporate bribes).

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not knocking Republicans. They just happened to be in power when this issue finally caught up with us. Virtually all politicians from all parties are on the take. Look up Diane Feinstein’s no-bid contracts awarded by her defense comittee to her husband’s company. Is she in jail? No, she’s a front-runner for the Democratic Party’s nomination to run for Governor of California! We desperately need to boot them all from office, and be crystal clear why we’re doing so.

In the meantime, the American economy is about as healthy as the forest in the photo above. Don’t have $400-500 to stay at the Ahwanee Hotel? That’s OK, plenty of foreigners do, especially now that the U.S. dollar is way down and rapidly declining as the American public foots the bill for bailing out industry after industry.

Did you know that the definition of “fascism” is corporatism, the control of goverment by and for corporations (not the people)? Yahoo or Google corporatism, accept Yahoo’s first suggestion that it be combined with fascism, and note further suggestions that they be combined with Mussilini (heck, look them up with Hitler as well).

Corporatism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism

Is there any doubt that public policy in America is controlled by the financial donations of special interests (corporations)? Look into corporatism. Consider the ramifications. Observe the results, in your life, and in the lives of your family and neighbors. Isn’t this worth an angry letter or two or three to your elected representatives? If we don’t all get off our collective butts and eliminate corporate bribes and control, we absolutely deserve this mess, and the far worse times that are definitely going to arrive for us and our children if we don’t fix it now, to the best of our ability, while we still can.

Corporatism was what the French Revolution was fought over. Will you help stop its rise yet again in America, or will you leave that for your children to do as things only get worse?

Economic Fascism
http://www.banned-books.com/truth-seeker/1994archive/121_3/ts213l.html
When most people hear the word “fascism” they naturally think of its ugly racism and anti-Semitism as practiced by the totalitarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. But there was also an economic policy component of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and ’30s as “corporatism,” that was an essential ingredient of economic totalitarianism as practiced by Mussolini and Hitler. So- called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a “model” by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe. A version of economic fascism was in fact adopted in the United States in the 1930s and survives to this day. In the United States these policies were not called “fascism” but “planned capitalism.” The word fascism may no longer be politically acceptable, but its synonym “industrial policy” is as popular as ever.

“…when the depression came, “the government added the loss to the taxpayer’s burden. Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social.”
(Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? That reminder was written in 1994. Letting this sort of thing happen over and over again is entirely intentional!)

“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt in an April 29, 1938 message to Congress warning that the growth of private power could lead to fascism.