Who’re you rooting for – Tom or Jerry? For many people, picking Tom or Jerry is about the same as asking whether you are for or against privatization. It’s a team sport. You just pick a side and support it.
But, dig into the facts, and the question becomes, Do you support accountability or not?
In the private sector, robust competition forces companies to constantly improve the services and goods they provide. Failure to improve means losing out to competitors. When there is a monopoly in the private sector, there is no competition, and accountability is lost.
Some goods and services are provided to us by the public sector, because they are a natural monopoly and cannot be held accountable by competition, because there is no competition. Take roads, for example. There have been times that people built their own roads and charged others to use them, but to be useful, roads must be part of a system that gets people where they want to go. That takes planning and government support.
It may seem that something must have changed to make private contractors want to lease roads and other public infrastructure for 50, 75, or 99 years. What has changed is that the gas tax, which is paid per gallon pumped, has not kept pace with inflation because it has not been raised for years, and cars are much more fuel efficient these days. The anti-tax movement has also made it difficult to raise the gas tax to cover road construction and maintenance.
There is no magic in turning our roads over to private contractors, and contractors do nothing special that the public sector could not do if we kept taxes even with inflation. Instead, what many states have chosen to do is to give big tax breaks to private contractors if they lease roads for 50 years or more. But those tax breaks come from the public treasury.
In all cases, privatizing services and infrastructure comes at a cost. In some cases the cost is tax breaks, and in all cases a cost is loss of public control. We are not just rooting for Tom or Jerry. We should be rooting for ourselves.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.