Unspoken fascism

Governments systematically get rid of their core business, providing services for their citizens. They follow the trend of Big Business to outsource tasks, ostensibly to reduce costs. The promise of reducing costs, however, is hardly ever fulfilled, expenses just get shifted to different accounts with the same company, and the total cost, especially on a long term basis, increases.

Yet without believing in this myth, which is quite eloquently perpetuated by smart dressed consultants from companies such as KPMG, PWC and the like, and instead assessing the whole picture, outsourcing helps just those companies that make money in suggesting other companies to do so.

Logic and efficiency are not the primary strategies used in business, but networking is. As long as deciders can gain unencumbered profits from outsourcing, they have no reason to think about the damage they produce to their company. After all, once you spend some time in middle und upper management, you made enough friends to fall softly into a similar position in another company, often as payback for favors you provided earlier. Mutual back-rubbing, also called networking, protects well from individual responsibility.

Private companies don't necessarily profit from outsourcing, customers don't like it too much when they have to deal with call centers in foreign countries, but group think still advocates this detrimental idea.

Governments, traditionally slow in adapting trends, now happily joined the idea of outsourcing to get rid of the few things they deserve getting tax money for. As the term "outsourcing" might easily disclose that the government no longer cares about their business, they call it PPP, Public-Private-Partnership.

So what's this PPP thingie? The public part is the administrative part of government, ie civil servants who have an incredibly safe job no matter how badly they perform. The "public" itself has no influence on choosing those positions of power, they just can elect some representative that try to place their friends in manager roles within the governments administration. Although the public is part of the term PPP, it has no say in it.

Another P in PPP is "private", finally something good, as private enterprise is the cornerstone of our glorious capitalist system, isn't it? Any citizen is a private person, so it's good for those entrepreneurs in a country. Well, at least those who have the resources to take over something like the public transport system, which are "private" entities such as big companies. A group of bus drivers and mechanics, who might be able to organise transport and maintenance of a bus fleet wouldn't even be considered to run public transport - what do they know about it?

The final P is partnership, not only a nice sounding word, but the only part of the term describing the reality of PPP. The networking between governmental admins and high level company management finally yields results. Sometimes the need to privatise away governmental responsibilities is so urgent, that tendering would just obstruct the boost in efficiency expected from redirecting tax payers money.

Whereas most Western governments had massive debts, they prevented bankruptcy so far, unlike millions of private enterprises. Even massive companies like Enron went down the drain, ruining the lives of thousands who trusted in them. Yet, according to governments officials, private companies work more efficiently, a claim that hardly can be proven at all.

So basically PPP describes nothing but a collusion between corporations and governments, and the results are mostly a reduction in service for higher charges. Privatisation of telecommunication and public transport in Europe, US and Australia followed along this pattern, but the success of those strategies (less work and profitable follow-up positions for the government part, competition free and highly subsidized business areas for the corporation part) cry for an extension of this idea.

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.

Benito Mussolini

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