I awoke this morning from an odd series of dreams. In one, the governor of Michigan had caused to be enacted a legislative package that conferred the power of government on corporations. The corporations would run cities—individual services or departments or entire cities themselves—without the inefficiency of voter input through elections. In another dream, government leaders in several states raced one another to sell off assets, built by the public with public capital raised from taxpayers, to the same corporations through contracts of a couple lifetimes’ duration. A third dream really was scary. Corporations sucked dry public coffers to fund sports facilities for privately-owned professional sports franchises while, simultaneously, budgets for schools, police departments, fire departments, and streets were slashed because of huge budget deficits. Very rich people no longer paid taxes—their investments in politicians having finally paid off—and took the accompanying windfall to invest in places where labor costs only a few dollars per day.

The wealth of the country, overnight, had been re-distributed, but not in some Marxist shift of riches from the rich to the pockets of the poor. Instead, the rich squeezed any pennies they could out of the pockets of jeans of the poor; jeans manufactured overseas by said cheap labor. A billionaire Australian had facilitated this re-distribution through purchase of newspapers and television licenses, until he hit on the concept of cable television. He then was able to convince the people from whom he squeezed those pennies that the squeeze was in their best interest. In my dream I saw him reach an epiphany as a youth as he read Orwell’s 1984. He could not call is media endeavor The Ministry of Truth—that would be too blatant. What if he called it Information Corporation? Hmm. He would work on that.

Majority shares in the corporations were purchased by people from countries with capital—China, India, Saudi Arabia—who sought to imbue American culture with their particular styles of enlightenment. Information Corporation went along and sold the stories of how good their enlightenment would be.

I wanted to write this all down before the dreams faded. I will shower and read the paper over breakfast and shake off these weird images I had overnight. --mark small. 03/25/11