If Greece Sells Mykonos Or Lesbos and Austria Sells A Couple Of Alps, How Soon Before We Sell Off The Rest Of Yosemite?

Yesterday Ken did two posts about the "austerity" movement, by which the very rich hope to even further entrench and enhance their positions in society-- "Austerity": the price we've gotta pay to keep the World's Greediest rollin' in dough and then one poking around one of the loudest public voices of the movement, David Brooks, the NY Times columnist paid to be a mouthpiece for that class which bought the entire "free" press, vowing to never allow themselves to be victimized and held up for public opprobrium by muckrakers again.

How could he have possibly missed this story about how Austria had decided to start selling off its Alps so that the rich could get even richer.

Austria has postponed the sale of two Alpine peaks after a public outcry that underscored the lofty challenges faced by cash-strapped governments that attempt to sell treasured national assets to raise funds.

The Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft, or BIG, Austria’s federal real estate company, proposed divesting two peaks in eastern Tyrol for a minimum of €121,000, but public opprobrium put a brake on the sale.

The agency received an avalanche of calls from irate Austrians, while a series of political figures spoke out against the privatisation of the pair of craggy peaks.

The sale process was temporarily suspended on Tuesday pending further evaluation, with a future sale now likely to be restricted to “Austrian institutions."

“Tyrol is not Greece,” a satisfied Günther Platter, governor of Tyrol, told an Austrian newspaper, adding that the proposed sale had been a “Schnapsidee”, or “crackpot idea."

The comparison stems from a headline last year in Bild, the German paper, urging Greece to sell off some of its most treasured tourist attractions instead of relying on a European Union bail-out.

“Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks! And sell the Acropolis too!” the paper proclaimed. George Papandreou, Greece’s prime minister, has insisted the country will not sell these assets as it pushes ahead with a €50bn privatisation programme.

The Austrian affair echoes a similar climbdown by the British government, which in February was forced to abandon a sale of state-owned forests.

In Spain, plans to privatise the popular state lottery as part of a planned multibillion-euro sale of public assets have so far raised few objections.

Like most EU countries, Austria is running a budget deficit, but its debt is rated triple A-- the highest level-- by the credit agencies and the country has no trouble financing itself in the markets.

Laugh, but in our country, where conservatives always opposed the whole concept of publicly owned parks and fought the establishment of the national park system, the masters of the universe now feel the time is right to sell them off or, as David Brooks will one day soon urge, privatize them. And they have just the politicians in their pockets to do it for them, shills to great wealth like John Kasich in Ohio, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Rick Snyder in Michigan, Rick Scott in Florida and, more tragically, even financially hard-pressed "progressives" in progressive states who have been taking the likes of David Brooks seriously. Yesterday, in a plea for donations, Truthout e-mailed subscribers an ominous missive:

A growing number of politicians are doing their best to take the "public" out of everything in American life, including libraries, schools, government workers, environmental protection-- even parks and parking meters.

And the movement is fast succeeding at creating an environment where only privileged students have access to higher education, by cutting subsidies to state and community colleges to such an extent that tuition is no longer affordable for many young Americans and their families.

When fewer and fewer of America's young people can afford to attend public college, we know that the US is headed toward a third-rate future.