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Minor Details
It's on track. Public health care, transportation, education, and social security programs have great potential for the kind of corporate executive profits pocketed by the top officials of Enron, Global Crossing, Tyson, WorldCom and the other corporations with "misreporting" problems. The strategy for moving public non-profit programs into private apparently profit-making hands (meaning profits for executives) is to destroy those public programs. You can do this either through a constant, conservative-think-tank-created barrage of criticism, a combination of enforcing new requirements for a program while decreasing or denying adequate funding to the program itself, or both. Merely adding further requirements to the public sphere (while, not coincidently, removing regulations from the corporate sector), such as mandatory achievement testing, without providing the additional funding needed to prepare for and administer the exams, is one example. Until they started doing so themselves, conservatives criticized so-called liberals for this, calling it "unfunded mandates." Privatization is usually justified by the assumed common wisdom that the private sector can do anything more efficiently than government. The actual evidence that this is so, however, is seldom examined. The assumption that government should be run like a business seems to ignore that the popular, long-running Dilbert comic strip is based on the tons of ideas from people in business, not government. And its creator, Scott Adams, said he still has four more years of ideas from business that have been submitted to him. One example of this assumed "success" in the area of education is Edison Schools, Inc., the nation's largest for-profit manager of public schools. Edison became a hit on NASDAQ with its shares trading at one time for as high as $38. But by 2002, Edison became another example, according to SEC investigators, of a company that misreported revenues and lacks an adequate system of accounting controls. By late 2002, its shares were selling for under a dollar. In Philadelphia it sold off textbooks and other supplies to pay its bills. This privatizing business model is behind the administration's funding of "faith-based initiatives." Again it's justified by the claim that religious organizations can do anything more efficiently than governments. And again, they cite no studies to prove this. We know religious institutions pay their employees poorly in comparison to governments. They even rely on free volunteer labor. We know religious institutions can discriminate in employment of, and services to, LGBT people. We know top religious executives aren't volunteers but often well-paid bureaucrats with housing allowances and other perks such as not having to pay payroll taxes. We know religious organizations are full of similar scandals and cover-ups as those that afflict big business. We know they have a privileged status that doesn't have to pay the property, real estate, sales, and other taxes other businesses do. We know they aren't required to publicly report what's really going on with their accounting. But we don't hear of data that says these institutions are more efficient than governments. And without full reporting, how can we know? We're just supposed to believe what religious leaders and their political supporters preach. That's where the faith is in government funding of "faith-based initiatives." They're no longer expressions of faith by the churches and their supporters. First, it used to be accepted that faith is to be active in good works. (C.S. Lewis once complained that Christians talk about doing good works but seldom about doing good work.) That has meant that faithful people give or tithe so that there is some sort of sacrifice of their wealth. It was the proof that God was more important to them than their money.
Not any more. Taxpayer funded "faith-based initiatives" bring in the non-believers who have needs that draw people to the initiative. The hardest part of evangelism is now the work of government funding. Religious people don't have to work as hard to "bring them in" to hear their message of salvation, or pay as much for it. How's that for faithlessness? Isn't it obvious? What government funded "faith-based initiatives" make clear is that those who push them have very little faith in their God, in themselves, or in the power of their own good works. They also demonstrate that they just don't want to make the financial sacrifice that good works were supposed to take. In other words, they've given up the real proofs that they have faith at all. 
Robert N. Minor's book Gay and Healthy in a Sick Society is due out in
November. He is the author of Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard to Accept
Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human (HumanityWorks!, 2001) and
Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas.
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Bush signed a corporate responsibility bill in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom scandals, but his policies continue to show him firmly entrenched with the ultraconservative corporate executive agenda 
Jim Towey is director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives