Reply #8: Privatization of public services: The great con game

[brentspeak]

Look no further than at what happened in California: all the state's electrical grids other than those that covered Sacramento and L.A. were privatized, after which everybody's rates went sky high. Then came the blackouts. But here's the catch -- though the energy companies saw record profits during the blackouts, they still raised the rates. And when Bush refused to cap wholesale energy prices during the blackouts, guess who cleaned up? Enron. You can thank Republican Gov. Pete Wilson for initiating the corruption, along with some prominent Democrats in the California assembly who were just as bought-and-sold by the energy companies, and voted 'yes' to Wilson's deregulation of California's energy utilities.

Meanwhile, Sacramento and L.A., whose electricity was still owned and run by the municipalities, saw no increase in their electrical rates.

Now, of course, we see what's happened to the U.S. military because of privatization: costs for support and equipment have doubled and even tripled because Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have given buddies Halliburton and friends blank checks to (very poorly) run even basic services like food preparation and laundry when those things have always been taken care of by the military itself. And everyone in the country should know by now how hundreds of millions of our dollars have been doled out to shady merc contractors and propaganda think tanks.

Plus, there's the issue of missing $8.1 billion designated for Iraq that no one in the White House wants to talk about.

They don't want to talk about the single greatest accounting mystery in the history of the civilized world? Gee, I wonder why not.

The words 'privatization' and 'deregulation' should be quickly added to list of synonyms for the words 'corruption' and 'theft' in all current and future English thesauruses.