David Bollier: Privatization Run Amok

[marmar]

Privatization Run Amok
Wednesday, February 9, 2011


Finally, a bit of great news: California Governor Jerry Brown is courageously bucking a national trend by refusing to sell off state buildings and then lease them back. This trend has been the budget subterfuge of choice among many of the nation's governors. Lease-backs of state assets are a backdoor way of getting a quick hit of money for troubled state budgets (in California's case, $1.2 billion) while saddling future taxpayers with huge additional expenditures (in California, $6 billion over 35 years).

Yes, welcome to the next frontier in the business campaign against government. First it was the fight against regulation and public-sector spending, both largely successful. Now business is vying to own the equity assets of government through arcane lease-back and securitization deals.

These strategies not only hurt us as taxpayers and citizens (through higher expenditures for less value, and through reduced public discretion over public assets). They fling open the doors to all sorts of other investor schemes to buy and privatize public assets. Next stop: the withering of the State and the arrival of the Total Market Order.

Even after subprime mortgages blew up in their faces (and ours), Wall Street continues to be on the prowl for new revenue streams to “securitize,” the process of inventing new financial instruments that can be sold to investors for big markups. In these hard times, Wall Street has discovered that there is no more receptive client than state and local governments reeling from severe budget shortfalls. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://bollier.org/privatization-run-amok

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[fasttense]

2. Just like in 3rd world countries.

"Now business is vying to own the equity assets of government through arcane lease-back and securitization deals."

Commonly referred to as kick backs when South American dictators do it.

Government has joined hands with the corporate aristocracy.

[HereSince1628]

3. I think they are joined other than hand-to-hand

And in my youth if unmarried people _did_ THAT (!!) they'd go to jail in many states.

[WinkyDink]

4. Hey, silver lining: The Feds can auction to the highest bidder the re-naming of the U.S.!

A new BRAND!
Apple Nation. Facebook Country. United Halliburton of America.

I'm tired of "Pennsylvania" and its dead-language thing. We could be the "PA APP."

[CrispyQ]

5. Americans stupidly fell for the 'private industry can do everything better' myth.

Perhaps a well regulated industry can do things better, but not as things are now.

The other key thing Americans didn't think of, is that if the public sector isn't doing it's job, you can vote the bums out. But, unless you're a shareholder & a significant one at that, you have no voice in how the private sector does things. Combine that with greed & lack of regulation & you have the clusterfuck we have now.

Americans let Madison Avenue turn us into consumers instead of citizens. We let ourselves be distracted by material things & we stopped paying attention to what our government was doing until things got bad. Refusing to see that some of this was our responsibility, we easily fell for the 'privatization is better' myth.

on edit: html formatting error

[Curmudgeoness]

6. Next step, let's sell off our National Parks. When debating

prior to the election for House Rep in my area, the Republican tea party candidate was ranting about how many "assets" this country has, and how we should not be running a national debt. We should sell these assets to get out of debt. I started thinking about some of our assets. So I expect any day now to hear that they want to sell Yosemite to the Chinese. Makes sense only if you are brain-dead.