Clay Bennett on Deregulation

Growing National Movement Against "High Stakes" Public School Testing

Marco Rubio, immigration and privatized jail

Corrections Corporation Of America Sues Florida Town For Blocking New Detention Center

Corrections Corporation Of America Sues Florida Town For Blocking New Detention Center

The nation's largest private prison corporation sued a South Florida town this week, arguing that city officials are trying to "disrupt and derail" plans to build one of nation's largest immigrant-detention centers northwest of Miami.

Corrections Corporation of America's federal lawsuit claims that city officials in Pembroke Pines, Fla., are interfering with the company's "advantageous business relationship" with federal immigration authorities. Corrections Corp. reached a tentative deal with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement last summer to build a 1,500-bed detention facility in Southwest Ranches, a quiet suburban enclave near the Everglades.

But residents and immigrant-rights groups have waged a battle against the company and elected officials who support construction of the jail. Money is on the line for both Corrections Corp. and the town of Southwest Ranches, which has an agreement to receive up to 4 percent of the compensation from the company's potential deal with the federal government.

So What Privitization doesn't work that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep pushing for more of it. From the AFL-CIO blog

Private Contractors Are Double the Cost of Federal Workers

by Mike Hall, Sep 13, 2011

In the past year, congressional Republicans and right-wing extremists have ramped up their long-standing campaign against federal workers, claiming their pay is too high and their benefits too generous compared to private-sector workers. A new study shows how wrong they are.
According to the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), the federal government pays more than twice as much to private contractors than it would cost federal workers to perform the same work. The government spends some $320 billion a year for services by private contractors.
Groups opposing federal workers cooked the books and used incomplete information—comparing just salaries and not including benefits and other costs—in their studies comparing costs. But POGO General Counsel Scott Amey told The New York Times:

We compared the full compensation paid to federal government and private-sector employees to the billable rates in federal service contracts. Across the board you see that it cost government more to pay for contractors.

The report notes that for “decades there have been increasing political pressures to reduce the size of the federal government.”

In response the government has awarded service contracts, resulting in an expanding “shadow government” that costs hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The focus on comparing federal and private-sector salaries needs to shift because they have nothing to do with what the government actually pays for services. Instead, the focus properly belongs on analyzing the full costs of paying contractors to perform federal services.

Given the nation’s ongoing economic problems, this analysis has become even more relevant—approximately one-quarter of all discretionary spending now goes to service contractors.

AFSCME President Gerald McEntee says the study confirms “privatizing services leads to cost overruns and in most cases a lower quality of services.”

The only ones benefiting from privatization are the private companies and the campaign coffers of the politicians who push for privatization. Study after study shows that privatization does not deliver the savings for taxpayers promised by its proponents.

Click here for the full report.

Stupid Politics: Private Prisons and Public Corruption

Stupid Politics: Private Prisons and Public Corruption

This links to an article in Rueters. Why should kids just be for profit by the privatized school merchants when plenty of other people can make money off them.

Privitization

Privatization. What is it? The government can’t longer afford do anything so they outsource services to the lowest bidder. Education is outsourced. Jails are outsourced. In Indiana even the toll roads have been outsourced , the state selling it for next to nothing to a private unelected company who then jacks up the tolls and fleece the people who the politicians supposedly represent.

I’m reminded of a story I saw on one of those PBS science shows of a party of nineteenth century British sailors whose boat was stranded in the northern Canadian ice. For some reason the party abandoned ship and began dragging the captain’s desk for miles in the wrong direction away from the place where they could be rescued. One sailor died and was buried in the ice. The party was eventually rescued. More than a hundred years later the dead sailor’s body, still preserved in the ice, was found. He was exhumed and the scientists found traces of lead in his body. They went back in the records and found that the company that had outfitted the expedition had never done so before but they had received the contract to do so because they were the lowest bidder. The director of the show surmised that the company had accidentally given the crew lead poisoning.

This was just another case of public servants hiring companies that don’t necessarily serve the public well. They get away with it more easily when the people they are serving are powerless and unimportant like: the elderly, children, the mentally ill, or minorities - all of which fall into the category of others whose problems people continue to want to bury because it distracts them from the lives they’d like to lead.

Years ago: the state of Massachusetts realized how expensive running services could be and they gradually began jettisoning them onto the lowest bidder. They began to take bids from whoever said they could do a job better, for cheaper. Once the state learned that a company could do it cheaper, they lost interest in whether they were doing it better. Money was there for a public/private partnership to divvy up and I don’t think Massachusetts is unique.

The way kids are treated in these programs is often deplorable. It isn’t that so much of the public hates kids. They actually probably love their own kids very much. It’s that too many of them hate other peoples’ kids and they don’t see why they have to pay for them either.

What is privatization? It is undemocratic and it basically says that we can no longer afford to treat our employees or our clients respectfully. Privatization is the one smart, usually politically connected, person making mega dollars by hiring a bunch of idealistic idiots, who are willing to undersell their labor. Those workers will tell themselves that they’re doing it for the children or the elderly because they can‘t face the fact that they are just really another commodity.

Privatization is the state withdrawing from responsibility into a world in which no one is responsible for anything. One kid gets killed in a program and everyone points fingers at everyone else who might be responsible. In the end what we are teaching the next generation, that unless things directly concern us, no is responsible for anything. It’s always someone else’s problem. Maybe we should be teaching them a different lesson.

Nothing like an old fashioned privatized government.

From truth out:

ALEC contends that government agencies have an unfair monopoly on public goods and services. To change that situation, it has created a policy initiative to counter what it calls “Publicopoly.” ALEC’s stated aim is to provide “more effective, efficient government” via privatization—that is, the shifting of government functions to the private sector. ALEC lists its initiatives on its website (alec.org/publicopoly).

Though the specifics are secret and “restricted to members,” ALEC openly advocates privatizing public education, transportation and the regulation of public health, consumer safety and environmental quality including bringing in corporations to administer:

• Foster care, adoption services and child support payment processing.

• School support services such as cafeteria meals, custodial staff and transportation.

• Highway systems, with toll roads presented as a shining example.

• Surveiling and detaining convicted criminals.

• Ensuring the quality of wastewater treatment, drinking water, and solid waste services and facilities. (After all, when someone mentions a safe and secure public water supply, the voter’s next immediate thought is: “Only if it’s cost-effective!”)

To accomplish these initiatives, ALEC contends that “state governments can take an active role in determining which products and services should be privatized.” ALEC advocates three reforms: creating a “Private Enterprise Advisory Committee” to review if government agencies unfairly compete with the private sector; creating a special council that would contract with private vendors if they can “reduce the cost of government”; and creating legislation that would require government agencies to demonstrate “compelling public interest” in order to continue as public agencies. (Who then oversees these committees to ensure the private sector doesn’t unfairly profit by monopolizing public goods and services? One can only assume it is the same “Private Enterprise Advisory Committee.”)

ALEC nuts and bolts

ALEC is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization that in recent years has reported about $6.5 million in annual revenue. ALEC’s members include corporations, trade associations, think tanks and nearly a third (about 2,000) of the nation’s state legislators (virtually all Republican). According to the group’s promotional material, ALEC’s mission is to “advance the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty, through a nonpartisan public-private partnership of America’s state legislators, members of the private sector, the federal government, and general public.”

ALEC currently claims more than 250 corporations and special interest groups as private sector members. While the organization refuses to make a complete list of these private members available to the public, some known members include Exxon Mobil, the Corrections Corporation of America, AT&T, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Verizon, Wal-Mart, Phillip Morris International and Koch Industries, along with a host of right-wing think tanks and foundations.

The full story is here:

http://www.truth-out.org/publicopoly-exposed/1310660473