privatization

Chicago residents are on the frontlines of a dangerous new trend – the privatization of their shared resources orchestrated through “private/public partnerships” and the new mayor, Rahm Emanuel.  Already Chicago has sold off the Skyway Bridge connecting Chicago to Indiana, and it has sold off downtown parking garages to private owners.  It has sold off the management of parking meters to a private company, which has resulted in higher rates, worse service and public outrage.  The City of Chicago has even attempted to sell Midway Airport, and it is now pushing privatization of schools and the water system.

Chicago educator, organizer and activist Tom Tresser is trying to mount a concerted citizen response.  His new project, Public Assets, is trying to recruit people to step up and become “public defenders” of the commons.  Tresser was the Green Party candidate for Cook County Board President in 2010.  The year before, he was a co-leader of No Games Chicago, which successfully opposed the city’s bid for the 2016 Olympics.

Tresser got wind of the city's new ambitions to privatize even more city assets when he attended a June 2011 conference called “It’s Not Privatization: Implementing Partnerships in Illinois.”  Organized by The National Council for Public-Private Partnerships and the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce with assistance from the Metropolitan Planning Council, the event revealed an emerging collusion among the city government, corporations, labor and mainstream citizen organizations to accelerate privatization and "re-brand” it because of its negative public image. 

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.

Why did Heathrow Airport near London come to a standstill last week after a few inches of snow?  How difficult can it be to keep a few runways clear, remove snow from the gate areas, and de-ice planes?  Scores of airports in snowy regions around the world do it all the time.

Clive Irving, a senior consulting editor at Conde Nast Traveler, specializing in aviation, offers a persuasive explanation for the Heathrow debacle:  the privatization of airport management.  Writing at The Daily Beast, “The Secret Behind the Travel Mayhem,” Irving argues that “the fundamental reason for this failure is hiding in plain sight” – the transformation of publicly managed airports into privately managed shopping malls: 

Novelist David Foster Wallace once fantasized that naming rights to years would eventually be auctioned off, leading to a future year being widely known as Y.A.D.U., for The Year of Adult Depends Undergarment. Chicago just took a step in that direction by letting Apple Computers spend $4 million to renovate a subway stop, the North/Clybourn station on the city’s near north side, in return for exclusive advertising rights throughout the station. It is clearly a case of testing the waters for selling naming rights and exclusive marketing to other subway stations in the Chicago Transit Authority system. In this case, Apple has a store nearby, and the company evidently thought that it could “do well by doing good” by spending so much money for such a high-visibility advertising shrine (er, make that a “productive public/private partnership”).