The Privatization of Public Services, State by State
Donald Cohen, founder and executive director of In the Public Interest, a national resource center on privatization and responsible contracting, sends us this.
It seems there’s no public service or piece of property that private companies are not eyeing as potential revenue streams. While funding anti-government think tanks like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), companies like Corrections Corporation of America, Waste Management, Maximus, Intuit, Laidlaw, Northrup Grumman, Koch Companies, Macquarie Capital Advisers, Pinnacle West, and UnitedHealthcare are hoping to use government as their candy store.
They want to take over our roads, bridges, parking lots, water systems, college dorms, and prisons. And they want to deliver public services like transit systems, school cafeterias, trash and recycling pick up, mental health services and many others. The following is a quick scan of just some of the proposals.
Water
The Emergency manager of Flint, Mich., is considering selling off its water and sewer systems to the highest bidder. The systems are currently generating revenues for the city.
Long Island’s Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano’s proposal is proposing to privatize the county’s sewage treatment system. Mangano also announced the privatization of Long Island Bus company to Veolia Transportation.
The Texas Lower Colorado River Authority is selling 18 retail water and wastewater systems in the Hill Country and in its southeast service area to [Canada-based] Corix Infrastructure.
Schools
School districts across the country are planning to contract out custodial, clerical, cafeteria and bus Read the rest of this entry »
Poverty Underlies Education System’s Shortcomings
Here’s a letter to the editor in The Hill by Diann Woodard, president of the School Administrators (AFSA), the only national education union representing principals, assistant principals and school administrators.
The failure of our education system lies not within the walls of the public schools that serve children in crisis, but with the policymakers and policies in place that ignore the fundamental causes of low student achievement: unfair funding formulas, poverty and unproven education policies (“For America’s children, education outlook grows only dimmer,” Jan. 23, by Juan Williams).
Families are increasingly falling into poverty, experiencing a lack of housing and unable to provide adequate health care and nutrition for their children. These children need increased services, yet often do not receive them because of budget cuts, bureaucratic hurdles and gross inequities in state and local funding formulas.
Public schools welcome these children, for our doors are open to all. We do not hand-select the brightest, the ones with involved parents, or the students who will make us look good on half-hour media specials. Their time at school might provide their only stable environment, and we provide it with only a fraction of resources afforded to more affluent districts and private schools.
Tea Party and Blue Dog Democrats: Let’s Double Unemployment and Drown U.S. Economy
Want a job? Want Medicare when you retire? How about good public schools? Then look out: Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) is joining with his tea party allies to hold a vote today that would guarantee deep, radical cuts—and make those cuts part of the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the land.
The so-called Balanced Budget Amendment is even worse than the budget proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) put it, the Ryan plan would have produced:
the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history, while increasing poverty and inequality more than any measure in recent times and possibly in the nation’s history.
Fear of Anti-Immigration Law Leaves Empty Classrooms, Idle Farms
More from Alabama, where a delegation of African American labor and civil rights leaders is investigating the state’s recently passed anti-immigrant law. Follow the delegation here.
A grade school child is there one day and gone the next. Dependable laborers don’t show up to pick crops on a farm.
“It’s incredible,” said local AFT President Vi Parramore.
I have teachers tell me that kids are disappearing overnight. Not unenrolling and leaving. Just all of a sudden gone, just gone! Crops are rotting in the fields!
Parramore shared what she knew at a roundtable at the Beloved Community United Church of Christ in Birmingham, Ala. The roundtable was part of a tour by national African American labor and civil rights leaders to help shed a light on one of the harshest immigration laws in the country and how it invokes inhumanity reminiscent of the Jim Crow South. The delegation has investigated firsthand the impact of Alabama’s H.B. 56 on the lives of Latino working families.
Early in the day, the group toured a trailer park. Later, they met with small business owners. Alabama’s punitive anti-immigration law has cast a chill over the state’s Latino population. According to news reports, the new law says that police must report to federal authorities anyone they detain if they have a “reasonable suspicion” the person may be in the country illegally.
Who Opposes American Jobs, Kids?
Yesterday, President Obama was in Colorado highlighting his plan to put Americans back to work modernizing the nation’s aging schools and to make sure there are plenty of teachers to fill those schools. The plan involves $30 billion to put hundreds of thousands of Americans to work modernizing at least 35,000 schools across the country, and $35 billion to save the jobs of 280,000 teachers, police, firefighters and other first responders. American Progress puts the Republican opposition to the president’s plan in perspective.
THIS OR THAT:
We can put hundreds of thousands of Americans back to work, keep 280,000 more Americans like teachers and cops in their jobs and modernize one-third of our nation’s schools for less than what keeping the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will cost us each year.
WHAT THE PRESIDENT SAYS:
From President Obama’s speech in Denver earlier this afternoon:
Every child deserves a great school—and we can give it to them. We can rebuild our schools for the 21st century, with faster Internet, smarter labs and cutting-edge technology. And that won’t just create a better, safer learning environment for the students—it’ll create good jobs for local construction workers right here in Denver, across Colorado and throughout the country. There are schools all throughout Colorado that need this kind of renovation. Last week, I visited a bridge in Cincinnati connecting Ohio to Kentucky that needs this kind of renovation. There are construction projects like these all across this country just waiting to get started. And there are millions of unemployed construction workers who are looking for jobs.
Minn. Workers Relieved by Shutdown’s End, Outraged by Budget
Barb Kucera, editor at www.workdayminnesota.org, sends us this from Minneapolis.
While thousands of public- and private-sector workers are relieved to be returning to work after the nearly three-week state government shutdown, they are outraged by a budget that protects millionaires and increases the burden on Minnesota’s most vulnerable residents.
The budget bills, signed Wednesday by DFL Gov. Mark Dayton, incorporate the Republican legislative majority’s provisions to cut programs for the working poor and balance the books by borrowing heavily from local school districts.
In the $34 billion budget, lawmakers are taking $58 million from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, to fund other services, said Linden Gawboy of the Welfare Rights Committee.
Pop Quiz: What Will Rep. Ryan’s Robin Hood in Reverse Budget Do to America?
Manny Herrmann, AFL-CIO online mobilization coordinator, details the extent to which the Republican budget proposal would hurt working families.
Pop Quiz: What would America look like under Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) radical tea party-inspired budget?
A. A typical 65-year-old would spend $6,359 more per year out of pocket for health care by 2022 because Medicare’s promise would be replaced with underfunded vouchers.
B. At least 15 million U.S. residents would lose Medicaid health care.
C. $4.2 trillion in new tax cuts would be handed out mostly to corporations and the rich.
D. All of the above.
Workers Come Out Strong At End of Missouri Legislative Session
Missouri AFL-CIO President Hugh McVey and Secretary-Treasurer Herb Johnson wrap up the outcome of the state’s legislative session.
The first session of the 95th General Assembly of Missouri ended at 6 p.m., May 13. The session began with the emotional fervor of the majority Republican party proclaiming great changes they would make in the state during the upcoming legislative session.
Among those issues were those that were political in nature, bills that would produce no employment and create no economic gains for our state. Those bills were simply meant to reduce the capacity of labor unions to advocate for our members and so reduce the participation of working people in the political process in our state. Read the rest of this entry »
Kasich’s Ohio Budget Bill Would Kill 51,052 Jobs
Yet another Republican governor is killing jobs. This time, it’s John Kasich in Ohio.
A study out today shows his proposed two-year budget could mean a direct loss of 51,052 jobs in that state. The study by Innovation Ohio shows that such job losses would be more than double the 22,000 jobs created since Kasich took office. This blow to Ohio’s economy is in addition to the Kasich-backed bill passed by the Ohio Legislature gutting collective bargaining rights for public employees, a drastic move that limits workers’ ability to attain or maintain middle-class jobs.
Innovation Ohio Communications Director Dale Butland puts it this way:
School districts and local governments will, of course, do everything possible to avoid laying people off. But they’ve already made the easy cuts and pared their budgets dramatically. So when the Governor proposes to cut school funding by $3 billion and local government funding by 50 percent, firing workers or raising local taxes are the only realistic choices they have left. But attacking workers — whether through a job-killing budget or the unfair Senate Bill 5 — will not fix Ohio. It will only destroy the middle class. And that’s not what Gov. Kasich was elected to do.
In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker already has racked up quite a record as a job killer, after only a couple months in office. In Florida, where Gov. Rick Scott turned away federal high-speed rail project, costing the state much-needed jobs, his hand-picked department heads are being paid special salaries—unabashed cronyism costing the state’s taxpayers a bundle.
Unemployment Insurance Extended, But States Face UI Disaster
In the “good news, bad news” category:
President Obama on Saturday signed an extension of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits that were set to expire Dec. 31. The two-month extension of the emergency UI also extends health insurance subsidies so that individuals now have 15 months to pay the reduced premiums related to the COBRA extension.
The only reason the bill made it to his desk without being blocked by anti-worker (i.e., the majority of) Senate Republicans is because the extensions were included in the fiscal year 2010 defense appropriations bill.
Now the bad news:
The recession’s jobless toll is draining unemployment-compensation funds so fast that according to federal projections, 40 state programs will go broke within two years and need $90 billion in loans to keep issuing the benefit checks.
Currently, 25 states have run out of unemployment money and have borrowed $24 billion from the federal government to cover the gaps. By 2011, according to Department of Labor estimates, 40 state funds will have been emptied by the jobless tsunami.
