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By Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin
$10.98
By Anne Boston
$11.16
$23
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Charlie Williams
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By Charlie Williams —
Thousands of protesters gathered at London’s Trafalgar Square on Saturday to celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher. The event marked the end of a bizarre and remarkable week in the U.K., characterized by a polarized response to the demise of the longest serving British prime minister in living memory. But the struggle to decide her legacy continues.
Posted on Apr 17, 2013
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Christo Komarnitski, Cagle Cartoons, Bulgaria —
Posted on Apr 11, 2013
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R_SH (CC BY 2.0)
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The deceased prime minister’s 11-year rule over the U.K. “was historic mainly by posing the conundrum that has shaped neoliberal politics since 1980: How can governments nurture and endow financial kleptocrats” with the consent of the people?
Posted on Apr 9, 2013
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AP/File
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The conservative Thatcher vastly reshaped Britain with her economic policies, pulling the country back from 35 years of socialism and ushering in a new era of privatization.
Posted on Apr 8, 2013
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John Scalzi (CC BY 2.0)
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By Zack Kopplin —
We’ve pushed standards, testing and accountability for public schools, so why shouldn’t private institutions receiving taxpayer money have to meet those same requirements?
Posted on Feb 1, 2013
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Nicholas_T (CC BY 2.0)
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When a plan to construct the first modern privatized highway in the United States did little to ease congestion, blocked residents from making further improvements and cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, Californians had the opportunity to learn a lesson about the folly of privatizing transportation projects.
Posted on Jan 5, 2013
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dave_mcmt (CC BY 2.0)
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Voters in Washington state will have a chance to direct public funds toward private bank accounts if they adopt an initiative to create charter schools this November. Who are the bajillionaires behind the campaign?
Posted on Oct 25, 2012
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striatic
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In exchange for a eurozone bailout of $123 billion, Spain’s conservative government Wednesday slashed $80 billion from its budget over the next two and a half years through a combination of sales tax hikes and spending cuts. That’s in addition to $92 billion dropped by the country’s previous administration.
Posted on Jul 11, 2012
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Gage Skidmore
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After attempts to partially privatize Social Security under President George W. Bush proved fruitless, Republicans have taken aim at the next government-run industry they would like to see move from the public sector to the private: education.
Posted on Jun 4, 2012
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DonkeyHotey (CC-BY-2.0)
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By Marian Wang, ProPublica —
Since last fall, one million borrowers have had their federal student loans randomly assigned to new loan-servicing companies, all nonprofits or subsidiaries of nonprofit organizations, thanks to a little-known provision in the 2010 healthcare overhaul.
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flee the cities (CC-BY)
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By Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman, TomDispatch —
Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate.
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Gamma Man (CC-BY)
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By Ellen Brown, Truthout —
Conventional wisdom holds that government bureaucrats are bad businesspeople. But around the world, the many countries with strong public banking sectors generally have strong, stable economies.
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Internal emails disclosed by Anonymous and WikiLeaks suggest that Stratfor, a private intelligence firm working with the U.S. Justice Department, has information about a confidential “sealed indictment” for the arraignment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
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Mr Ush (CC-BY)
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Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is leading the bipartisan push to digitize American education. In and out of office, he’s helped develop a national model that funnels taxpayer funds to private companies, sucker punches public employees and unions and sets him up for election as a champion of education reform.
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Flickr / trekkyandy
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A study conducted by the Project for Government Oversight (POGO) found that on average the U.S. government pays private contractors more than twice what it pays federal workers for a number of public services. (more)
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Flickr / Brenmorado
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After Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s fifth state of the nation speech last week, more than 50,000 people gathered in the Zocalo, Mexico City’s main square, to decry policies that have destroyed unions, privatized essential public industries, enriched a small elite and killed more than 50,000 people in the nation’s drug war. (more)
Posted on Sep 12, 2011
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Flickr / the-father
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ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is a secretive association of corporations and state legislators that has been crafting public policy to suit corporate interests since 1973. The organization is not new, but the opportunity to review ... (more)
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AP / Jim Cole
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On Friday, ultraconservative free-market booster Michele Bachmann suddenly came out as a supporter of government-run Medicare. But this potential presidential candidate’s break with the official Republican Party line was not surprising. The GOP has been under attack by its own base for the past few weeks ... (more)
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Flickr / mrlange
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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Saturday rejected a compromise on a budget repair bill under which Democrats offered to accept cuts in health and pension benefits for public employees in exchange for retaining their right to bargain collectively.
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Flickr / Hector Lopez-Berges
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Awash in debt and 20 percent unemployment, the Spanish government on Friday approved an austerity package aimed at reviving its moribund economy.
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Wikimedia Commons
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A decision by scientists back in 2003 to share their findings on Alzheimer’s research has led to a “wealth of recent scientific papers” and important advances in moving to understand the disease and develop drugs to combat it.
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AP / Gregory Bull
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By Moshe Adler — When a branch fell from a tree at the Central Park Zoo, killing a 6-month-old baby, Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared it “an act of God.” But in all likelihood it was the act of a mayor.
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Bigelow Aerospace via Wikimedia Commons
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Out in the Nevada desert, in a complex encircled by barbed wire and guards, a millionaire motelier who believes in UFOs and prayer—but not the Big Bang—is building the world’s first private space station. And it’s inflatable. (continued)
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U.S. Air Force
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The U.S. military, despite reports to the contrary, has continued to rely on a secret private spy network, akin to a Blackwater with brains, that has provided a stream of intelligence to military forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than a year.
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pithhelmet.wordpress.com
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Once-esteemed (by the government, at least) mercenary corporation Blackwater is in some hot legal water after the company’s former president and four other former employees were slapped with federal charges over the alleged stockpiling of automatic weapons.
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Flickr / The City Project
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Culture and history matter, even if it costs money. Someone should tell that to the city of Los Angeles, which is raising rents on the merchant tenants of Olvera Street, a Mexican-heritage historical site downtown that is currently undergoing privatization.
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Flickr / No Sweat UK
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In an announcement that was one part election hackery and one part good domestic politics, the Iraqi prime minister has declared that his country will not sell the rights to any more of its oil fields to foreign companies, a move that signals an intent by Iraq to develop its own national oil industry.
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AP / Laura Rauch
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By Max Blumenthal —
Business is booming in Arizona, thanks to a disturbing federal immigration program that transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to a private prison company, parasitic attorneys and other opportunists.
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Flickr / The City Project
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Olvera Street, the oldest part of downtown Los Angeles, is a pocket of near-authentic Mexican culture where one can buy chorizos, clothing and handicrafts. But the city’s budget crisis is leading to a push to privatize the monument, giving way to an influx of Starbucks and Pollo Loco on the historical street.
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aqah.org
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The fight against health care reform is being waged partly by secretive front groups such as Americans for Quality and Affordable Healthcare. While its sponsorship may be cloaked in mystery, its aims fit nicely with those of the health insurance industry.
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City of Hardin
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TPMMuckraker investigates the sad story of Hardin, Mont., a town so desperate for jobs it fell for a private prison scheme that left it with a big empty jail and a load of debt. You know you’re in trouble when you have to beg the state to send you sex offenders.
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wordpress.com
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These tough economic times have ganged up on the poor, homeowners, investors, students and immigrants. And now comes word that even Harvard and Yale, among the wealthiest schools in the world, have suffered dramatic losses in their endowments over the past year.
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flickr.com
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For only $5 a month, you too can undermine a developing country’s health infrastructure. Since 1990, foreign funding for “development assistance” has quadrupled, offering medical resources to the poor but also luring local health care workers away from government hospitals and toward more lucrative private companies.
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By Amy Goodman — As many as 5,000 children in Pennsylvania have been found guilty, and up to 2,000 of them jailed, by two corrupt judges who received kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities that benefited.
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pjvoice.com
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A BBC investigation on U.S. war profiteering estimates that $23 billion of taxpayer funds has been “lost, stolen, or not properly accounted for in Iraq.”
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Thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the privatization of the military and the surge in defense spending since 9/11, individual Pentagon auditors now have to keep track of more than three times as much money as they did 10 years ago. Because of limited resources, the Defense Department inspector general revealed in a recent report, about half of the military’s $316 billion weapons budget went under the radar last year.
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post-gazette.com
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More than a dozen American soldiers have died or received severe electrical shocks in Iraq, reportedly as a result of faulty electrical work often done by ill-trained Iraqis and Afghans under the supervision of Houston-based contractor KBR.
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This corporate war is fictional. Any resemblance to a real privatized war, immoral or otherwise, is purely coincidental.
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Mexican President Felipe Calderon released his plans Wednesday to give greater autonomy to the country’s nationalized oil monopoly PEMEX, a move criticized as privatizing the industry that constitutes 40 percent of federal income. With domestic oil production falling for the past six years, Calderon has had to negotiate his pro-business politics amid steadfast public opinion against denationalization.
Posted on Apr 9, 2008
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AP photo / Reed Saxon
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By Stanley Kutler — With our economic and financial crises deepening, government insiders reportedly are debating whether we need to restore some regulation—or not. Given the state of things, we can expect further woes and no regulation.
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blogspot.com
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After two months and 261 rounds of bidding, the FCC announced Tuesday that it has raised a total of $19.6 billion from the sale of the U.S. wireless spectrum. The revenue, slated to fund “public safety and digital television transition initiatives,” is nearly double what Congress had previously estimated for the publicly owned spectrum.
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Patrick Chappatte, NZZ am Sonntag —
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By Marie Cocco — There is no set piece more emblematic of the tragic farce that is the American involvement in Iraq than the grotesque episode of Blackwater USA and the killing of civilians in Baghdad—at least nine and as many as 28—on Sunday.
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By Amy Goodman — The host of “Democracy Now!” reports from New Orleans, where residents are fighting to keep their homes and resist the unholy alliance of opportunistic developers and an unresponsive government. Meanwhile, the president seems just as oblivious to the suffering of people in Louisiana as he is to that of Iraqis.
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According to data from the State and Defense departments, there are more than 180,000 civilian contractors on America’s payroll in Iraq. That’s about a surge’s worth more than the current troop count, and it doesn’t fully include private security contractors. The L.A. Times takes an exhaustive look at the “coalition of the billing.”
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amazon.com
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The writer speaks with Truthdig about his new book, “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army,” privatization in America and abroad, and our dysfunctional democracy.
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By Marie Cocco — Many of our nation’s latest scandals, from the abject failure to rebuild New Orleans to the abuse of veterans at Walter Reed, are the logical result of a contempt for government so zealously implemented by Ronald Reagan and his political descendants.
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By Amy Goodman — If Lady Liberty wasn’t bolted down, she would get up and walk away, having witnessed the abusive imprisonment that America’s broken immigration system imposes on the asylum seekers, torture victims and innocent families who had the criminal impulse to search for a better life.
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