Some excerpts from the article
....In his 2006 budget President Bush proposed auctioning off 300,000 acres of national forest in 41 states. This followed attempts by both the Reagan Administration and Clinton-era Republicans to privatize public land.
Now, with continuing budget shortfalls, the Cato Institute and other libertarian groups are pressing for property deals, with the justification that land should be "allocated to the highest-value use," presumably making it available to the highest bidder for consumption purposes.
2. Infrastructure decaying in the hands of profit-seekers-
David Cay Johnston describes the deteriorating state of America's infrastructure, with grids and pipelines neglected by monopolistic industries that cut costs rather than provide maintenance. Meanwhile, they achieve profit margins of over 50%, eight times the corporate average.
The government agencies that are usually blamed for the crumbling infrastructure are often staffed with regulators from the industries they're expected to monitor. If and when accidents happen, the companies responsible can plead hardship and demand rate increases from the public
3. Water no longer available for the common good
According to Food and Water Watch , "The finance industry is promoting water privatization as a way to help local governments pay for budget shortfalls and improvement projects." The chief economist of Citigroup concurred: "I expect to see a globally integrated market for fresh water within 25 to 30 years."
But while profits average 12 to 15 percent per year, water and sewer utility rates typically rise 33 to 63 percent, and short-term business ventures are subject to abandonment after just a few years. Desperate local governments often regret their hasty decisions. A Century Foundation report concluded that with privatization "Competition is hard to create and maintain, cost savings (if any) from privatization erode over time, and service quality often suffer...
4. Our children put at risk with unproven educational methods
The few charter schools with good reviews have functioned with limited enrollments ,retention policies favoring likely-to-succeed individuals, and an absence of special needs students. This violates a precept underscored by Chief Justice Warren in Brown vs. the Board of Education: "Education...is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms." Charters aren't even close to that. The Louisiana Believes project, for example, which will eventually be the country's most extensive voucher system, has only 5,000 slots available for about 380,000 eligible students .
But corporations are rushing headlong into this lucrative new market anyway, while paying little heed to the body of research confirming their relative ineffectiveness. This includes studies from Stanford University , the Department of Education , Johns Hopkins University , and the RAND Corporation .
In addition to their poor performance, charters are more segregated, less likely to accept students with disabilities, and conducive to a widening of the racial and rich-poor education gaps....
5. Colleges gradually being replaced with prisons
America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and despite a falling violent crime rate , more people are going to jail. As explained by Michelle Alexander , "federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses."
So as education funding drops again this year in most of the states, spending on prisons increases. The U.S. spends over two times as much per prisoner as per public school student. California spends more on prisons than it does on higher education.
The profit motive is hastening prison privatization. Quickly. From 1990 to 2009, the number of prisoners in private facilities increased by more than 1600%, from about 7,000 to over 125,000 inmates. Corrections Corporation of America recently offered to run the prison system in any state willing to guarantee that jails stay 90% full.
