The new Gilded Age: Brought to you by privatization

There are two reasons corporate stooges anti-worker politicians are able to sell to their cronies vast swaths of taxpayer-owned prisons, highways,  forests, postal delivery services and anything else that generates cash: (1) taxpayers think it saves them money and (2) taxpayers think the bidding process is fair.

Those taxpayers are wrong. Here are a few examples:

• The sale of the Indiana Toll Road to a Spanish-Australian consortium caused tolls to double (and they'll double again), longer waits at toll booths, dirty rest stops and the state is losing toll revenue while a foreign corporation profits by cutting corners.
• Washington State voters in November voted to become the first state since Prohibition to privatize liquor sales. When sales were privatized in June, Washington residents were stunned by a 19 percent increase in the price of liquor and a 9 percent drop in Washington state liquor sales. (Government is always more expensive, right?)
• Prison privatization all over the country is a fiasco for so many reasons, safety being one of the most important. In Texas, nearly a dozen taxpayer-built prisons lie empty after they were privatized. In Liberty County, scandal emptied 60 percent of a private prison and the county has to pay the contractor a 15 percent premium because the headcount fell below 150 inmates.

Or the humiliating shambles ... well, we'll stop here.

The privatization ball keeps on rolling.  The Pennsylvania state Senate will probably vote this week on a bill to change settled law that protects local parks from being sold for development. Florida will no doubt try to privatize more prisons next year. Gov. John Kasich wants to privatize the Ohio Turnpike. And all over the country corporations are trying to get their hands on cash from public schools under the guise of education reform.

Privatization doesn't just cost more. It makes it easier to hide wrongdoing, harder to oversee public spending, gives less recourse for people harmed by a private contractor and increases corporate influence over government.

Those reasons are why privatization is so beloved by ALEC, the dating service for corporations and state lawmakers also known as the American Legislative Exchange Council. This secretive, powerful group is a major force behind the push to privatize.

A law review article by Penn State Law Professor Ellen Dannin analyzes the impact on the War on Workers, of which privatization is a major part. She concludes that corporations will end up running our lives even more than they already do if privatization continues apace:

Services that are provided by the government tend to be natural monopolies. If ALEC succeeded in moving all government services to the private sector, the result would be private monopolies that were regulated neither by competition nor by the oversight provided by freedom of information acts or sunshine laws. In addition, if it was not possible to return to the public sector privatized work that failed to meet its contractual obligations or whose operations harmed the agency’s mission, then an important incentive to provide good performance would be lost. Aggravating this concern, because government services tend to be natural monopolies, alternate private providers may not exist. The result would be a new gilded age propelled by the ambitions of robber barons.

Yup.