Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has an important article in the New York Times. Krugman reflects on a major investigative series in the newspaper about privatized prisons in New Jersey, run by for-profit corporations..
The prisons described in the articles are akin to “hell on earth — an understaffed, poorly run system, with a demoralized work force...”
Krugman says we should read the story in the “broader context of a nationwide drive on the part of America’s right to privatize government functions, very much including the operation of prisons.”
Aside from making money, you might think that the motivation for privatization is the conservatives’ “belief in the magic of the marketplace, in the superiority of free-market competition over government planning. And that’s certainly the way right-wing politicians like to frame the issue.”
But Krugman points out that “…the one thing the companies that make up the prison-industrial complex — companies like Community Education or the private-prison giant Corrections Corporation of America — are definitely not doing is competing in a free market. They are, instead, living off government contracts. There isn’t any market here, and there is, therefore, no reason to expect any magical gains in efficiency.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I was tempted to write him to see if he had dipped into any of your posts on privatization.
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Krugman knows that privatization invites corruption and abuse. I wish he would write more directly about what is happening in education.
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I wish he would, too. I follow him closely, and have worried about his silence on this big question. He most certainly isn’t afraid of offending Obama; but maybe there’s somebody close to him on the other side.
He wrote this in his column:
“Now, someone will surely point out that nonprivatized government has its own problems of undue influence, that prison guards and teachers’ unions also have political clout, and this clout sometimes distorts public policy. Fair enough. But such influence tends to be relatively transparent. Everyone knows about those arguably excessive public pensions …”
I dunno. Every pension any working person has must be excessive. “Everyone knows” that by now.
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As if tyranny is better? Keep giving our corrupt Govt. more power and wonder why we are in this mess. I still prefer the problems with the power in the hands of the people rather than the govt.
I think what you see right now is crony Capitalism. Hardly free market capitalism. Krugman spouts the Keynesian ideology but will never acknowledge it doesn’t work.
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I have never understood how by having to make a profit, that is by definition adding at least 15% to the costs of an endeavor is more “efficient” and cost effective than not having to do so. Makes no sense logically.
There was a study from the 90s that showed that in the private business sector there was one supervisor for every five employees whereas in the public school sector there was one supervisor for every 23 or so employees. Tell me which is more efficient. Drives the free mouseketeers, oops mean marketers, crazy when you bring up stats like that. Now I’m sure that those stats have changed since then due to “gains in efficiency” (not that the workers ever received in remuneration any of those gains) so lets’s say it’s now 1/10 in the business sector and since many teachers have been let go its 1/18 (those figures are my guesstimates) which one is still more efficient???
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Krugman’s excellent piece represents a drop in the ocean of corporatism coup d’etat that has been accelerating in front of our eyes in the past forty years.The Fascist Italian leader Mussolini famously said: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
This phenomena is what has been taken place in the US. Education is just the last example to the crony capitalist takeover. Privatization is euphemism to the unaccountable transferred of public money – initially designated to promote and support the public – into few hands of top earners and other members of the criminal class.
Matt Taibbi of the Rolling Stone magazine has been documenting privatization of many aspect of our lives, all essentially designed to abolish any public service and support no bid contracts with unaccountable tyrannies. The parking meters story of Chicago and New York is a great example:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/new-york-to-repeat-chicago-s-parking-meter-catastrophe-20120613
He also documented how local municipalities handed – and was defrauded into handing – contracts to banks who made billions while bankrupting the municipalities:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620
He mentioned in the article that:”By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from “virtually every state, district and territory in the United States,”
Privatization in the most populated Alabama County- Jefferson – created conditions in which people can not afford running water and sewer, what the BBC called “third world conditions”:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16172522
Privetization supposed to bring the free market and competition into our lives. Regardless the fact that the idea is an atrocity, corporatism is neither free, doesn’t involve any market and offers no competition. For years US government has been shielding corporations from competition. Handing no bid contracts, subsidizing banks, like JP Morgan who get billions in tax payer money trough corporate welfare:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-18/dear-mr-dimon-is-your-bank-getting-corporate-welfare-.html
and of course by bullying away any sort of competition or challenge to corporate rule, like the case of world health organization threatened by the US not to publish dire warnings about consumption of sugar, for profits are more important then people:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/apr/21/usnews.food
Or Pfizer experimenting on African children in Nigeria while discussing with US embassy how to cover up their crimes :
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/12/10/us-wikileaks-pfizer-nigeria-idUSTRE6B93DF20101210
The list is endless, but it’s not accidental as Naomi Klein observed: …People can develop response to gradual change – but if dozens of changes come from all directions at once, a filling of futility sits in, and populations go limp”
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With regard to your last paragraph, Frank, quite simply put:
If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them w/your
bs.
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Corporatization of public education–thy name is Pearson. Follow the money.
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Earlier this year I had an epiphany about this issue and made some attempt to articulate my revelation on PolicyMic. Here is my thesis as it developed —
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“Resist the Privatization of America” is a Facebook group that tracks developments on this front.
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Friendly critics tell me that the prose in my first comment above is simply too turgid to bear. You would do us all a favor to delete it, in compensation for which I offer the following revised edition:
“Free trade” is the poker face that capitalism puts on as it loads its guns under the table and aims for the final trump of monopoly.
I used to think that democratic governance and corporate governance were antithetical in nature, but then I donned my old Hegelian thinking cap and suddenly realized that the real antithesis is between free trade capitalism, an ideal type that we never see in reality, and corporate modes of governance. The war between these two is due to the fact that every corporation seeks a monopoly, vertical, horizontal, and eternal, and it is that quest for universal incorporation that is the true nemesis of the free trade capitalist ideal.
In this view of things, democratic government is the evolving synthesis that alone has the power to regulate the conflict between the spirit of free market capitalism and the thirst of corporations for monopoly.
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Welcome to the New Guilded Age. A Michigan Representative, Bill Rogers, said, “I don’t care how it turns out. You have to competitively bid that stuff.” When commenting on privatizing a correctional facility in his home district. The Senate Majority Leader said, “I’m not sure what the final result is. I just want a final result.” This comment was in the context of gutting public school teacher’s pensions. Sound familiar? Imagine as ignorance and desperation grows, so will people’s fear of the poor and disenfranchised. The tea party is becoming a master of using the fear card to manipulate the shattered middle class. Once the level of public safety is eroded from under funding (austerity measures), what’s left of the middle class will welcome private prisons, and private prisons will see a growing line of new customers (prisoners), and owners will watch their wallets and influence grow. Anyone speaking out about the horror will be painted as a security threat, and liberal thought will gasp it’s last breath. Didn’t some dictators, in the not too distant past, use fiat and fear to criminalize non-conformity? The information war holds promise and perils, depending on who wins of course.
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All I hear is, money will fix the problem. How many more years do we have to pretend as if that is the fix?? How much more of our tax dollars do we have to flush down the toilet before we realize money will never fix education.
The question I ask is, do I want govt. bureaucrats (who’ve already destroyed public ed) running the show, or do I want parents?
I prefer that the customers run the show.
Will it be perfect? Of course not. But those of us who have access to private schools know that we know when our kids are suffering and when we have the power, we will drive excellence.
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Who are these “customers”? You seem to say they are the parents. If so, it would really be only the parents of school-age children.
So why should non-customers be forced to pay for the “choices” and “purchases” of people who are not even in the “market” for the “commodities” in question?
Please phrase your answer in terms that avoid any concept of “public benefit”, since you appear to have no grasp of that concept.
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Sorry, cut & paste error, here is the correction:
Who are these “customers”? You seem to say they are the parents. If so, they would really be only the parents of school-age children.
So why should non-customers be forced to pay for the “choices” and “purchases” of people in the “market” for educational “products”, when they are not even in the “market” for the “commodities” in question?
Please phrase your answer in terms that avoid any concept of “public benefit”, since you appear to have no grasp of that concept.
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No one has spent a dime on my children’s education because they’ve been educated in parochial schools. I’ve always paid for everyone else’s education. I did that before I had children, while my children were educated outside the public school system and after they all graduate.
I think there is a general consensus to support a public education system. It’s not going anywhere.
IT’s broken and we know it.
I suspect it will get worse with Bill Gates leading the path to destruction.
Right now you have the govt. controlling education because they hold the $$$. Parents have no voice because they don’t control the $$$.
The question becomes, do you want schools accountable to bureaucrats or parents? I trust the parents over legislators and bureaucrats.
Is that a perfect system? NOPE. I have school choice and it’s not perfect.
But as the customer who can come and go to any school I choose, I sure do appreciate my voice, my ability to find the best school for my kids and the respect I receive from administrators because they value my opinion and that I am a paying customer.
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The thing that people really need to think hard about here is what a private corporation is. For one thing, a private corporation is a commodity that can be traded and bought by a bigger private corporation, and so on, and so on, until no one knows who or what really owns it.
Just like my credit union, which I otherwise like well enough, one time sold my car loan to Comerica on account of me being such a preferred risk, and suddenly I’m sending my payment coupons (think “vouchers”) to a mega-corporation that I had not “chosen” to do business with.
And pretty soon we won’t what know foreign corporations are in charge of our local schools, just like it happened with mortgages in the housing industry.
If you believe that just can’t happen here, please let me know, because I can give you a really good deal on a Gateway* computer that I unknowingly bought from a Chinese import-export outfit that sold my credit card number to some offshore pirates.
* Michigan readers will know that our current “Governerd: was CEO of Gateway during the time it was sold to China.
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