Take five minutes and watch this excellent video about the startling advance of privatization, not only in schools, but in the military, in prisons, and in other sectors that used to be public. The video was made by Lawrence Baines, who wrote a short and excellent book with the same title as the video.
You will consider this five minutes well spent. Send it to your friends. It is an well-made brief statement about privatization warps our priorities.
Here’s the link on YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQc-KmJ_5ms
VIMEO: https://vimeo.com/397303390
Dr. Lawrence A. Baines
Director, Oklahoma Writing Project, http://www.okwp.org
Mailing address: University of Oklahoma, 820 Van Vleet Oval, room 114, Norman, OK 73019. (405) 325-3752. lbaines@ou.edu
http://www.lawrencebaines.com http://www.americansellout.org
Diane Ravitch's blog 
. . . brief, clear, and to the point. Well done. CBK
This video is worth the five minutes. Privatization generally does not save money. It often costs us more due to misuse of funds and extreme profiteering. We are paying $775 per day to house migrant children in for profit detention centers that offer makeshift quarters. https://www.truthorfiction.com/does-it-cost-750-a-day-to-house-migrant-children-in-camps/
Privatization means:
Pay More and Get Less.
Prices rise, quality drops and service deteriorates. But a few people get richer.
summed up in five words: well said
powerful
Very chilling and enraging, to see public goods being looted by the private sector. The clip should add that both major parties have collaborated in undermining the public sector, especially during the eight disastrous years of the Obama-Biden Administration. Does candidate Joe Biden admit his terrible mistake in supporting privatization and now offer a plan to strenuously change direction?
If anything, this health crisis shows we need universal healthcare instead of a bunch of private providers that put profit over people, and some left without coverage. We also have the highest healthcare costs in the world for mediocre results.
What an excellent question. Not holding my breath.
Admirable simplicity with key points made.The worst is not seeing a clear path to reverse this path…at least not in my lifetime.
As I watched this, I was reminded of a George Carlin bit that I think someone here first made me aware of some time ago (go to 6:30 for education part):
Let us say that a school system decided to privatize maintenance. Sounds reasonable. What does a principal know about floor wax. That can be taken care of by a manager who sub-contracts the whole job and answers to a different boss who talks to the superintendent of the school system. We can save some money that way right?
Not really. Can we trust the company to put the quality of the wax on the floor over company profits? Of course not. They are going to cut the wax so they can get the job done cheaper. In order to call their hand on it, the principal has to contact the superintendent, who would rather not hear that there is a problem because he already has enough problems. The company gets away with murder. Soap dishes are empty when the janitorial staff is undermanned so the company can make money. There is no accountability, a word that is most often used as a cudgel against all those lazy teachers.
Look at almost any charter school. Everything outsourced to some ne’er-do-well cousin or mistress or golfing buddy of the con artist who runs the charter management organization. No soap in the kids’ bathrooms, no art supplies, no science equipment, no gym, no theatre, no media room except for testing, no library, no nurse. Every penny that is not spent of the per-pupil amount allocated by the state is one that can be spent on the nice offices and cars and airplanes and salaries and other perks of the CMO officers.
Follow a business model. Buy cheap, sell dear. Pocket the difference. Ca-ching.
Eisenhower warned that the military-industrial complex, a union of defense contractors and the armed forces, was as a threat to democratic government. He made his speech in 1961.
It is well worth listening to again today.
Said it before and I’ll say it again, this speech was a cowardly act. After a career of enabling this behavior, the last eight of which were as president when he could have done something, at least give speeches like this, he mentions an existential problem as he walks out the door.
And it’s only gotten worse. As I’ve written ad infinitum, AT LEAST 60 cents of every annual federal discretionary dollar goes to the military. We spend more annually on military research that we have in the past century on medical research. Given the history since this duplicitous speech, Eisenhower’s admonition rings even hollower than it did then.
Kind of like Ray Kroc coming out for healthy eating after cashing in all his McDonald’s stock. Or Jeffrey Dahmer doing PSAs for vegans. Or…
You have a point, but all the more important because he (Ike) really knew what he was talking about
. . . capitalism and entrepreneurship, in most of their manifestations, have a way of dulling the moral,social, cultural and even spiritual intentions we are born with, but that still need nurturing and development.
BTW, I was a small business owner for seven+ years way-back-when (florist), and remain a supporter of capitalism–but NOT the kind that systematically dulls the human spirit (greedy, predatory, selfish, transactional-only, careless, etc.). CBK
Michael Milken knows about junk bonds and “online education.” Willie Sutton knew a lot about robbing banks. Not a compelling argument. One has never had to be an expert in military affairs to know how spending on it slowly strangles every other public program.
Trump must sit up every night snorting Adderall and thinking up the most jack*** outrage that he can perpetrate tomorrow. Today he named the long-time attorney for a trophy hunting organization to lead U.S. international wildlife policy. Perhaps Putin is paying this vile cretin to screw everything up in the United States as much as possible.
Every day another outrage.
Here we are. The worst possible guy at the worst time.
Meanwhile, my Trump senator, Marsha Blackburn, sent this in a newsletter I get periodically:
“The communist country has mobilized the full force of its propaganda machine to spread lies about the Chinese coronavirus originating in the US. To be clear: this is a bold-faced lie and an attempt to shift the blame away from Beijing. China is now using the power behind their diplomatic corps to try and avert public humiliation for sparking yet another global pandemic.”
The only mobilization I have read about is a second tier public official re-tweeting a Chinese rumor that the Covid was an American military effort to punish China in some way.
The last line, that this is an attempt to avoid public humiliation for an epidemic arising in China smacks of the Yellow Peril days of the early 1900s. China has always been the source for world epidemics. Complaining about that is like complaining that there are volcanoes in the ring of fire. The implication that this epidemic is somehow different from Bubonic Plague, Spanish Flu, or any other of the multitude of diseases that have been produced by the combination of climate and population down through the centuries is provocative.
Of course it is. Provocation is the way fascists avert the public scrutiny from their most dramatic failures. When you cannot govern, you must provoke or lose power.
The New York Times reported this morning that the Trump administration has decided to focus public anger on China rather than Trump’s failure to act last December to prepare for the epidemic, stockpiling medical supplies and convening medical experts. Senator Blackburn is acting on White House instructions.
The good old days of the 1950s includes McCarthyism and the Red Scare. It’s not just fashions that are recycled.