How To Sell Off a City
2/21/2015


For over a decade now, Chicago has been the epicenter of the fashionable trend of “privatization”—the transfer of the ownership or operation of resources that belong to all of us, like schools, roads and government services, to companies that use them to turn a profit. Chicago’s privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration, which ran from 1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace.

For Rahm’s investment banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For citizens? Not so much.

They say that the first person in any political argument who stoops to invoking Nazi Germany automatically loses. But you can look it up: According to a 2006 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the English word “privatization” derives from a coinage, Reprivatisierung, formulated in the 1930s to describe the Third Reich’s policy of winning businessmen’s loyalty by handing over state property to them....

As president, Bill Clinton greatly expanded a privatization program begun under the first President Bush’s Department of Housing and Urban Development. “Hope VI” aimed to replace public-housing high-rises with mixed-income houses, duplexes and row houses built and managed by private firms.

...That is the promise of privatization in a nutshell: that the profit motive can serve not just those making the profits, but society as a whole, by bypassing inefficient government bureaucracies that thrive whether they deliver services effectively or not, and empower grubby, corrupt politicians and their pals to dip their hands in the pie of guaranteed government money.

...As one of the movement’s fans explained in 1997, his experience with nascent attempts to pay private real estate developers to replace public housing was an “example of smart policy.”

“The developers were thinking in market terms and operating under the rules of the marketplace,” he said. “But at the same time, we had government supporting and subsidizing those efforts.”

The fan was Barack Obama, then a young state senator. Four years later, he cosponsored a bipartisan bill to increase subsidies for private developers and financiers to build or revamp low-income housing.

However, the rush to outsource responsibility for housing the poor became a textbook example of one peril of privatization: Companies frequently get paid whether they deliver the goods or not (one of the reasons investors like privatization deals)....



...Other cities and states did their homework and rejected the privatization fad. In 2008, Pennsylvania turned back Democratic governor Ed Rendell’s dream of selling off the state’s famous turnpike for 75 years to a consortium of Citi Infrastructure Investors and the Spanish company Albertis Infraestructuras.......And after Atlanta leased its water system to United Water Inc. in 1997, leading to a series of water-main breaks and billing disputes, the city’s watershed commissioner said, “I don’t believe the city will ever look at privatizing essential services again.”

Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago, though, presses ahead....

Read entire, very informative article here~
http://inthesetimes.com/article/17533/how_to_sell_off_a_city

Taking on ‘Mayor 1 Percent’

Reclaim Chicago is a campaign to put people’s candidates up against incumbent city council members who’ve been "tail-wagging lapdogs for Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s corporate rule." It's time a winning people’s movement makes a change in Chicago.

The people of Chicago are grappling with a big question that people in nearly every urban place face: Can anyone really govern such a sprawling, brawling city?

Reclaim Chicago — an upstart populist coalition that has become a major force in the city — says the answer is a great big NO.

Moreover, asserts this grassroots group, no “one” should.

Rather, the many should. If they’re organized through a democratic network, the people can be their own government, producing egalitarian policies that improve the lives of everyone and advance the whole city.

Indeed, the problem in Chicago is that “one” has been in charge, imposing corporate rule that further enriches the wealthy while holding down everyone else.

“Mayor 1 Percent,” as the people have dubbed him, thinks he’s untouchable. At present, the city’s Numero Uno is Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The Wall Street Democrat uses everything from privatization schemes and tax favoritism to harsh budget cuts and arbitrary police action to shift money and power away from the people and into the coffers of the elites.

Reclaim Chicago, however, is about to test that. This independent coalition is backing a top-notch slate of 14 people’s candidates to challenge incumbent city council members who’ve been tail-wagging lapdogs for Emanuel’s corporate rule.

And Mayor 1 Percent himself has drawn two opponents for the dominant Democratic Party’s February 24 primary election.

Of course, Emanuel is floating on a boatload of special interest cash....

http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/02/19/taking-mayor-1-percent/