#privatization

#privatization

My mind, though enfeebled by New Year's celebrations, was fine; I'd traveled to Queens to see Jeffrey Joyal's "my Life Underground" at Gandt. For this exhibition, the gallery left its longtime home in a basement for a column-laden miniature ballroom in a clinic up the block, complete with a wrought-iron chandelier and ghostly portrait hanging above the crown molding. Walking through the lobby to the exhibition room, I passed by an empty suggestion box entreating patients to "rate their therapist."

Through the generations, hundreds of thousands of public servants have spent the best years of their lives delivering for New York whether on the beat as a cop, on the job as a firefighter, picking up trash for the Sanitation Department, pruning trees for the Parks Department, assisting seniors at the Department for the Aging, and so on.

The way they do that is with an induced form of "disaster capitalism," where they intentionally crash the economy in order to have some control over what remains. So the function of tariffs, for example, is to bankrupt businesses or even public services in order to privatize and then control them. Stall imports, put the ports out of business, and then let a sovereign wealth fund purchase the ports.

I've got a genius business idea for people with few discernible skills. First you establish a health insurance company and get people to pay you large sums every month. Then, when a customer tries to use their insurance to cover medical costs, make a habit of denying their claim. While doing that, pay lobbyists to keep politicians amenable. Repeat this strategy until your company is worth billions. I'm not saying this is exactly how the US health insurance industry works, but it's close enough.

Take the old example of Ross Perot: Before he was a presidential candidate, he made his fortune producing welfare forms for the federal government. Today, this dynamic has evolved into sophisticated disaster capitalism, where public benefit systems create ideal conditions for private equity extraction that devastate both vulnerable communities and nonprofits.

"People detained there will almost certainly have their basic rights violated while caged in tents under the brutal West Texas sun, with extreme heat that puts their lives at risk."

The Department of Veterans Affairs has lost thousands of healthcare professionals deemed core to the system's ability to function, affecting mission-critical work.

Labour could have chosen the public interest over the profit motive when reorganizing the water industry in England and Wales. Despite polling showing support for publicly owned water companies, the government ruled out reversing the 1989 water privatization.

There are some inescapable facts here. The cost of producing water and dealing with our wastewater is going up.

In response to technical outages, the Trump administration aims to invest billions into revamping the FAA rather than pursuing privatization, which could hinder progress.

Senator Mike Lee's controversial provision aims to open 250 million acres of public lands for privatization, promising to boost housing supply and generate funds.

The latest deal means about €19.5bn of that cost has been recouped for taxpayers, in a mix of share sales, interest on rescue loans and other fees and levies.

In the U.S., we're still relying on a rail network built in the 19th century, which limits our ability to compete with modern transportation options.

This shift, generally in the U.S., from NASA doing everything to hiring everything out, is creating new opportunity for businesses and individuals in their careers.