Locking Up Grampie for Fun & Profit

These Are the REAL Welfare Cheats: For-Profit Prison Company Diversifying into Robbing Medicaid Funds

Well, that didn’t take long. Within just a few months of Kentucky cutting its ties  with the country’s biggest for-profit prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) has hit back with its latest sinister scheme to turn tax dollars (and human misery) into shareholder returns.

Here’s the plan: rather than letting one of the company’s prisons in Kentucky sit empty, a CCA ally in Kentucky’s legislature has announced plans to re-fill it by incarcerating the old and infirm.

One might think that prison funding gets allocated based on requests from the people who actually run the prison system. Not so for CCA – the Corrections Department has not reported that it needs extra prison beds for the elderly and ill.  A spokesperson told reporters, “That wasn’t an initiative that came from us.”

So why, then, did CCA pop up in the House version of Kentucky’s proposed budget, which instructs the Corrections Department to sign a contract with CCA to convert one of its prisons into an “ an assisted living or nursing facility” for elderly prisoners?   Has CCA suddenly decided it really cares about the elderly? Not quite.  It cares about profits, as it always has, and this provision would create a new way for CCA to bolster its bottom line.  If the federal government reimburses the private prison company for its medical expenses through Medicaid, it will convert old people into an attractive revenue stream for CCA.  By recharacterizing this geriatric prison as an “assisted living and/or nursing facility,” CCA can receive the same Medicaid reimbursement as a nursing home or hospital in the community—and be paid a per-diem rate by the Kentucky Corrections Department on top of that.

For the complete article see COMMON DREAMS http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/15-3

 

The Selling of Pennsylvania

The State of Pennsylvania with very little fanfare or publicity has decided to “give” the State’s bridges to a private for-profit company for the next 40 years. So whenever one passes over a bridge in the Quaker State one will have to pay a private company for the privilege. Besides racking in the dough on tolls, the company will have what is called an “adverse action” provision in the contract so that if the State ever does anything which would reduce the company’s anticipated profits, the State will have to make up the difference thus guaranteeing the profit return.

A similar provision in the contract between Chicago and the company that took over the public parking meters is costing that city boatloads of cash. The parking meter company actually gets paid if a street is shutdown for repair resulting in empty meters. This little gem of a giveaway was engineered by the Bankster “Rammed” Emmanuel who prior to becoming the Windy City’s Mayor was the man who operated the strings allowing Obama to dance on cue.

One can imagine conditions where due to a new road or such, a bridge would be used less and result in lower revenues. The Company will still have to be paid regardless. Sweet deal, if you’re a bridge owner.

This far-seeing action was delivered courtesy of Republicans and Obamacrats who sought to get Government off our backs while putting the State on its back so as to facilitate profitable ravishing.

_______________________________________________________

SOURCE: Ellen Dannin, “The Stealth Privatization of Pennsylvania”, TruthOut.com (January 29, 2014)

Running Government Like a Business

ARNE DUNCAN, the Obama-clone presiding over the Administration’s privatization of public schools, is notable for yet another accomplishment, apart from the number of public schools turned over to private operation, Arne is Mr. Profit!

The Department of Education turns a profit (Can the Defense Department make this claim?) dispensing college loans to students. Indeed, the Education Department actually makes more money from the millions of students burdened with never-ending debt than it GIVES to poor students under the Pell Grant program — $ 42 BILLION squeezed out of students and ex-students!

This skimming off the top constitutes HALF of the Department’s budget and goes along way to explaining why the Department DOES NOT enforce the Law against the private loan sharks who market the product, while taking their own vigorish.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), one of the remaining REAL Democrats in Congress, had this to say, “This is fundamentally about our values and what kind of country we want to be. . . With college costs exploding and students being crushed by more than a trillion dollars in debt, I believe we should invest in our students — not make obscene profits off them.”

SOURCES: Matt Taibi in THE ROLLING STONE, Common Dreams and Huffington Post

Privatization Is Not a Solution, It Is a Problem

DIANE RAVITCH

Abandoning public schools for a free-market system eviscerates our basic obligation to support them whether our own children are in public schools, private schools or religious schools, and even if we have no children at all.

The campaign to “reform” schools by turning public money over to private corporations is a great distraction from our system’s real problems: Academic performance is low where poverty and racial segregation are high. Sadly, the U.S. leads other advanced nations of the world in the proportion of children living in poverty. And income inequality in our nation is larger than at any point in the last century.

We should do what works to strengthen our schools: Provide universal early childhood education (the U.S. ranks 24th among 45 nations, according to the Economist); make sure poor women get good prenatal care so their babies are healthy (we are 131st among 185 nations surveyed, according to the March of Dimes and the United Nations); reduce class size (to fewer than 20 students) in schools where students are struggling; insist that all schools have an excellent curriculum that includes the arts and daily physical education, as well as history, civics, science, mathematics and foreign languages; ensure that the schools attended by poor children have guidance counselors, libraries and librarians, social workers, psychologists, after-school programs and summer programs.

Schools should abandon the use of annual standardized tests; we are the only nation that spends billions testing every child every year. We need high standards for those who enter teaching, and we need to trust them as professionals and let them teach and write their own tests to determine what their students have learned and what extra help they need.

Our nation is heading in a perilous direction, toward privatization of education, which will increase social stratification and racial segregation. Our civic commitment to education for all is eroding. But like police protection, fire protection, public beaches, public parks and public roads, the public schools are a public responsibility, not a consumer good.

An excerpt from Diane’s forthcoming book, REIGN of ERROR: THE HOAX of the PRIVATIZATION MOVEMENT & the DANGER to AMERICA’s PUBLIC SCHOOLS

One Is Punished If One Steals a Goose Off the Common; But If One Steals the Common Out from Under the Goose, One Profits

Professor Eisen discusses the privatization of publicly-funded knowledge. The taxpayers pay for the development of knowledge and then must pay again to access this knowledge. This happens across the spectrum of other activities as well. The public pays to develop medicines which are then given to private companies to own and market. The private pharmaceutical companies then charge the public for the drugs for which the public has already paid. Likewise, our courts and legislatures make decisions and establish laws with public funding. The cases and laws are then compiled by private companies and loaded into computers for which the public must pay again if they wish to access the law.

Michael Eisen, Professor, UC of Berkeley

It is a felony to share knowledge created by the faculty, staff and students of the University of California with the public.

Wait. What?

In 2011, online rights activist Aaron Swartz was accused of using the MIT computer network to download millions of scholarly journal articles with the intent of freely sharing them with the public. Federal prosecutors aggressively pursued charges against him, and, earlier this month, with a trial looming, Swartz killed himself.

The Justice Department has faced intense scrutiny for its senseless decision to turn this victimless act into a major case, but the real culprits in this tragedy are all the universities across the world that allowed articles that rightfully belong to the public to fall into private hands in the first place.

Every day, faculty, staff and students of the University of California hand over control of papers describing their ideas and discoveries to publishers, most of whom immediately lock them up behind expensive paywalls. They do this not only with the university’s knowledge— they do it with its complicity.

That the public does not have unlimited access to the intellectual output of academic scholars and scientists is one of the greatest-ever failures of vision and leadership from the men and women who run our research universities — all the more so at a publicly funded institution like the University of California.

When the Internet began to take off in the mid-1990’s, it created the opportunity to do something scholars had been dreaming of for millennia — to gather all of the writings of scholars past and present together in a single online public library — a free, globally accessible version of the ancient library in Alexandria.

But 20 years on and we are barely any closer to achieving this goal. Instead of posting their work online, scholars send them to journals, most of which condition publication on receipt of the authors’ copyright. These journals then exercise their exclusive rights to distribute these works by demanding payment for access to their collections.

If you have not yet published in a scholarly journal, you may not realize just how absurd this transaction is. Scholars at the UC system and every other research university on the planet voluntarily hand over control of their work to publishers, work that the same universities have to immediately turn around and buy back. And this is not a minor transaction — revenue for scholarly journals exceeds an estimated $9 billion per year.

It is inexplicable enough that university administrators have done next to nothing to stop this ridiculous system. But the situation is even worse than that. Not only do universities refuse to stop shoveling money to publishers, but they all but require that their faculty publish in these journals. They do this by promulgating the idea that getting a faculty position at Berkeley, and then being tenured and promoted, requires publishing in prestigious journals, most of which greatly limit access to their contents.

While I and a handful of others have resisted, most of my colleagues are unwilling to risk their careers in the name of public access to their work. And thus an insane and unjust system continues.

The situation is, however, not completely static, especially in the sciences. Alternative publishing paradigms have emerged, including the “open access” model pioneered by the Public Library of Science which I co-founded. And major funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, now require that their grantees make their works freely available, albeit with a delay.

No single action would accelerate this process more than a clear endorsement from university leaders that free public access to the works people produce is not just a good— it is a priority. The university should take the lead by making such a declaration and openly altering the criteria for hiring, tenure and promotion to emphasize the value and importance of public access and ultimately require it.

For too long the leaders of this university have sat idly by while the crisis of scholarly communication festered. Decades ago, universities should have stepped forward to take advantage of the Internet to advance their disseminating mission. They didn’t, but it’s never too late to start.

NOTE: In the early years of the Internet certain companies garnered favorable publicity announcing “partnerships” with university libraries under which the businesses promised to digitalize library resources for the supposed free use of the inquiring public. After a few major books had been digitalized, and after thousands had been provided without charge by libraries, the companies came up with a fee to be assessed whenever a user sought out a book. Again, public resources privatized for the profit of the few.

Power Elite in Chicago Dump the Kids

CHICAGO CLOSING 129 PUBLIC SCHOOLS

From BLACK AGENDA www.blackagendareport.com —

Bruce Dixon

If you don’t live in Chicago you might not know that the CEO and the dozens of other six figure a year mayoral cronies who run the Chicago Public Schools want to close 129 public schools this year, more than a third of the city’s total. It’s not national news for the same reason that CLOSING 40 PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN PHILADELPHIA last year wasn’t national news, and massive school closings in the poorer neighborhoods of cities across the country is not news either.

It’s not news because school closings and school privatization, the end game of the bipartisan policies the Obama administration, Wall Street, the US Chamber of Commerce, a host of right wing foundations and deep pockets and hordes of politicians in both parties from the president down are pushing down the throats of communities across the country, are deeply unpopular. The American people, and especially the parents, teachers, grandparents, and other residents of poorer neighborhoods where closings and privatization are happening emphatically don’t want these things.

Even the word describing their policy, “privatization” is so vastly unpopular that they’ve taken it out of circulation altogether. The best way, our leaders imagine, to contain and curtail resistance to their deeply unpopular policies is to avoid naming them for what they are, to keep them on the down low, to not report on their implementation, and certainly to not cover any civic resistance to them.

Local elites in each city and school district concoct real or imaginary “crises” to which the solution is always firing more experienced teachers, hiring more temps in their place, instituting more high-stakes testing, closing more public schools and substituting more unaccountable (and often profitable) charter schools, frequently in the same buildings that once housed public schools. In Chicago the “crisis” is precipitated every year when the CPS (that’s Chicago Public Schools – Chicago’s never had an elected school board, they’re all mayoral appointees) honchos announce the schools are in a billion dollar hole. The Chicago Teachers Union of course, took a look over the same books and revealed that despite the host of top $100,000 a year officials whose jobs never seem to be cut, the system was nine figures in the black, not ten in the red. Naturally, local and national media didn’t report that either.

Rahm Emanuel, formerly Obama’s controller, as Mayor of Chicago has pursued an aggressive strategy of privatization of public resources. Chicago handed over the city-installed parking meters and their revenue stream to a private for-profit company and is hell-bent on converting the foundation of American democracy, public schools, into another profit center for banksters and corporateers

Postal Privatization

It is still not well known but what we grew up with as the Post Office DEPARTMENT of Government is now called the “Postal Service Corporation”. The head of this Corporation is not the Postmaster General but is called a CEO. The last one “retired” with a severance package of $ 1.3 MILLION. Department heads DO NOT get Government retirements of over a MILLION DOLLARS!

Recently the Postal Corporation let it be known that Saturday service would be discontinued by August of this year. Several “pilot programs” have been initiated wherein “customers” (what we used to call citizens when we had a democracy) will be required to pick up their mail at the postal corporation stations. Within several years these pilots will be applied nationally. Of course, this won’t apply to BUSINESS customers who will continue to receive office deliveries (You know who owns the Government, don’t you).

Year by year, station by station, the postal staff and letter carriers will be laid off and “temps”, short-termers and contract workers will take their place. Meanwhile, the for-profit carriers will up their prices and takeover the market completely, as was the purpose of this little experiment in privatization.

Public schools are already under attack indeed public funds are being used to pay for-profits to takeover public schools, and discharge teachers, thoughout the country.

Public parks are being auctioned off.

Major Cities, including Chicago, have sold their parking meters to private for-profit companies.

Medicare is being nibbled into by profit companies. Twenty Percent of the Medicare market being given to private carriers and the pharmaceutical industry being guaranteed fully-paid research results AND top rates paid for out of public funds.

Publicly constructed roads are being turned into privately-operated tollways.

And the Military? The last bastion of governmental enterprise that would seem immune to privatization is gradually being shifted to mercenaries and private armies run by private corporations. There are more mercs in Afghanistan than G.I.s. Mess tents and latrines are privately owned and contracted out to the Pentagon by business interests who are paid far more than the buck privates who used to maintain these institutions.

There is a change in process. Democracy is being sold off. The idea of a Public Sphere is passe. Indeed major public buildings and facilities that in any other time would be named for a city or historical person are now subject to privately owned naming rights. Schoolbooks are being sponsored by private enterprise and approved by them before being distributed in the schools. We are branded, segmented and commercialized down to the marrow and the very concept of a Res Publica has been diminished into insignificance. It may be a New World Order, a Brave New World, or the latest version of a resuscitated Feudalism, but it is not Democracy.

The Vultures Are Circling; For-Profit Companies Want to Takeover Public Colleges

Prisons are privatized, schools are privatized, welfare services are privatized . . .  They want to privatize Social Security. They are also going after our colleges . . .

There has been an interesting spate of “news” recently regarding the nation’s public community colleges. The timing of articles appearing in March and April seem suspicious as they all follow on the heels of the defeat of California Assembly Bill 515, which would have partially privatized the California community college system.

The bill would have allowed for the creation of an internal governing board within community college districts that could then be authorized to sell college courses based on a students’ ability to pay. This proposed pay-to-play system would have semi-privatized the 112 community colleges. The fact that it did not pass has infuriated the corporate press, eager to see all education privatized.

* * *

America’s community colleges are in a near-death cycle after decades of budget cuts designed to weaken the public commons. Underfunded, lacking the ability to offer access or classes to students seeking an education and continuously hiking fees and tuition, public community colleges cannot handle the millions of students who wish to receive a reasonably priced education.

Rather than acknowledge the years of economic neglect and the new austerity that have left the public community colleges in a most precarious fiscal position, the recent swarm of corporate news articles instead seems aimed at demonizing public colleges, their faculty, students and staff. This is troubling and also fishy, for at the same time that the public colleges and universities are experiencing an inability to serve students due to years of economic starvation and slash-and-burn budget priorities, the for-profit colleges are ginned up to take over the educational “market” at costs over six to seven times the tuition costs at public institutions. So, while the neglect of the public sphere is devastating to students, the private for-profit subprime colleges can hardly contain themselves now that they have helped foster and create the material conditions for future profits.

Like a beast that smells blood, for-profit colleges such as Kaplan, Corinthian, Educational Management Corporation, the Apollo Group (University of Phoenix), to name just a few, see a hemorrhaging public sector as a business opportunity – a grand crisis just waiting to be exploited. Like private pike in a public lake, the for-profits are poised to take over even more of the $40 billion higher educational “industry.”

From http://truth-out.org/news/item/9383-the-washington-post-pbs-and%20-the-bee#.UIGolIvsIzk.email
By Daniel Weil

The Obama-Republican Plan to Privatize Public Schools

From Diane Ravitch’s blog –

If ever evidence was needed about the bizarre mind meld between the Obama administration and the far-right of the Republican party, here it is.

Secretary Arne Duncan is giving the keynote to Jeb Bush’s Excellence in Education summit in Washington, D.C. on November 28. Another keynote will be delivered to the same gathering of the leaders of the privatization movement by John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, who headed the Obama transition team in 2008. This is sickening.

Jeb Bush’s organization supports vouchers, charters, online virtual charters, and for-profit organizations that run schools. It also supports evaluating teachers by student test scores and eliminating collective bargaining. Jeb Bush believes in grading schools, grading teachers, grading students, closing schools, and letting everyone “escape” from public schools to privately-run establishments. The free market is his ideal of excellence, not public responsibility, not the public school as the anchor of the community, but privatization.

About That Bipartisan Consensus to Privatize Public Education

 

Private Prisons – Private Slave Labor

The United States is adopting the Chinese model: imprison millions and charge the taxpayers to maintain them and then rent out the prisoners as slaves to private for-profit business. What we called Chinese Communism has transformed itself into Chinese Capitalism and courtesy of American entrepreneurs will become the new model of American Capitalism.