Hold on to your wallets, the privatization circus is back in town

If public-private partnerships were such a good idea, our bridges and roads wouldn’t be crumbling and our middle class wouldn’t be facing extinction.

Because public-private partnerships, touted by President Obama in his State of the Union speech as a key tool in his administration’s second term, have been around for a long time.

Fifteen years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Donald Bartlett and James Steele, after an 18-month investigation for Time Magazine, called public-private partnerships a form of corporate welfare and raised doubts about their effectiveness [no link].

Too often, public-private partnerships have meant local or state governments handing over valuable pubic assets to private control without adequate public oversight.

These partnerships come in many forms – governments leasing out parking lots, contracting with private firms to build toll roads, funding repairs of bridges with money from union pension funds repaid with public bonds.or the ever-popular public subsidy or tax break for the promise of new jobs or even just maintaining the jobs in a particular location.

In the wake of the financial collapse, politicians across the spectrum from economically strapped cities and states have latched on to public-private partnerships as a way to fund projects that were once paid for wholly out of public funds.

One city that has embraced the public-private partnerships with gusto is Chicago, President Obama’s hometown – with dubious results. In one notorious deal, the city leased its parking meters for 75 years to a Morgan Stanley-led partnership in exchange for $1.6 billion upfront. Later citizens watched as parking rates skyrocketed and the full costs of the deal to taxpayers emerged – the city was obligated to pay the Morgan Stanley partnership $11.6 billion over 75 years.

Another fan of private-public partnerships was the president’s former Republican opponent, Mitt Romney. As a private businessman, his firm, Bain Capital, benefited from many goodies bestowed by government officials, making “avid use of public-private partnerships,” the Los Angeles Times reported.  While Romney liked to brag about the jobs Bain created at an Indiana steel mill, he didn’t mention the tax breaks and other subsidies taxpayers gave Bain to create those jobs.

As Chicago attorney Clint Krislov said of his city’s foray into public-private schemes: “I think this is just the latest way for people to make money off state and local governments. This is the new way the investment banks, their lawyers, and consultants squeeze the taxpayers....They’re going around making these deals, and it’s very lucrative. It’s like a circus coming to town.”

The most egregious example of a public-private partnership gone wrong is the 2008 federal bailout of the financial industry: after the bankers’ recklessness and fraud wrecked the economy, taxpayers came to the rescue, as government officials promised that the goal was not to enrich bankers but to restore Main Street. But bankers got billions without any conditions, while Main Street continued to suffer. When we hear the grand promises of everything that public-privatization can do for us, we should remember who won and who lost out in the bailout.

 

 

 

 

The Quiet Occupying of LA

The Occupy Movement changed the national policy debate last year, but then its supporters dispersed or – more accurately – were driven out of public parks by the police and winter.

A different kind of occupation has occurred, almost unnoticed, in Los Angeles over the last few weeks.

In late September, thousands of Californians waited in long lines at the Sports Arena in downtown Los Angeles for free medical and dental care provided by Care Harbor, a local non-profit organization. About 6.9 million Californians don’t have health insurance: about 1 in 5. They are not only the poor; about 27% of families making $50,000 or more each year are uninsured. Skyrocketing insurance rates, higher deductibles and dwindling benefits have left many in the middle class without insurance – or greatly under-insured, so that an unexpected illness or root canal can have a devastating financial impact. Thanks to the Financial Debacle, credit cards aren’t much of a fall back anymore. Hence the 3,754 patients, many of whom showed up three days early, grateful to receive the attention of thousands of doctors, dentists and other volunteering medical professionals, even if that meant being treated among strangers in a massive hall with no privacy. The sponsors of the event, now in its fourth year, call it a “health fair.”

Save the Dream

A week later and a few miles north, the line began forming early around the Convention Center, where more thousands hoped for a chance to refinance their mortgages in order to keep their homes. The five day event – part of a national tour it calls “Save the Dream”– was sponsored by the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, another non-profit that has stepped into the breach opened by the failure of the marketplace. Operating in triage-like conditions in the conference hall, it arranged refinancing for beleaguered homeowners, many of whom were the victims of predatory lending, who would otherwise face foreclosure.

Monikers like “Health fair” or “Save the Dream” create a comforting, almost festive feeling about these occasions. But they can’t mask the despairing situation many of our fellow Americans now find themselves in.

The New Orleans Superdome 2005

The images of people seeking help with basic necessities – medical care, a place to live – reminded me of the breadlines of the Depression era, before the social safety net was put in place by FDR. The cavernous venues themselves recalled a more dire moment: the gruesome pictures from the New Orleans Superdome in 2005, to which residents were evacuated during Hurricane Katrina, and there left to fend for themselves for days. "I've seen things," NBC News anchor Brian William said of his time inside that nightmare, "I never thought I'd see in the United States."

The Occupy Wall Street supporters and their local affiliates across the nation were loud and angry enough to get the news media’s attention. A few instances of police brutality certainly helped. For all the many things the Occupy movement subsequently failed to do, like create a political force that could have been deployed in national and local election campaigns, just pointing out the wealth disparity – the 1% versus the 99% – vectored public attention from the abstraction of the national deficit to the concrete pocketbook issue of the imbalance of power between the powerful and everyone else.

But there was relatively little news coverage of the quiet, peaceful members of the 99-percent encircled around arenas that usually cater to business meetings or sports, people whose life stories have been derailed by credit default swaps, derivatives and other shenanigans by speculators over which they had no control.

Wall Street got it’s stimulus package – an estimated $29 trillion bailout, courtesy of  U.S. taxpayers, in the form of cash infusions, tax breaks, and the ability to borrow at an almost zero interest rate from the Federal Reserve. But Main Street’s stimulus package was $700 million – demonstrably not enough to do the job of getting Americans back in their jobs.

Compare the two stimulus packages and explain to me why we can’t afford to address the plight of job-less, home-less and savings-less Americans.

The total debt owed by consumers in this country for loans and credit cards is roughly $12 trillion, according to the latest report. Every dollar of it could have been erased (including everyone’s mortgage debt!) if those trillion$ had gone to taxpayers instead of Wall Street, as I’ve pointed out previously. Imagine the powerful spending effect on the economy if Americans were given the right to borrow from the Fed at the same low rate that the banks do. Or if someone in Congress or the White House had thought to impose a modest cap on interest rates for consumers as a quid pro quo for the bailout money that went to those firms.

Wall Street and its allies in government have tried to diminish the significance of the bailout, noting that most banks and other corporate beneficiaries have repaid most of the money. But that’s not the right way to gauge the value of what the taxpayers did for them.

Say two people are in a boat when it capsizes.  One of them, the captain, throws a life preserver to his passenger. The passenger survives, but the captain drowns. Wall Street would measure the value of that transaction by the cost of the life preserver. The rest of us would say that the rescue came at a much, much higher price.  That price can be measured by the anguish and fear on the faces of those waiting for big box style medical and financial assistance at the Sports Arena and Convention Center.

Reality-based tax breaks

By now you’ve heard the bitter, widespread debate over whether giving the wealthiest Americans fat tax breaks will ever create jobs.

But everybody agrees on one thing – we shouldn’t just give rich people tax breaks so they can have even more money to do whatever they like with.

Don’t we?

That’s why I was intrigued by this proposal that would tie tax breaks to the actual creation of jobs.

The proposal was floated by Benjamin Barber, a Democratic theorist writing on Huffington Post.

Barber suggests a system of vouchers to make sure they’re creating jobs with their tax breaks.

“Conservatives should certainly welcome the principle of vouchers, which they have been proffering for a long time to the poor for education, groceries and housing – and now, courtesy of Mr. [Paul] Ryan, for Medicare too,” Barber writes, referring to the Republican vice-presidential candidate’s proposal to have the government give future Medicare recipients cash to buy insurance instead of health care. “The premise has been that a voucher prevents "irresponsible behavior" by those being helped, like buying drugs instead of groceries or a golf caddy instead of private schooling for the kids. It's a way to prevent the poor from getting all that "free stuff" Mitt Romney thinks they are always conniving to acquire.

Basically, it’s so simple I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t suggested it before: If you create real jobs, you get a tax break. No job creation, no tax breaks.

While Barber appears to suggest granting the tax cuts first and taking them away if the tax break doesn’t lead to jobs, I’d flip it: base the tax cut on hard proof that the jobs have been created.

Proponents of this latest version of the trickle-down theory should have no problem with the wealthy actually having to prove they’re creating real jobs to earn their tax breaks.

Because nobody wants to give away money for nothing, right?

I think the proposal could be refined to link the quality and number of jobs to the size of the tax cut.

For example, buy a yacht: no tax cut. Enjoy your yacht.

But prove you created a significant number of high-wage jobs with health care benefits and pensions, get a bigger tax cut.

Extending the logic of Barber’s idea, if you outsource jobs, shouldn’t your taxes increase?

Barber has hit on an issue that extends beyond just tax cuts – government officials have been extending all kinds of subsidies to business owners for creating jobs without ever requiring proof that the business owners actually create the jobs, or requiring that the subsidies be returned if the jobs are destroyed.

The very notion that we’ve allowed these huge tax cuts for the wealthy without demanding proof that they lead to real, not just theoretical, job creation, suggests how far we’ve moved away from the sensible fact and data-based world into a realm based on wish fulfillment for the wealthy who dominate our politics. The notion that proponents of the tax cuts want to pay for their extension by eliminating tax breaks that help the middle class, like the home mortgage tax break, also suggest how far our political debate has gone astray. Barber’s proposal suggests a way to get it back from fantasyland.