As San Diego County supervisors seek to privatize more services, public officials elsewhere are reading the danger signs and starting to move in the opposite direction.
Tag: Privatization
Healthy competition?
When Mayor Jerry Sanders wanted to reform city government, he turned to what he believed was an effective tool of market capitalism – competition. He claimed that pitting government workers against private sector companies would generate savings for the city.
Sanders, not an ideologue, grabbed on to “managed competition” so he could privatize city jobs and show his conservative backers that he was one of them. If it resulted in turning middle class city jobs into $12 an hour jobs without health care, that wasn’t his problem.
Now the debate about the effectiveness of public-private competition is at the center of the coming debate on health care reform in Washington.
Jailing Teenagers and the Poisoning of Public Purpose
Last month, two Pennsylvania judges pled guilty to accepting $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to the two private detention centers. One judge secured the contracts for the firms to house the teenagers and the other judge kept the centers filled by sentencing enough teens.
The judges, as part of their secret “placement guarantee agreement,” sent hundreds of teenagers to detention facilities for minor and often questionable teen offenses. One high school student was sentenced to three months for mocking her assistant principal on a spoof MySpace page.
