Privatization

Teacher Strikes Are Exposing The Corrupt Charter School Agenda

January 20, 2019 By Jeff Bryant, Our Schools Resist! Corporatization, Education, Privatization

The LA teachers’ opposition to charter schools is just the latest voice in a growing chorus of public school teachers calling on politicians to do more to support the public schools we have rather than piling more dollars and accolades onto a competitive charter school industry. And with the backing of nearly 80 percent of Los Angeles County residents, according to one survey, the teachers likely have the clout to change the politics of “school choice” in California, and perhaps the nation.

Teacher Strikes Expose The Corrupt Privatization Of Schools

January 19, 2019 By Jeff Bryant, IndependentMediaInstitute.org Educate! Education, Los Angeles, Privatization, Schools, Strikes, Teachers

This week, Republican lawmakers held a press conference on Capitol Hill to kick off National School Choice Week, an annual event that began in 2011 under President Obama who proclaimed it as a time to “recognize the role public charter schools play in providing America’s daughters and sons with a chance to reach their fullest potential.” This year, Democratic lawmakers took a pass on the celebration. You can thank striking teachers for that. In the latest teacher strike in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest school system, some 30,000 teachers walked off the job saying unchecked growth of charter schools and charters’ lack of transparency and accountability have become an unsustainable drain on the public system’s financials.

Los Angeles Teachers Strike To Defend Public Schools From The Privatizers

January 15, 2019 Barbara Madeloni, Labornotes.org Organize! Class Struggle, Education, Los Angeles, Privatization, Strikes, Teachers

Last spring a teacher uprising swept the red states. Today it reached the West Coast, as the 34,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles began a long-anticipated strike in the nation’s second-largest school district. Teachers, parents, students, and community supporters hit the picket lines in their fight against the budget cuts and privatization being pushed by the school board and Superintendent Austin Beutner, a former investment banker. In November the L.A. Times and Capital & Main leaked the outline of Beutner’s plan to carve up the district into clusters of schools run like competing stock portfolios. Any school judged to be an underperformer would be sold off like a weak stock.

Privatizing The VA: Vets Wait Longer, Corporations Make Billions

December 20, 2018 By Isaac Arnsdorf and Jon Greenberg, Propublica.org Educate! Corporations, Privatization, Veterans

For years, conservatives have assailed the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs as a dysfunctional bureaucracy. They said private enterprise would mean better, easier-to-access health care for veterans. President Donald Trump embraced that position, enthusiastically moving to expand the private sector’s role. Here’s what has actually happened in the four years since the government began sending more veterans to private care: longer waits for appointments and, a new analysis of VA claims data by ProPublica and PolitiFact shows, higher costs for taxpayers. Since 2014, 1.9 million former service members have received private medical care through a program called Veterans Choice.

The Postal Service Is A Public Treasure That Should Not Be Privatized

December 20, 2018 Sarah Holder, Citylab.com Educate! Class Struggle, Postal Service, Privatization, USPS

The United States Postal Service has been fighting for its life since it was born. President Richard Nixon created this vast mail-managing entity in 1970 by turning its old Cabinet-level predecessor, the U.S. Post Office Department, into a government-owned corporation, caving to union demands after hundreds of thousands of postal workers went on strike for better wages and collective bargaining rights. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan tried to change the USPS’s public status and sell it off for cash. He failed, but in 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which mandated that Postal Service retirement health care* be pre-funded, and arguably contributed to a long-term financing crisis that continues today.

Baltimore Joins Global Movement, Becoming The First Major U.S. City To Ban Water Privatization

November 19, 2018 Thomas M. Hanna, Inthesetimes.com Create! Baltimore, Privatization, Water

On November 6, Baltimore became the first major city in the United States whose residents voted to ban water privatization. Nearly 77 percent of voters cast ballots in favor of Question E, which declared the “inalienability” of the water and sewer systems and exempted them from any city charter provisions related to franchising or operational rights. This vote resulted from an ongoing struggle waged by Baltimore community activists, unions and civic leaders demanding affordable access to water for low-income residents. That struggle emerged in response to concern the city could sell off the community’s water infrastructure to for-profit investors. The vote is also part of an emerging worldwide movement to fight back against privatization and to municipalize or re-municipalize (put under public control) local enterprises and services.

Baltimore Voters Stand Up To Water Privatization

November 10, 2018 By Chuck Collins, Inequality.org Create! Baltimore, Electoral Politics, Privatization, Water

One interesting local victory on Tuesday was a vote by the citizens of Baltimore to amend the city’s charter to prohibit the privatization of their water and sewer system. In a rare instance of progressive preemption, the city’s voters told private water corporations to leave them alone. “Private corporations have been circling Baltimore for years, ramping up efforts to pitch a privatization effort,” said Rianna Eckel, an organizer with Food and Water Watch and a member of the coalition that pressed for the charter change. “Baltimore has an aging infrastructure and is under pressure from the EPA to upgrade our system.” Corporate vultures like water conglomerates Veolia, American Water, and Suez were lobbying to take over the system, with Suez and its Wall Street partner KKR proposing a 50-year lease.

Postal Workers Unite Nationwide Against Trump’s Privatization Plan

October 11, 2018 Jessica Corbett, Truthdig.com Resist! Class Struggle, Postal Workers, Privatization, Protests, Trump Administration, USPS

Under the proposal—unveiled in June as part of a 32-point plan (pdf) to significantly reorganize the federal government—USPS would “transition to a model of private management and private or shared ownership.” The White House argued that “freeing USPS to more fully negotiate pay and benefits rather than prescribing participation in costly federal personnel benefit programs, and allowing it to follow private sector practices in compensation and labor relations, could further reduce costs.” Critics warn that such a transition would not only negatively impact service but also bring awful consequences for postal workers, who demonstrated on their day off in cities across the United States on Monday to tell the president that USPS is #NotForSale.

Salvadorans Protest Renewed Attempts To Privatize Water Resources

July 10, 2018 By Pedro Cabezas, Inequality.org Resist! El Salvador, Privatization, Protests, Water

Barely six weeks have passed since the newly elected, right wing-dominated legislature took office in El Salvador, but recent frictions between security personnel of the legislature and university students protesting the potential privatization of water already paint a grim picture of things to come for social movements. During the month of May, parliamentarians moved to ratify the mining prohibition approved in March 2016 and to shelve all pending requests related to the mining file. At the same time, the Environment and Climate Change Commission, ECCC, moved to reopen a long overdue discussion on water legislation, hinting at the possibility of privatization. Since 2006, environmental organizations in El Salvador have pressured lawmakers to approve laws that recognize water as a human right and as a common good that should be publicly managed, with a focus on sustainability, accessible domestic use, and regulation of commercial and industrial use.

Trump Seeks To Privatize The Post Office

June 25, 2018 Staff, Afge.org, Nalc.org Apwu.org Resist! Class Struggle, Post Office, Privatization, Trump Administration

WASHINGTON - American Federation of Government Employees National President J. David Cox Sr. today issued the following statement in response to the Trump administration’s government reorganization plan: “This administration has displayed nothing but contempt for the 2 million federal workers who serve the public each and every day. Instead of improving health care access to veterans who deserve our very best, administration officials have used the new authorities Congress provided them at the Department of Veterans Affairs to fire thousands of rank-and-file workers like nursing assistants and housekeepers. “Instead of working with employee representatives to make the workplace safer and more inclusive, this administration has violated labor contracts at the Department of Education, Social Security, HUD, and elsewhere to deny employees the representation they are entitled to under the law.

Privatization: The School-To-Prison Pipeline And Inequities In Education

May 23, 2018 Staff, Badassteacher.org Educate! Education, Privatization, Schools

We must come to terms with the fact that for People of Color, especially Black people, the Promise of Public Education was never realized. As we engage in this fight for Public Education and what it should be for all children, it is imperative that we are honest in our reflection and include the struggles that communities of color have faced in just trying to receive the most basic and fundamental education for their children. Of all of the obstacles our students of color face, the School to Prison Pipeline (S2PP) may be the most harmful. Too many of our Black and Brown children are introduced to law enforcement at an early where there chances of success are diminished as a result.

Tucson Draws The Line On Prison Privatization

May 23, 2018 By Joe Watson, Truthout.org Create! Arizona, Prison Industrial Complex, Privatization

One more time, with emphasis: A city near the Mexican border in a state that's home to some of the country's harshest sentencing guidelines and the fourth-highest rate of incarceration in the US -- with privately-run prisons and immigrant detention centers from one corner of the state to the other -- is telling companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic that they're not welcome around here. "Profit should never be motivation for our justice system," said Tucson City Councilmember Regina Romero, who spearheaded passage of the resolution. Our little corner of Arizona has been so traumatized by mass incarceration -- with per capita jail admissions almost 50 percent higher than our neighbors in Phoenix -- that the Tucson City Council isn't the first municipal body in these parts to pass such a resolution.

Trump Using Amazon to Destroy the Post Office

April 22, 2018 By David Dayen, The American Prospect Educate! Donald Trump, Post Office, Privatization

The Amazon spat is a cover for the formal unveiling of a long-wished right-wing project to destroy the post office and have private industry take over its infrastructure, which taxpayers funded long ago. All the executive order really does is create a report; it would take a willing Congress to deliver the final hammer blow. But that report, with a government imprimatur, will become part of that right-wing wish list, living on for decades in think tanks and private shipping company boardrooms as a fervent dream. Let’s look at the executive order, which is a bit deceptive in its intentions. The policy section manages to mention that the Postal Service routinely earns the highest public approval rating of any agency in the federal government. But then it layers on the bad news: the decline in first-class mail volume—$65 billion in losses since 2009, an “unsustainable fiscal path.”

How Privatization Sparked The Massive Oklahoma Teacher Uprising

April 12, 2018 Valerie Vande Panne, Inthesetimes.com Resist! Privatization, Teachers, Uprising

OKLAHOMA—On April 2, an estimated 30,000 Oklahoma teachers walked out of schools across the state, some traveling hundreds of miles to the capital to protest. This momentum has not stopped: At the time of this writing, teachers are marching—by foot—from Tulsa to Oklahoma City. Across the state, they are planning to continue to mobilize, despite legislative opposition that has gone so far as to accuse the teachers of bussing in protestors from Chicago. To explain the reasons for the strike and ongoing mobilizations, most mainstream media have been marketing poverty porn: This teacher sells plasma. Another works six jobs to make ends meet. Some teachers in Oklahoma tell In These Times that major outlets are specifically only asking to speak with the poorest teachers.

Amid School Closures, Puerto Rico’s Teachers Fight Privatization

April 9, 2018 By Emily Wells, Truthdig.com Educate! Class Struggle, Privatization, Puerto Rico, Schools, Teachers

Puerto Rico’s Department of Education announced Thursday it will close 283 schools this summer after a sharp drop in enrollment, thought to be partly a result of displacement of families after Hurricane Maria. However, many teachers in the island’s school system say the issue might be more complicated and believe the system’s recent acceptance of charter schools and voucher programs could be contributing to the deprioritizing of public schools. The Associated Press reports that Puerto Rico is currently operating 1,100 public schools with 319,000 enrolled students. Puerto Rico’s Education Secretary Julia Keleher said of the closings, “We know it’s a difficult and painful process. For this reason, we’ve done it in the most sensible way, taking in consideration all the elements that could impact the daily lives of some families and the school communities in general. …

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