Privatizing is About Nothing But Corporate Greed

As Kentucky Gov. I Got Mine Fuck You prepares to use his budget director's lies to justify gutting what remains of state government, keep this to hand as a reminder that the only thing billionaire privatizers build is their own offshore bank accounts,.

 

Anything that qualifies as a public service - education, health care, transportation, water and sewer, veterans benefits, law enforcement, criminal justice, parks and recreation and more - must be provided by public servants, not corporate interests.  Public servants who are well-paid, with full benefits including generous defined-benefit pensions.  That is because only such public servants on the public payroll can be trusted to do what is in the public service.

Public servants do not work for profit.  They work for the people.

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:

Privatization of any public service is not about quality. It's about ideology and about into whose pockets tax dollars flow. It arises from the privatizer's belief that any product or service provided by "we the people" that might even in theory be provided by the private sector is a crime against capitalism. They don't see a need to be filled or a service to be improved or a duty to be met. They see billions of dollar$ budgeted annually of which they are not getting their cut.

They want to privatize public education — a middle-man in every middle school — because the single largest component of every state's annual budget is education and They. Want. Their. Cut. So they have demonized teachers and public pensions and public servants who stand between them and their payday. They have cut budgets to degrade services and hasten institutional decline to pave the way for eliminating the public from public service and services.

SNIP 

Those promoting privatizaton want to sell off publicly owned infrastructure for a song, public trusts you, your parents and grandparents and I paid through our lifetimes to build and maintain. Privatizers do not want to fix public infrastructure. They want to extract profits from it. They are rentiers looking to suck even harder off the public teat with far less accountability.

The VA is yet another program they hope to turn into a profit-producing venture by cutting costs and shortchanging patients under the rubric of "efficiency." And when they have sucked all the profit they can from it, they will abandon it for the next investment opportunity and discard its empty husk, like a retailer with an underperforming big-box store.

And public education? They want to privatize it as well, slowly weakening its funding by diverting resources to vouchers and charters because, you know, choice and competition. The real goal is to increase the pressure to fully privatize public education mandated by state constitutions from the Atlantic to the Pacific since their adoption, thus to open "the Big Enchilada" to private investors. They too will cut costs and services to shave off more public tax dollars for themselves, meaning less for children's education.

The vultures are slowly privatizing prisons as well, and perversely incentivizing lawmakers, judges and law enforcement to keep prison beds filled and investors' portfolios padded. I'm wondering when individual Americans get vouchers from the Pentagon to purchase their own national defense. Because, you know, choice and competition.

But what happens to public schools and children's education, for example, when the system is fully privatized and hollowed out, and investors decide the hot new investment opportunity lies somewhere else? They just walk away. Investors have no commitment to the public good, no faith to keep with public trust, only to their bottom lines, especially for services like the VA's that are not and were never intended to be for-profit. Want to improve the VA? Improve the VA. Privatizing it is its death sentence.

Privatizers are the Midas cult. They believe anything that can be turned into gold should be, including wounded veterans and children. They are the corporate raider from Pretty Woman, who believes more in making money than in building things. They don't believe in this country. They believe in stripping it. Their lobbyists have turned our legislatures into chop shops so they can sell off America for parts. They have no shame, because shame is not as profitable as having none.

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Bevin's Secret Budget to Turn Kentucky Into Prime Shithole

"I'm eliminating 70 programs and cutting essential services 6 percent, but I'm not telling you which ones until after you approve it."

The only answer to this arrogant rubbish is a loud raspberry and screaming laughter.

Any legislator who falls for this fiduciary and political crime should be run out of Frankfort on a rail.

From the Herald:

Gov. Matt Bevin proposed a two-year state budget Tuesday night that would eliminate “about 70” state government programs and cut spending at many state agencies by 6.25 percent. 

Bevin, who provided lawmakers with highlights of his plan in a sparsely attended 7 p.m. speech, did not immediately list the programs he wants to eliminate or which agencies will be spared from budget cuts. Unlike previous governors, Bevin did not brief the media on details of his proposal ahead of his speech.

Typical of business creeps with no public service experience, Gov. I Got Mine Fuck You has no clue how government and state budgets work.

Tax money spent on public services that improve the health and well-being of Kentucky's residents is not "spending." It's investment.  The returns on that investment is the education and health care that grows a strong economy. 

Bevin is following the Brownback budget-stripping script that turned Kansas into Haiti-on-the-Prairie.

You have 10 calendar days and eight working days to file to run against the spineless worms in the General Assembly who are about to vote for that monstrosity.  DO IT NOW.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article195017314.html#storylink=cpy

When I Say Privatizaation Kills, I Mean That Literally

Via Zandar:

Kiera Feldman at ProPublica takes a long look at the most dangerous job in the Big Apple: working the private garbage trucks that roam the city in the darkness.

SNIP

 In New York City overall, private sanitation trucks killed seven people in 2017. By contrast, city municipal sanitation trucks haven’t caused a fatality since 2014. SNIP

$80 bucks a shift for 18 hours and no benefits whatsoever, paid cash off the books and you have to buy your own uniform and safety gear, if you get paid at all.  That's where "cheaper, private carting" gets you in NYC these days.  And that's just the start of this piece.

Less than $5 an hour.  That's a literal crime: one-third of New York's mandated minimum wage.  Those workers should be getting 10 times that much. The owners of this criminal enterprise - and the city officials and employees who authorized the contract - get more than that.

Bevin Scamming Taxpayers With Budget Cut Fuckery

If your goal is actually to balance the budget rather than just drown the last shreds of public service and government in the Commonwealth, there are a few sources of money you should tap before attacking the agencies that serve Kentucky citizens.

Start with the $1.8 million he's handing to the freakazoid grifters of the Big Wooden Box.  Then however much he paid his buddies to recommend destroying the state pension system in order to save it.  Then let's make rich fucks and corporations pay their fair share of taxes that they haven't paid for the last 30 years.

Then we'll see how much the "shortfall" is. 

Bevin's lying.  Again.

Jack Brammer at the Herald:

The Bevin administration asked constitutional officers and cabinet secretaries Friday to cut spending in most state agencies by 17.4 percent this fiscal year to address an expected $200 million budget shortfall.

The cuts would not affect SEEK, the state’s school funding formula; universities; Medicaid; the Department of Corrections; and debt payments, said Bevin communications director Amanda Stamper.

In a letter to state officials, State Budget Director John Chilton said Kentucky “must start preparing for the ongoing financial challenges facing the state” and come up with a budget reduction plan by Sept. 25.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article171997122.html#storylink=cpy

Chilton said the cuts would save an estimated $350 million, enough to close the $200 million projected shortfall for the fiscal year that began July 1 and replenish the state’s $150 million rainy day fund for emergencies. He said the emergency fund will be spent in coming months and must be replaced to protect the state’s credit rating.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article171997122.html#storylink=cpy

SNIP

Kentucky has endured repeated rounds of budget cuts since the Great Recession of 2008. In all, some state agencies will have seen more than 70 percent of their budgets disappear in the last decade, according to the liberal-leaning Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.

House Minority Leader Rocky Adkins, D-Morehead, called Bevin’s request “unprecedented.”

The possible cuts to services, programs and jobs “seem premature,” Adkins said.

“We’re only in the third month of the new fiscal year and the governor’s move is based on a projection from a group of independent economists,” Adkins said. “It would seem to me to be better and more responsible to wait until more months pass in the fiscal year to get a better reading of what the shortfall might be.”

Jason Bailey, executive director of the Berea-based Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, said Friday that the new cuts “are sudden, so early in the fiscal year.”

He said Friday’s announcement coupled with Thursday’s announcement by the administration that local governments in Kentucky might have to contribute up to 60 percent more money next year to provide pensions for their employees is “clearly an attempt to create a sudden crisis.”

“We need long-term solutions more carefully and thoughtfully reached,” he said.

Bevin promised as recently as July that he would call a special legislative session this year to overhaul the state’s tax system and fix its financially ailing pension plans, but he has since backed away from that promise and said lawmakers should consider the issues separately, starting with pensions.

Pension consultants hired by Bevin released a list of recommendations last week that would save an estimated $1 billion, though leading lawmakers have said some of the most controversial proposals are “highly unlikely.”

 

Without the changes, Chilton has said the state would have to cut funding for K-12 schools by $510 million and slash spending at most other agencies by at least 16.8 percent to make up the difference. Meanwhile, Bevin has pledged to fight any proposal that increases taxes to pay for pensions.

Here's an easy way to judge anything Bevin says:  If Governor I Got Mine Fuck You wants it, do everything you can to do the opposite.

Only the Government Will Save Your Ass This Time

Another great midnight meme from Noah at Down with Tyranny:

Charlie Pierce, down in Houston, "where there were people from the government, and they were there to help."

One of the things I noticed during my trip from Rockport to Houston in the aftermath of the storm was that the narrative of people helping people was true and righteous altogether, to quote Abraham Lincoln quoting the Bible. What also struck me was that, if we could convince people again that they could help each other through the institutions of self-government as readily as they could hauling bottled water in a truck, or navigating a bass boat through what once was a suburban neighborhood, we would go a long way toward being the country we say we are again. Self-government is a creative act that ought to renew itself, over and over again, through the collective action of the people who choose to govern themselves. As such, it’s possible for government to be a mechanism for charity in this country, because the government is us—or it should be, anyway—and we have convinced ourselves that we are fundamentally a charitable people.

It’s cheap and easy to point out that conservative Texas politicians have discovered a sweet-tooth for Big Gummint now that they’ve got a natural disaster and a public health catastrophe on their hands for the next decade or so. The job of reclaiming self-government is harder than the job of reclaiming the land and the sprawl of what Houston once was. We have been inundated by decades of mendacious propaganda, all aimed at convincing us that government is some alien entity so that we don’t once again engage the creative force of self-government and aim it at the people who are looting the country’s wealth and destroying its natural beauty. It’s worked, too. The many acts of charity in Texas over the past two weeks have been used far too often as anesthesia by the people who would rather not see the country apply its government as a permanent shelter for those in need. Look, they say, this is what people can do for each other. This is what the churches can do. We don’t need government program X, Y, and Z.

This is said, often, by people who did not go to those places, by people who would have fought the Morrill Act, and by too many people who would have walked out of the Congress in 1861. Nobody can do anything but admire the charitable whirlwind that was J.J. Watt of the Houston Texans. But, out in the field, the little churches and small communities are hanging on by their fingernails. (One person told me that it was God’s miracle that there hadn’t been any of the customary summer thunderstorms since Harvey passed through. She didn’t know what she’d do with more water on her land.) The job of rebuilding (and, god knows, the job of preparing for the next hurricane, and the next one, and the one after that; they’re lined up at the moment like a chorus line out into the Atlantic) has to be done by the people acting through their government, and not through the little Baptist church with the twisted tin wall in its front yard.

The Only People Getting Rich Off KY Pensions Are Bevin's Wall Street Buddies

How very convenient that just when the country finally starts turning to raising taxes on the rich fucks who have been stripping the nation's treasury bare for 40 years, Governor I Got Mine Fuck You should decide that the victims of Kentucky's pension fraud - state employees - should have to pay for the money stolen by legislators and Wall Street sharks.

State employees have been fucked over time and again for 35 years, since legislators started chipping away at statutory benefits.

First they did away with incremental raises. Then performance bonuses.  Then the annual raises mandated by state law.  State employees haven't received full annual raises since 2002.  That's 15 years without a raise.

By then the motherfuckers in the legislator had started stripping pension benefits from new hires. The ones hired since 2013 don't have a pension at all: just a 401K they have to pay for themselves, then watch Wall Street strip it down to nothing.

State employees did not cause the pension crisis. State employees are the victims of the pension crisis.  But trumpie Bevin and repug austerity declare that the rich fucks who did cause the pension crisis cannot be asked to contribute a penny to solving it.

From the Herald:

Robb Smith, superintendent of Bellevue Independent Schools, was getting attention on social media Wednesday for a passionate open letter he wrote Gov. Matt Bevin in response to critical comments Bevin made about teachers.

“There are no absolutes when dealing with humans, but I can confidently say 99 percent of the people with whom I have worked, and there are hundreds, are not the greed-fueled personalities you have referenced in your speeches. The professionals in our schools are altruistic in motivation and pure in practice. To characterize them as anything else is irresponsible and unjust. To say they are anything but compassionate and dedicated is to distort the truth,” Smith wrote in an open letter to Bevin that he posted on social media.

The letter can be read in full at this link.

Anybody seen Bevin's tax returns for the last decade?  I'll bet my house he's profited from the Commonwealth's pension crisis.  Made money off the very victims he's now exploiting again.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/education/article170197182.html#storylink=cpy

Cowardly KY Gov. Blocks and Threatens Critics

Just like his hero the Orange Loser, Whiny-Ass Titty Baby Mattie can't deal with the reality of elected office.

WEKU:

But as Bevin ramped up his criticism and online dispatches, he’s also blocked more than 500 Twitter users from following him, according to records released this week by ProPublica, a national investigative newsroom. 

Bevin’s list of blocked social media users — obtained by ProPublica through a records request — includes many people who have shared their disdain for Bevin or President Donald Trump.

We're not talking about stalkers or people who threaten violence; those should be reportedto police anyway.  No, we're talking about people who dared to express on social media  their contempt for the poor-bashing, rich-fellating repugs who are destroying the country

Attorney General Andy Beshear said his office, which weighs violations of the Open Records Act, has never issued an opinion “about the nature of social media and whether blocking someone violates the open records law.” 

To date, no one has filed an appeal challenging a public official’s social media blockade.

Beshear declined to share his views on the matter and called it inappropriate because the office may have to tackle the issue in the future. 

Beshear said he has never blocked anyone on Twitter. The Twitter account of his predecessor, Attorney General Jack Conway, had barred several followers. Beshear said he had his staff unblock those users.

Democracy sucks, and public office is not a fucking vacation. Deal with it, cowards.

Whoops, almost forgot this little gem: After  playing Governor Freakazoid for a year and a half, telling churches to violate the Constitution by getting into partisan politics, our poopy-diapered "leader" is threatening critical pastors with hell. 

The Resistance: Openly Mocking

Yes, he can do this only because he's safely retired.  But he's speaking for many still on the job.

 

Think Progress: 

Mike Cox retired after three decades at the Environmental Protection Agency on March 31 with a scathing letter for EPA administrator Scott Pruitt.

Team Trump is apparently an open joke to their staff — something even the Reagan and Bush administrations never experienced. Morale has collapsed, Cox notes.

“I have worked under six administrations with political appointees leading EPA from both parties,” Cox wrote on his last day on the job. “This is the first time I remember staff openly dismissing and mocking the environmental policies of an administration and by extension you.”

The 60-year-old Cox, who worked on climate change for EPA’s Region 10, which covers Alaska and the northwest, was especially harsh on Pruitt’s science denial.

Cox called Pruitt’s claim on national TV that CO2 is not a primary contributor to recent global warming “shocking” — and directly compared it to the congressional hearing with the CEOs of the major tobacco companies where “all of the CEOs categorically denied that smoking causes lung cancer.”

What’s the result of this denial? “You will continue to undermine your credibility and integrity with EPA staff, and the majority of the public,” Cox wrote, “if you continue to question this basic science of climate change.”

In the five-page letter, Cox slams the president for the “false and misleading” claim that killing EPA carbon pollution standards will bring back coal jobs.

A New Ally

From Alt National Park Service:

We’re a growing coalition of 59 National Park Service employees from nine different National Parks. We formed to ensure the protection of the environment for future generations to come. We were forced into a media blackout, hiring freeze, policy changes, and possible reduction in funding. We are here to stand up and speak out against the current administration. We all refuse to be silenced while we watch everything we love crumble.

The Resistance is growing.

How Repugs Destroy Public Goods

They've been doing it for five decades: scream lies about high taxes, incite hatred against poor and minority communities and blame the "government" their own voters depend on. Repugs get elected, trash the place, leave it for Democrats to clean up, then point to the cleanup costs and scream more lies.  

 

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:

But the GOP never does anything that's not at least a twofer. Privatization — of roads and water systems, for example, or public schools via charter expansion — is not just about converting "We the People" assets into private profits for cronies. It's about disrupting the income streams of Democratic-leaning city governments. The goal is to weaken them politically, stripping them of revenue by creating a slow-rolling economic crisis that will force cities to either raise taxes or slash services or both, allowing Republicans in a few years to argue, See, see how badly Democrats have handled your economy? Elect us and we'll show you how it's really done.

Gov. Trump-Lover Appointments Yet Another Corporate Creep to Fuck Up State Government

You know what would happen if every single corporate executive on earth - starting with the ones currently committing mass casualty event while masquerading as public servants - were loaded onto rockets and fired into the sun?

Lots of good.  Businesses would be run by the workers who actually do the work instead of playing games with stock prices and people's lives. Governments would be staff and run by people who have the education, experience and enthusiam about public service to actually be good public servants.
And we wouldn't be under attack by nonsense like this:

FRANKFORT, Ky. (Dec. 14, 2016) - Gov. Matt Bevin today announced the appointment of Terry R. Gill, Jr. as Secretary of the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development. 

The Cabinet is the primary state agency responsible for encouraging new jobs and investment in the state. Gov. Bevin says Gill is the right choice to help lead the Commonwealth to new heights.

“Kentucky is poised for unparalleled success in the years ahead,” said Gov. Bevin. “Thanks to a new pro-business majority in the legislature and our focus on eliminating bureaucratic red tape, Kentucky is becoming more business-friendly by the day. Terry brings integrity, business competence and a passion for economic development that will foster a stronger environment for job creation in every region of Kentucky. The Commonwealth is on track to becoming the undisputed engineering and manufacturing hub of excellence in America.”

Gill most recently served as President of OneTouchPoint, a $140MM marketing services organization. He was responsible for growth and M&A initiatives resulting in the creation of the largest privately held marketing services and technical printing company in the region. 

Prior to OneTouchPoint, Gill served as the Vice President of EnterpriseCorp, the arm of Greater Louisville Inc., which is focused on increasing the number of high potential companies headquartered in the Louisville and Southern Indiana market. Before coming to EnterpriseCorp, he served as President and Chief Executive Officer of FetterGroup.  

Gill holds a BA degree in Marketing with a Minor in Economics from the University of Kentucky. In addition to his charitable and civic involvement, he is a Board Member and serves on the Investment Committee for AccessVentures, a Louisville based impact investment firm.

Government is not a business.  It is pretty much the opposite of a business, in that it is supposed to be operated for the good of all the people, not just the good of the owners.

Government doesn't seek to make a profit; it works to improve the lives of all of its citizens.

All the abominations of government - budget cutting, deregulation, tax cutting, corruption - are the effluent of corporate influence. 

Taxes, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, are what we pay for civilized society. When corporations and the rich demand their already scandalously low toxes be cut even further, they are saying they don't want to be part of a civilized society that includes everyone.

Fine. Ship them all to Somalia.  No taxes there.

Trump-taint-licker Bevin is a member and tool of the money power.  He and his corporate cronies have no place in any government.

The Obstruction Begins

Rick Perry doesn't have a chance against these guys.

 

Civil servants at the Energy Department have joined The Resistance.

The Energy Department has rejected a request from Donald Trump's transition team to list staffers at the department who were engaged in climate policy under the Obama administration.

“The Department of Energy received significant feedback from our workforce throughout the department, including the National Labs, following the release of the transition team’s questions. Some of the questions asked left many in our workforce unsettled,” Energy Department Spokesman Eben Burnham-Snyder said in a statement first reported by the Washington Post. “Our career workforce, including our contractors and employees at our labs, comprise the backbone of DOE (Department of Energy) and the important work our department does to benefit the American people. We are going to respect the professional and scientific integrity and independence of our employees at our labs and across our department."

Dear Civil Servants: OBSTRUCT!

The biggest anti-Trump secret weapon no one is talking about is the federal bureaucracy.  The one without whose cooperation no president can accomplish jack shit.

Yes, there are trumpies everywhere and the scientists are already being lined up for execution, but there are millions of civil servants who see ill presidente as an existential threat to the nation that they work every day to improve and safeguard.

And they have the power.

The Vandals are busy filling 4,000 political appointment positions with radioactive sewage like Betsy DeVos and Rex Tillerson.

Steve Benen wrote:

The president-elect has no governing experience, and neither does his chief of staff. The same is true of his chief strategist. And his Treasury secretary. And his HUD secretary. And his Education secretary. And his Commerce secretary. And some of his deputy cabinet officials.

In other words, Trump and many of those he’s surrounded himself with have no idea what they’re doing, and about a month from now, they’ll be running the executive branch of a global superpower. These are the same folks, however, who’ve decided to “largely ignore” detailed governing plans.

And while those appointees may have the titles and the pay, they are vastly outnumbered by the civil servants who actually run the country.

According to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), as of December 2011, there were approximately 2.79 million civil servants (civilian, i.e. non-uniformed) employed by the US Government.

That's 697.5 to one.  You can take 'em, y'all.

Political appointees serve at the pleasure of the president.  They can be fired at any time for any reason.  Civil servants, however, have civil service protections.  They can be fired only for cause: proven to have committed a statutory firing offense, like embezzlement or drug dealing. Yes, bosses can gin up charges but it requires months if not years of daily documentation. Few appointees have that kind of patience or competence.

Especially because contrary to conventional wisdom, after 30 years of budget cuts, agencies are grossly understaffed. Appointees can't afford to get rid of people they need to literally keep the lights on.

Thus the hidden power of civil servants.  They don't have to start riots.  They don't have to rebel.  They don't have to be insubordinate.  They don't have to refuse to follow orders. They don't have to break any laws or rules at all.

All they have to do is quietly obstruct.  Play dumb.  Stall.  Make small but time-consuming mistakes.  Do nothing without detailed instructions. Repeatedly seek clarification. Request signed approval for every tiny step.

The game-show host is already planning to cut civil-service protections and pensions.  Civil servants have nothing to lose by fighting back the only way they can.

Civil servants can't Resist by protesting like the rest of us.  In return for job protection, they give up their civil rights to participate in partisan political activities.  But they can Resist by obstructing the catastrophe at every turn.

A Hillary Rant for Your Weekend

Via Political Animal:

Feds Finally Admit: Privatization is the WORST

This decision addresses only privately-run federal prisons, but the issue is of course far, far bigger.  The problem with private prisons is not the prison part, it's the private part.

Giving tax dollars to for-profit companies to provide public services is worse that a mere horrific  waste of money and an even more horrific abuse of helpless citizens.  It's worse than incompetent, worse than counter-productive, worse than sabotaging the very idea of public services provided by public employees at public expense.

Privatization - which in most cases is invisible to the public - gives people the precisely wrong idea that government does not work and should be run like a business.

It's private companies making a profit off of the Common Wealth that always fails.

Washington Post:

The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons after officials concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced the decision on Thursday in a memo that instructs officials to either decline to renew the contracts for private prison operators when they expire or “substantially reduce” the contracts’ scope. The goal, Yates wrote, is “reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons.”

“They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” Yates wrote…

The Justice Department’s inspector general last week released a critical report concluding that privately operated facilities incurred more safety and security incidents than those run by the federal Bureau of Prisons. The private facilities, for example, had higher rates of assaults — both by inmates on other inmates and by inmates on staff — and had eight times as many contraband cellphones confiscated each year on average, according to the report.

TPM took a deep look at private prisons here as part of a series on privatized government in general. 

And that's where this prison story needs to lead: the millions of government contracts worth tens of billions of tax dollars given to private companies to do everything from janitorial work to running schools to nursing patients to undermining public safety as cops and firefighters.

Only government can provide public services, because only government is accountable to the public.

Now that we have proof that private contracts always cost more than public employees and always fail to provide adequate services, it's time to put an end to companies sucking off the taxpayer tit.

Gov. Moneybags Steals From Working People to Give to the Obscenely Rich

Free stuff for rich people.  $20 million in tax dollars from people earning $7.25 per hour to benefit only people who can afford a private plane.  

From the press release:

Gov. Matt Bevin announced today that select general aviation airports across the state will receive $20 million over the next two years to fund overdue airport pavement renovations.

Don't be fooled: "general aviation" airports do not serve the public. Only private planes - and people rich enough to buy one - can use them.

Meanwhile, Governor Only Rich People Are Really Human is still planning to rip health care away from 400,000 working poor Kentuckians.

None of whom have a private plane.

Privatization Always Kills: UL Hospital "Unsafe"

Shame on everyone who ever fell for the scam that public services should be "run like a business." A business does not serve the public. A business rakes in profit for its owner(s.) Public services - like hospitals and universities - do not rake in profits. Its owners are the taxpaying public to which the public entity provides services.

The two are not the same and cannot work together. This is fucking obvious, people, and always has been.

Privatization is an unholy partnership between anti-government conservatives and greedhead corporations sucking up tax dollars for bad service.

From the Herald:

A leading University of Louisville surgeon says staffing cuts at U of L Hospital since a private company took over its management have made it unsafe, and that the hospital has "never been worse" in his 34 years at the facility.

In an email to the university's top health officials, Dr. J. David Richardson, vice chair of surgery and the current president of the American College of Surgeons, says the hospital is facing "major" safety issues, reported The Courier-Journal (http://cjky.it/1PiCGFg).

The hospital is poorly staffed at night, resulting in emergency room crowding, Richardson said. The Intensive Care Unit, he said, is understaffed as well.

Furthermore, Richardson said it's "virtually impossible" to do clinic research in the hospital. One approved study was canceled last week because of inadequate nurse staffing, resulting in a "major embarrassment" for the hospital, he said.

The only solution, according to Richardson, is to cut ties with the company that took over hospital management in 2013 and laid off several employees shortly thereafter.

"They are destroying the hospital," Richardson said of KentuckyOne Health.

Talking Points Memo has started a new investigative series on privatization.  Part One is on how the scam got started.

People Over Share Price

That's how you fight capitalism:  reject the premise.  Refuse to wage a futile battle on the false grounds of Profit Over All.  Demand to fight on the grounds that individuals and communities, not corporations, represent the Highest Value of civilization, and must be treated as such in every decision about our economy, our politics and our future.

Workers before employers. Voters before elected officials.  Customers before corporations. 

People Over Profits.  Every time.

Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal:

I am reminded of what David Simon said years ago about what he was witnessing that became in inspiration for his HBO series The Wire.

We are in the postindustrial age. We do not need as many of us as we once did. We don’t need us to generate capital, to secure wealth. We are in a transitive period where human beings have lost some of their value. Now, whether or not we can figure out a way to validate the humanity of the individual, I have great doubts…

As for the characters on the program, their lives are less and less necessary. They are more and more expendable. The institutions in which they serve are indifferent to their existence…

I didn’t start out as a cynic, but at every given moment where this country has had a choice - its governments, institutions, corporations, its social framework - to exalt the value of individuals over the value of the shared price, we have chosen raw unencumbered capitalism. Capitalism has become our god. You are not looking at a marxist up here, but you are looking at somebody who doesn’t believe that capitalism can work absent a social framework that accepts that it is relatively easy to marginalize more and more people in this economy. Capitalism has to be attended to. And that has to be a conscious calculation on the part of society, if that is going to succeed. Everywhere we have created an alternate America of haves and have-nots. At some point, either more of us are going to find our conscience or we’re not.

All of that was happening years before the Great Recession and isn’t necessarily a result of trade agreements. It points to the need to attend to capitalism in a way that puts the value of human beings into the equation of our social framework. In other words, it requires that we expand our moral imagination.

Matt Bevin Doesn't Know What the Fuck He Is Doing, Part 18

This is what you get when you let people who made billions in "business" ripping off consumers and investors into public office: they think they can just fire public employees as if they were personal servants.

From the Herald:

Gov. Matt Bevin cannot remove members of the Kentucky Horse Park Commission but must allow them to serve out defined terms, according to an opinion released Monday by Attorney General Andy Beshear’s office.

The opinion, which spells out the commission’s independence, would indicate that Bevin apparently cannot remove former chairwoman Alston Kerr from the board, as he has done.

As usual, Bevin's response ranges from toddler "can so!" through asshole arrogant "I'm rich I can do what I want" through legal lying "the Attorney General is wrong."

This. Is. Socialism.

Also known as Big Gubmint. I dare any anti-government patriot to survive a week without any of these.

From Down with Tyranny: