PVTIZATION 2

SEE MAIN

1/8 age of trump

see 4 horsemen

SEE HEGSETH 1-3 VA

SEE ERIK BLKWATER MASS DEPORT “DEPUTY” PVT ARMY “DEPUTY”

SEE MILLER 4 REPO DEBT

disaster capitalism

MILEI ARGENTINA STURZNEGGER

new tag pvt

see voucher charter

see libtard

SEE MEDICARE ADVANTAGE BS SEE PJT 2025

see social safety net

// dereg

merri ok

are pvt and extract the same?

see PIC private prison geo Core civic mass deport HOMAN 50k$ BRIBE

see pvt security/intel

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puerto rico pvt grid fails more than public, protests 9 22

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COM DR

Ted Cruz Admits Trump Accounts Are Designed to Privatize Social Security Over Time

One advocate said the Texas Republican laid bare the “two-pronged strategy to push Social Security privatization: Creating the Trump accounts with one hand and gutting the Social Security Administration with the other.”

Jake Johnson

May 08, 2026

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5 26 lever Trump’s Private Repo Men Are Hunting Immigrants

theTrump administration has quietly hired a team of scandal-plagued private debt collectors to hound immigrants slapped with new multimillion-dollar civil penalties for not leaving the country, according to documents reviewed by The Lever. All of the companies previously worked on a federal student loan debt-collection program shut down for widespread abuses.

One private collection notice obtained by The Lever assessed a $1.8 million fine on its recipient, the maximum penalty allowed under immigration law, plus another half a million in fees and interest charges, bringing the total to $2.3 million.

IFrame ContentA collection notice sent by a private debt-collection agency regarding a $1.8 million Homeland Security fine, plus another half a million in fees and interest charges.

That notice is not a one-off. According to immigration lawyers, there’s been a recent uptick in collection letters from private firms demanding immigrants pay multimillion-dollar fines, which the Department of Homeland Security began imposing last year.

As directed by a White House executive order from January, the Trump administration is using these massive new financial penalties to pressure immigrants to self-deport as part of its immigration crackdown. And to ensure immigrants ship out or pay up, the White House is enriching private contractors with a history of dubious practices, just like it has outsourced oversight of its detention centers to embattled for-profit companies like GeoGroup and CoreCivic.

“This is part and parcel with the administration’s desire to partner with the private sector to make immigration enforcement as punitive and painful as possible,” said Charles Moore, an attorney at Public Justice, a legal advocacy and defense group. “It’s very telling that they view the private market as the best way to accomplish that.”

As of last year, the administration had slapped hefty fines totaling an estimated $6 billion on over 20,000 immigrants for various infractions. The bulk of those penalties relate to overstaying a deportation removal order, for which immigrants are now being fined nearly $1,000 a day for up to five years.

Now, Homeland Security is outsourcing the management of that debt to the private collection industry, which has faced mountains of lawsuits and consumer complaints over exploitative practices such as harassing consumers who are late on credit card bills, medical payments, or auto loans.

At least four private companies inked debt-collection deals with Homeland Security as the agency began ramping up civil penalties on immigrants, according to procurement records. That included Continental Services, one of the largest collection agencies nationwide, which signed three purchasing agreements with Homeland Security last September worth a combined $1 million. A fifth company is doing debt-collection work for Homeland Security through a contract with the Treasury Department, which manages the account where payments for these fines are deposited.

All of these private agencies were previously part of a federal student loan debt-collection program plagued by alleged misconduct. That program was eventually shut down by the Biden administration due to widespread operational problems, massive fees on borrowers, and cost overruns for taxpayers.

Now, that same group of debt collectors has been rewarded with new Homeland Security contracts — which have fewer guardrails in place to protect debtors.

“If you’re [Homeland Security Adviser] Stephen Miller, you want the worst debt collector in America to be as aggressive and harassing as possible, because the goal is to make people miserable to get them out of the country,” said Mike Pierce, the executive director of Protect Borrowers, a legal advocacy group for consumer rights, who previously worked on student-borrowing issues at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Homeland Security and the debt collection agencies did not respond to a request for comment.

“A Total Sham”

Around March 2025, the Trump administration began levying large penalties on immigrants by relying on an obscure provision from a 1996 immigration law signed by President Bill Clinton. The statute allows the government to fine undocumented immigrants for willfully failing to depart the country — but it had never been enforced until President Donald Trump first took office.

Around 2018, after Congress blocked the total funding requested by the Trump administration to build a wall along the country’s southern border, then-White House advisor Stephen Miller devised an alternative strategy. The administration would finance the wall by leveraging its civil penalty authority to raise funds on the backs of immigrants, according to leaked emails obtained by the government watchdog group American Oversight.

Once collected, those fines would be held in an “immigration enforcement account” administered by the U.S. Treasury that could then be tapped by Homeland Security as a de facto slush fund for enforcement initiatives of its choosing.

While the penalty program remained fairly limited during Trump’s first administration, it has ramped up considerably under his second term. By August of last year, over 20,000 people had been slapped with new fines.

Homeland Security recently expanded the scope of these penalties, including instituting a new $5,000 fine for illegal border crossings, as authorized by the One Big Beautiful Bill. But the most common fines target immigrants for overstaying deportation removal orders issued by immigration judges.

The government is now fining immigrants nearly $1,000 for every day they overstay a deportation order, even if those court orders were issued years ago.

The statute of limitations for such a penalty is five years, meaning the maximum fine Homeland Security can levy is $1.8 million. For many immigrants, that’s an insurmountable amount of debt, and it can’t be waived unless they leave the country.

The department also instituted new rules “streamlin[ing] the process for fining illegal aliens,” which entailed gutting the administrative hearings where they could previously protest a fine. Now, immigrants are merely entitled to written notice from the government in response to their petitions.

The rules also reduce the number of days’ notice Homeland Security must give immigrants before beginning to collect such fines, so they can contest the matter. That number is now 15 days, down from 30.

According to a lawsuit filed by a collection of immigration lawyers last year, Homeland Security may be enforcing this new penalty program illegally by targeting immigrants who have other legal avenues to remain in the country. The suit argues that the government has failed to demonstrate that many of these fines’ recipients were willfully defying deportation removal orders, per the statute.

According to the suit, in some instances, immigrants have secured permission from immigration authorities to temporarily remain in the country, but they still faced heavy fines. In other cases, immigrants received fines despite being in the process of contesting their deportation orders and pursuing other legal avenues to remain in the country, such as applying for temporary visas that may still be available to them.

“The entire process is a total sham,” said Moore, the attorney at Public Justice.

These ongoing legal challenges haven’t discouraged Homeland Security, which is now working with the Justice Department to file lawsuits against immigrants who haven’t paid their million-dollar fines. With a court order, the government can begin garnishing wages and seizing assets if payments aren’t made.

“We’ve heard of people who weren’t even notified of the fine before getting served a lawsuit by the government,” said Nicollete Glazer, an immigration lawyer based in Los Angeles. “There’s a lot of bad practices taking place.”

Weaponizing Financial Distress

In addition to bringing legal action against immigrants who haven’t paid their fines, Homeland Security is also using its massive new $190 billion immigration enforcement budget to award lucrative contracts to private contractors to collect this debt on the agency’s behalf.

Immigration lawyers say they used to only see debt notices coming directly from the government; now they’ve noticed an increase in notices sent by a host of private debt collectors. From June to September of last year, the Department inked procurement deals with Continental Services and four other debt agencies. That included a major collector, FH Cann Associates, which was awarded a contract valued at nearly $700,000. Coast Professional Inc., Central Portfolio Control Inc., and Pioneer Credit Recovery were also tapped by Homeland Security.

According to immigration lawyers, most of the collection papers they’ve seen from private contractors are for fines in the millions of dollars, accompanied by sky-high fees.

In itemized payment sheets sent by private collectors and reviewed by The Lever, such “administrative fees” make up the bulk of the financial markups, sometimes totaling $500,000 in charges for an $1.8 million fine. Language from the notices inform its recipients that authorized private collectors may collect fees as well as charge interest at an unspecified rate.

A Customs and Border Protection notice informing people that authorized private debt collectors may collect fees and charge interest on the Homeland Security fines.

“Additional interest, penalties, and administrative costs will also continue to accrue from the date of the initial CBP-issued invoice,” reads one notice sent by Customs and Border Protection, the division of Homeland Security that administers these fines.

It’s unclear whether these fees and interest charges line the contractors’ pockets or are transferred back to the government’s immigration enforcement account.

Based on the procurement records reviewed by The Lever, the private debt contractors are paid for their debt-collection services, regardless of whether they recover the fine.

A History Of Abuse

All of the debt collection firms now working under contract for Homeland Security formerly held contracts with the Department of Education to collect money from students who defaulted on government-guaranteed loans to pay for college.

The 2010 Federal Direct Loan Program created government-backed student loans, whose debt servicing was then outsourced to private firms. That public-private partnership was eventually expanded under the Obama administration to include 30 contractors. But the program quickly became a political and legal debacle, one that didn’t fade even after the Obama administration tried implementing reforms to cap exorbitantly high fees charged by student debt collectors.

In 2017, a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a scathing report finding endemic problems with the Education Department’s debt-collection privatization effort, including that contractors were profiting immensely from the program despite not delivering results.

For example, investigators found that the companies’ collection cost fees totaled as much as 25 percent of students’ loan balances, even though those fees didn’t reflect the firms’ actual costs of collecting such payments. In total, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that the government was reimbursing these firms $40 for every $1 they recovered from students.

The report led to a Senate inquiry that concluded the program was fueling a punitive, wasteful, and self-defeating debt cycle.

In a _{letter}_ to the Education Department, a group of senators wrote that the “Departmental process provides perverse financial incentives for private collection agencies to aggressively pursue borrowers… and encourages distressed borrowers to use less successful tools to help them deal with default.”

In 2021, the Biden administration shut down the private-sector student debt collection effort entirely. But now, some of the same contractors involved in the Education Department program have been reemployed to collect debts for Homeland Security.

Most prominently, in 2017, the Obama administration sued Navient, then an Education Department loan-servicing contractor, and its subsidiary, Pioneer Credit Recovery, for failing to inform students about debt-relief options before demanding payments, among other questionable practices.

In 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized a $120 million settlement in the matter banning Navient from all federal student loan servicing and putting Pioneer under the supervision of the chief consumer regulatory agency.

Now, Pioneer, which was spun off from Navient in 2025, appears to have been tapped to work on behalf of Homeland Security’s new financial-penalty effort. The firm has sent collection letters for Homeland Security fines, according to immigration lawyers, as part of an ongoing contract it has with the Treasury Department.

Alongside Pioneer, Continental Services, FH Cann Associates, Coast Professional Inc., and Central Portfolio Control Inc. were all part of the Education Department’s debt-collection privatization effort before being recently tapped directly by Homeland Security. Central Portfolio Control was a subcontractor of another debt agency, Professional Bureau of Collections of Maryland, which had secured a $13 million contract from the Education Department.

According to immigration lawyers and debt protection lawyers, the overlap may be by design.

“This kind of operation is going to be a perfect fit for [Homeland Security], which will tell [private contractors] there’s no rules or accountability,” said Glazer, the Los Angeles immigration lawyer. “And with the government guaranteeing pay, it’s a major revenue source for these collectors, even if they don’t end up collecting debt.”

According to Glazer, private collectors’ automated technology systems can churn out text messages, emails, letters, and phone calls at a vast scale to hound debtors for payments. That could be a major boon for Homeland Security, given the massive number of fines it has levied.

And now, the rapacious practices once deployed on student borrowers may be unleashed on immigrants who have even fewer legal protections.

“We’re seeing financial distress weaponized all across this administration to manipulate people’s behavior, especially now with immigration,” said Pierce at Protect Borrowers.

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MMA 4 26

A group of Trump allies have formed the Mass Deportation Coalition to encourage the administration not to back away from its deportation push. The coalition — which includes the Oversight Project’s Mike Howell, former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, former Customs and Border Protection Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan, and conservative groups including The Heritage Foundation — released a playbook urging the White House to continue raiding work sites and deporting migrant workers despite pushback from voters. Politico, [4/1/26]

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JACOBIN LEVER NOV?

IN February, at the start of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, news broke that a group of military contractors was circulating a blueprint for mass deportations, to be carried out by private contractors.

Led by Erik Prince, Donald Trump ally and founder of the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater, the group proposed (among other ideas) that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) create a “skip tracing team” that would send out private contractors to hunt down immigrants targeted for deportation, per reporting at the time by Politico.

Now, there are indications ICE is carrying out those plans.

Last month, the Lever revealed that ICE had signed a $7 million contract with defense contractor SOS International for “skip tracing services.” SOS International, also known as SOSi, has long done business with the federal government, including working with the US military in Afghanistan — and has business ties to one of the military contractors whose name was listed alongside Prince’s in the proposal.

It was the first time, per online federal procurement databases, that an ICE contract description contained the phrase “skip tracing,” a term usually associated with debt collection and bounty hunting. There was little further detail about the services SOSi would provide to Trump’s immigration enforcers.

The contract — with its eerie callback to the Prince deportation blueprint — appears not to be a fluke. Several days later, ICE signed another “skip tracing” contract, this time worth up to $33.5 million, with international debt collector Global Recovery Group LLC.

Then, on Friday, October 31, as the Intercept first reported, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations bureau, the agency’s primary deportation arm, released procurement documents that mapped out new plans to create a bounty-hunting program that would deploy skip tracing methods. Though the documents are preliminary, ICE’s proposed program hews closely to the blueprint drawn up in February by Prince and his cadre of military contractors.

Under the program, private contractors will deploy “all technology systems available” to locate ICE’s targets, the documents say. Contractors would be given a list of ten thousand names at a time and be allowed to ultimately locate “up to 1,000,000” individuals, per the records.

ICE already has plenty of technology at its disposal to identify and track down immigrants, an arsenal that the agency is furtherbuilding out now that it is flush with cash. But the “skip tracing team” appears distinct in that its mandate would include sending out privately contracted bounty hunters to systematically identify immigrants’ residences and workplaces.

The bounty hunting program would include “performance-based incentives” — cash bonuses for vendors who successfully hunt down immigrants for ICE. This cash payout idea appears to be pulled directly from the Prince memo, which suggested that ICE build out a “bounty program which provides a cash reward for each illegal alien held by a state or local law enforcement officer.”

To judge from ICE’s first skip tracing contracts with SOSi and Global Recovery Group LLC, which are together worth over $40 million, the program will prove yet another gold mine for the military contractors clamoring for their cut of the Trump administration’s multibillion-dollar immigration spending blitz. And that makes sense: it was drafted by those same vendors.

From Blackwater to Bounty Hunting

The core message of Prince’s deportation plan was this: If President Donald Trump wanted to carry out his stated goals of mass deportations, he couldn’t do so alone. “The government,” the plan said, “should enlist outside assistance.”

Although Politico did not publish the complete text of the proposal, what has been made public from the document indicates that Prince was making the suggestion as part of the “special entity” 2USV, a group of defense contractors. (An LLC with the same name has been registered in Wyoming, but many details about the project remain unclear.)

The contractors include former Blackwater employees like Bill Mathews, the company’s former vice president, who pleaded guilty to violating firearms records law related to his work at the mercenary firm, as well as Richard Pere, former head of a Blackwater aviation subsidiary. Most of the Blackwater alumni have not been formally associated with the company in years. Blackwater has gone through a series of acquisitions and name changes since Prince sold the firm in 2010; its latest form is the private security conglomerate Constellis, which still operates the flagship Blackwater training center in North Carolina and is now trying to “drive strategic growth” in its border-operations work.

So far, there are no clear ties between Prince’s current business ventures — including Vectus Global, a murky security firm that is sending drones and mercenaries to the Haitian government — and the vendors now inking deals to carry out ICE’s new bounty-hunting program. But at least one other contractor involved in the initial proposal has business ties to the companies that have been tapped to carry out the plans.

Louis Gobern, one of the names listed in the initial Prince memo, is currently the president of Resilient Logistics Services & Solutions, a defense contractor that advertises its work with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. The company names SOS International, ICE’s new skip tracing contractor, as an “industry partner,” and both companies have previously worked as subcontractors on the same Customs and Border Protection contract.

SOS International has been vying for Department of Homeland Security contracts in recent months, poaching one of ICE’s top intelligence chiefs, Andre Watson, in August. The company boasted that Watson, who helped run the ICE program targeting students for political speech, would help the contractor “expand its business and deliver capabilities to the federal and state law enforcement agencies.”

When Politico contacted Mathews, one of the former Blackwater executives, about the proposal in February, he claimed he had heard nothing from the Trump administration about moving forward with the bounty hunter program.

“There has been zero show of interest or engagement from the government, and we have no reason to believe there will be,” he said.

If ICE’s recent multimillion-dollar spending spree is any indication, that is changing.

This article was first published by the Lever, an award-winning independent investigative newsroom.

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corp aatability 12 25

In recent years, we’ve seen some of the biggest cities in the U.S. mobilize against water privatizing corporations. Most recently, thousands of residents in Pittsburgh voted to ban water privatization in their city — keeping their water system in public hands for generations to come.¹

Pittsburgh’s story proves that through community organizing and collective action, we can take on some of the most powerful corporations and, most importantly, win. From Houston, Texas, to Lagos, Nigeria, we and our allies are making sure that water remains under local, public control. But we can’t do it without your support

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gmail 12 25

Dear MoveOn member,

Shawn from RuralOrganizing.org here. Threats facing the U.S. Postal Service are ramping up. Just this past week, news broke that Amazon—USPS's biggest client—is considering cutting ties and not renewing its partnership, which would be a huge financial blow to the Postal Service and would hurt our communities who rely on the USPS for medications, food, voting, and more.¹

And it doesn't stop there. Amazon is also considering launching a rival delivery service that would privatize our mail and put the USPS further in crisis.² This is exactly what Donald Trump wants to happen—to have our Postal Service dismantled and sold to the highest bidder. Amazon would just be laying the groundwork.

Right now, the USPS has the responsibility to serve every single resident in this country equally, regardless of where they live. But a private company wouldn't have that same obligation, which could drive up costs for everyday Americans—not only in rural communities, but small towns too.³}:

–Shawn Sebastian, RuralOrganizing.org

Sources:

"Amazon in discussions with USPS about future relationship," Reuters, December 4, 2025

https://www.reuters.com/technology/amazon-explores-cutting-ties-with-usps-washington-post-reports-2025-12-04/

Ibid.

"Who Would Pay the Biggest Price for Postal Privatization?" Institute for Policy Studies, April 2025

https://ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Who-Would-Pay-the-Biggest-Price-for-Postal-Privatization_.docx.pdf

"Americans see many federal agencies favorably, but Republicans grow more critical of Justice Department," Pew Research Center, August 12, 2025

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/08/12/americans-see-many-federal-agencies-favorably-but-republicans-grow-more-critical-of-justice-department

"Trump approval rating ticks up to 41 percent: Survey," The Hill,December 9, 2025

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5640218-trump-approval-rating-ticks-up-survey/

"Millennials trust the postal service more than Amazon," CNBC, January 24, 2020

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/24/millennials-trust-usps-more-than-amazon-morning-consult-study.html

"Exclusive: Amazon targets as many as 30,000 corporate job cuts, sources say," Reuters, October 28, 2025

https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-targets-many-30000-corporate-job-cuts-sources-say-2025-10-27/

"Lawsuit seeks records related to Amazon worker deaths," New Jersey Monitor, November 26, 2024

https://newjerseymonitor.com/briefs/lawsuit-seeks-records-related-to-amazon-worker-deaths/

"Amazon Prime Day is full of 'fake sales,' lawsuit alleges," USA Today, October 20, 2025

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/10/16/amazon-lawsuit-fake-prime-day-sales/86728601007/

"USPS Privatization Would Cost Rural America More Than Mail," Jacobin, February 26, 2025

https://jacobin.com/2025/02/usps-rural-areas-services-privatization

"USPS strikes deal with Elon Musk's DOGE team for reform help," Reuters, March 14, 2025

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/usps-signs-agreement-with-elon-musks-doge-team-assistance-2025-03-13/

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TDB

Hegseth’s Venmo Is on Display in Embarrassing Leak

Pete Hegesth’s Venmo is publicly viewable and showing his full list of friends and contacts, according to a report.

While Hegseth’s transactions are private, his list of friends on the mobile payment service isn’t—and it’s a who’s who of Washington bigwigs, defense contractors, and healthcare executives, The American Prospectreported.

A name appearing on Hegseth’s friends list could mean he has transacted with the person, but Venmo also has an option to automatically add phone contacts as friends in the app. At the very least, it suggests that the two people are in touch.

All over the list are executives from up-and-coming Silicon Valley defense contractors Palantir (founded by Republican superdonor Peter Thiel) and Anduril, both of which already have multimillion-dollar contracts with the DOD. They could be poised for additional deals under Hegseth’s regime.

Hegseth’s rolodex appears to include executives from Palantir, a defense contractor founded by major GOP donor Peter Thiel. / Marco Bello / Getty Images

His other ties to Silicon Valley include Google’s former director of law enforcement and information security, a former advisor to Thiel’s hedge fund, and former Sen. Scott Brown—who since leaving Congress has become the leader of Competitiveness Coalition, a group that advocates against anti-trust action.

In addition to defense and tech, the healthcare industry is well represented in Hegseth’s contacts. The friends list features executives at UnitedHealth Group, including a vice president, product director, and public affairs consultant.

Hegseth has long pushed for the privatization of Veterans Affairs, the government agency that supplies health insurance for military veterans. As an advisor to the White House during Trump’s first term, he even reportedly advocated outsourcing more of the agency’s work.

While Hegseth doesn’t oversee VA as defense secretary, he could directly attempt to privatize Tricare, the health insurance option for active duty military members.

...

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hightower

jul 2025

🚨🚨🚨 From the Lowdown’s “Early Political Warning System” comes this Code Red alert… 🚨🚨🚨 a fast-moving front of corporate corruption is sweeping westward from the White House… 🚨🚨🚨… Residents are urged to seek higher ethical ground immediately… 🚨🚨🚨

This is not a test, but a warning of an unnatural disaster: A plutocratic cabal of corporate elites is aiming to gut and eventually eliminate America’s National Weather Service! Yes, that’s the extensive network of scientific analysts, monitoring systems, researchers, emergency responders, and others trying to anticipate, prepare for, and protect us from the worst of storms, floods, wildfires, and other calamities.

Upgrade your subscription

In the name of “efficiency,” Republican politicos are now defunding and cancelling essential storm warning centers, hurricane monitoring staffs, flood rescue teams – and they’re even closing some forecast offices at night (as though bad weather checks out at sunset). Why?

Greed. Wall Street profiteers – including Trump appointees and political funders – have long lusted to privatize the weather service. While no one can control the weather, it is possible to control, commodify, and monopolize the collection, interpretation, and distribution of forecasting data. So, Trump Inc. intends to stop providing these functions as a public service for the benefit of all. Instead, weather data would become a corporate profit center, packaged and sold at premium prices to media conglomerates, insurance giants, private resorts, and others who can afford it.

These privatizing profiteers are shameful. They’re deliberately demonizing, destaffing, and dismantling a public servicethat is essential to America’s common good – just so they can steal it for their own profit. To rebel against their destructive greed, check out Union of Concerned Scientists: UCS.org

===

'A betrayal': Veterans reel as understaffed agency calls privatization fears a 'far-left canard'

AN 7 25 BESSANT?

Trump official slammed for saying this policy is 'backdoor to privatizing Social Security'

Ailia Zehra

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an 6 25

Benji Backer, author of The Conservative Environmentalist, slammed Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) on social media, accusing him of “secretly trying to sell” America’s public land for development, and called Lee's proposal made a “loser issue.”

A land sale plan introduced by Lee as part of President Donald Trump's “One Big Beautiful Bill" has sparked widespread concerns, The Hill reported Wednesday.

This provision in the current Republican budget proposal could put more than two million acres of public land across 11 western states on the auction block. But it has drawn backlash from environmental groups, hunters, regional leaders, and even some conservatives, the report noted. Even Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) has railed against the idea, promising he would be a "no forever" on selling public land.

This proposal from Lee, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is a longstanding push among many Western conservatives to transfer federally managed land to state or private hands.

IFrame Content

Lee argues the measure would promote domestic energy production, generate new income, and ease housing shortages. States in the crosshairs of this proposal include Utah, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming.

In a video released by his office, the Utah Republican stressed that national parks, monuments, and designated wilderness areas wouldn’t be included in the sales. Instead, the focus would be on “isolated parcels” suitable for development or infrastructure projects.

“Washington has proven time and again it can’t manage this land. This bill puts it in better hands,” Lee said last Thursday, in comments highlighted by The Hill.

Despite his defense of the plan, Lee has faced opposition even within his party. The report noted that Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) led an effort to strip the land sales clause from the House version of the bill. Calling himself a “hard no” on the issue, Zinke succeeded in having Montana excluded from the scope of the legislation, per the report.

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an 6 25

Alarm raised as Trump admin's potential 'endgame' for the postal service revealed in memo

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an 6 25

What privatization looks like: Yosemite hotel plagued by safety and killer virus threats

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MMA // MUSK?

### Benny Johnson: “Social Security is completely fraudulent. It should be privatized. They should destroy that entire program.”

05/20/25

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like fucking herpes

an 4 25

Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince and defense contractors are aiming to cash in on deportations to a Central American prison/holding facility.

Prince — the brother of President Donald Trump's former education secretary, Betsy DeVos — hopes his proposal can skirt U.S. immigration laws by designating a section of a sprawling El Salvadoran prison as American territory, Politico reported. Proposed new language claiming “transferring a prisoner to such a facility would not be an Extradition nor a Deportation” raises the specter of deporting U.S. citizens to offsite facilities because "deportation" may only qualify as a "transfer." Politico's Dasha Burns and Myah Ward noted that Prince's proposal "could be a precursor to deporting U.S. citizens" even though the facility is initially only for holding undocumented immigrants.

Trump has already floated plans to deport U.S. citizens.

READ MORE: 'Could be the last one standing': Trump aims to 'illegally remove' head of bipartisan board

The facility, which has already drawn accusations of violence and overcrowding from human rights groups, could receive thousands more immigrants from facilities in the U.S. There is no word on how accessible the expanded Central American prison would be to immigrant defense attorneys and affected families, however.

It is unclear how seriously the White House is considering Prince’s plan.

A shooting incident in Nisour Square left 17 Iraqi citizens dead, allegedly at the hands of four Blackwater guards, nearly two decades ago. Intense government investigations, scrutiny, private security reform and criminal charges ensued. In 2014, an American jury found the Blackwater guards guilty of various criminal charges, from murder to weapons offenses.

Trump pardoned Blackwater contractors jailed for the massacre in 2020.

READ MORE: Outrage as video of Trump bragging about enriching his billionaire pals emerges

The facility is pitched as a holding pen for “criminal illegal aliens,” but the administration has made it clear that the only criminality necessary for arrest and deportation to an offsite prison is being on U.S. soil.

“[B]ecause they illegally broke our nation’s laws, and, therefore, they are criminals, as far as this administration goes,” said Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt in January.

Most immigrants swept up within the last two months do not have criminal records in the United States.

Read the full POLITICO article at this link.

READ MORE: 'Punched the bully in the face': How some Republicans found courage to take on Trump

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an 3 25

'Catastrophic': Experts warn DOGE cuts could mean national parks end up in private hands

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an 1 25

Of the 11 Texas Republicans who lost their seats this year in Gov. Greg Abbott’s quest to create a school voucher program, none went down swinging quite like state House Rep. Steve Allison.

Last session Allison, a former Alamo Heights ISD board president, was one of 21 Republicans in the Texas House who joined Democrats in stripping school vouchers out of a broader education funding bill.

The move turned him from a longtime ally of the governor into an overnight political target, drawing a deluge of attack ads from his own party’s leaders in his primary race.

In the face of that fight, Allison’s long record as a conservative lawmaker has quickly been overshadowed by his unusual cross-party efforts to keep public education in the spotlight.

The roughly $4.5 billion that Texas lawmakers approved for public schools last session never made it into districts’ hands after the governor demanded school vouchers be included in the legislation. Even after losing his primary, Allison tried unsuccessfully to rally lawmakers back to pass a school funding bill over the summer.

“When [schools] have to lay off staff, lay off teachers, discontinue programs, that is moving towards a breaking point,” Allison said in a Dec. 18 interview. “The money was there this last session. And for it to be held up over this voucher scheme that could have just been separate, it’s really heartbreaking.”

In a stunning rebuke to his party’s leaders, this fall Allison joined forces with the Democrat running for his seat who shared his views on school finance.

He’s also been speaking out about a messy 88th legislative session that left public schools scraping for money while Abbott cashed campaign checks from a billionaire voucher proponent and Attorney General Ken Paxton sought taxpayer dollars to cover his own legal defense.

“I’ve been asked several times if I regret my vote on Paxton’s impeachment, or regret my position on school vouchers, and I don’t regret either one one bit. I’d do the same thing again,” Allison said. “Integrity is so important and I think we’re missing that … I’m not haunted.”

When state lawmakers return to work on Jan. 14, House District 121 will be represented by a new face. Republican Marc LaHood, who defeated Allison in the primary, and is a member of the conservative wing who found success in a district that’s elected moderates.

While wrapping up his final weeks in office, Allison spoke about a changing Republican Party, rifts with party leaders and lessons learned from six years in the Texas House.

San Antonio Report:When you were first running in 2018, the incumbent, then-Speaker Joe Straus, had just been through his own disagreements with the party’s conservative wing, and a crowded field of Republicans signed up to run for his seat. What was on your mind when you joined that race?

Steve Allison: Education. Education was terribly important. And then I thought it was important — and the encouragement I was receiving was — that Joe Straus was well-respected in our district and had done a good job. I think there was a strong interest in having someone older and more experienced, that had been around, to try to fill that role. My background in business and education and transportation, and my experience at the capitol, seemed to fit. I wasn’t planning on it at all, it just kind of snowballed.

SAR:So even though the party as a whole was shifting right, this district was still in the market for someone more moderate. What do you think changed in this election?

Allison: I think I’ve got a pretty conservative voting record… so to be labeled a RINO [Republican in Name Only], or Democrat sympathizer, more recently. Even sometimes to be called a moderate, I guess I do kind of tend more there.

But I think we’ve seen it around the country — we saw it in this primary in particular — a lot of outside influence. A tremendous amount of money and mailers and campaign efforts came from outside [the district], some pro-choice, some pro-voucher, and some just on extreme conservative issues. Then the governor picked up on that, and that changed everything.

There was a feeling, really up until this election, that House District 121 was changing and becoming a more middle, moderate — however you want to describe it — that there was a Democrat increase. I won the first two times by seven or eight percentage points, and the last time by 10. But then you see this time LaHood won it by just under five. So what does that say? … That kind of supports the fact, I think, that this district is still a little more middle of the road.

SAR: You’ve been working on public education issues in Texas for a long time, well before running for a seat in the legislature. How have those policy discussions changed in recent years?

Allison: When I first got involved… it was primarily over school finance. That’s when recapture and Robin Hood started [which is the practice of redistributing property tax dollars from wealthy districts]. Alamo Heights was one of the original Robin Hood districts and it was devastating. What’s frustrating is, it’s come full circle. This was back in the ’90s, and it’s where we are again: There’s a funding issue.....

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an 12 24

One of the campaign promises President-elect Donald Trump made ahead of his victory over Vice President Kamala Harris last month was to carry out the "the largest domestic deportation operation in American history."

According to a Sunday, December 22 Wall Street Journal report, the private prison industry is preparing to benefit greatly from the move — if Trump is able to accomplish it.

"Private prisons and other companies that provide detention services are getting ready to cash in on" the initiative, which "includes scouring for as many detention beds as possible in their networks of facilities, and scouting sites for new buildings to house migrants," the WSJ reports.

Per the report, George Zoley, who serves as executive chairman of the private prison company, GEO group, told investors soon after the election, "This is, to us, an unprecedented opportunity."

The company, the WSJ notes, "which currently houses about 40% of ICE detainees, is looking at a potential doubling of all its services, Zoley said on the call."

GEO Chief Executive Officer Wayne Calabrese told the newspaper, "We have assured ICE of our capability to rapidly scale up to monitor and oversee several hundreds of thousands, or even several millions, of individuals."

WSJ reports:

*CoreCivic, the other major player in ICE detention centers, had a similar message for investors after the election. The company believes it could quickly bring its detention capacity to 25,000 beds by bringing unused ones online, including at a facility previously used to hold families in Dilley, Texas, CEO Damon Hininger said in an interview. The Biden administration chose to close the site earlier this year, but CoreCivic kept it in 'warm status,' Hininger said.

READ MORE:['Acknowledging reality': Fed chair says Trump agenda creating 'uncertainty around inflation'

Hininger, according to WSJ, said "in addition to identifying already-existing beds it could open, CoreCivic is also exploring adding new buildings or temporary facilities on land it already owns."

WSJ also notes, "To bolster its ties to the incoming administration, GEO Group recently hired a Trump-connected lobbying firm called Continental Strategy LLC, according to federal lobbying disclosures. The Florida firm is run by Carlos Trujillo, who advised Trump on Latino voters and immigration issues during the campaign. It also employs Katie Wiles, daughter of Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles."

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12 24 pattern targets FDIC; tesla crash data kia 40 of 45 excessive data collection trans 2

an 12 24

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said the time has arrived for the Transportation Security Administration to be grounded – and he has at least one Republican in the lower chamber on board.

Lee made the comments on Monday in a string of social media remarks where he also called for an end to the Affordable Care Act when lawmakers return next month with a Republican trifecta.

“Congress should abolish TSA,” Lee told his social media followers on X. “If Congress somehow can’t abolish it, Congress should at least (1) privatize it, and then (2) require what remains of TSA to truly compete with private security contractors.”

The Utah senator’s announcement caught the attention of Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who reposted Lee’s comment with her own remark: “Hear, hear!” she wrote.

The proposal to do away with the TSA – created weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks – would upend safety measures for the country’s mass transportation. But the agency has landed on the radar of conservatives who have criticized it for overstepping its authority and violating peoples’ rights.

Congressional Republicans have promised to gut several federal agencies when Donald Trump reemerges in the White House next month, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Education.

Lee in March also proposed axing the TSA.

But political scientist Rachel Bitecofer pushed back on the suggestion being floated by Lee and other conservatives with a stinging two-word rebuke: "OK moron," she wrote in an X reply above a photo of a second plane preparing to slam into the World Trade Center on 9/11.

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an 4 24

nonprofit hospitals created largely to serve the poor are adding concierge physician practices, charging patients annual membership fees of $2,000 or more for easier access to their doctors.

It’s a trend that began decades ago with physician practices. Thousands of doctors have shifted to the concierge model, in which they can increase their income while decreasing their patient load.

Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, Penn Medicine in Philadelphia, University Hospitals in the Cleveland area, and Baptist Health in Miami are among the large hospital systems offering concierge physician services. The fees, which can exceed $4,000 a year, are in addition to copayments, deductibles, and other charges not paid by patients’ insurance plans.

Critics of concierge medicine say the practice exacerbates primary care shortages, ensuring access only for the affluent, while driving up health care costs. But for tax-exempt hospitals, the financial benefits can be twofold. Concierge fees provide new revenue directly and serve as a tool to help recruit and retain physicians. Those doctors then provide lucrative referrals of their well-heeled patients to the hospitals that employ them.

“Hospitals are attracted to physicians that offer concierge services because their patients do not come with bad debts or a need for charity care, and most of them have private insurance which pays the hospital very well,” said Gerard Anderson, a hospital finance expert at Johns Hopkins University.

“They are the ideal patient, from the hospitals’ perspective.”

Concierge physicians typically limit their practices to a few hundred patients, compared with a couple of thousand for a traditional primary care doctor, so they can promise immediate access and longer visits.

“Every time we see these models expand, we are contracting the availability of primary care doctors for the general population,” said Jewel Mullen, associate dean for health equity at the University of Texas-Austin’s Dell Medical School. The former Connecticut health commissioner said concierge doctors join large hospital systems because of the institutions’ reputations, while hospitals sign up concierge physicians to ensure referrals to specialists and inpatient care. “It helps hospitals secure a bigger piece of their market,” she said.

Concierge physicians typically promise same-day or next-day appointments. Many provide patients their mobile phone number.

Aaron Klein, who oversees the concierge physician practices at Baptist Health, said the program was initially intended to serve donors.

“High-end donors wanted to make sure they have doctors to care for them,” he said.

Baptist opened its concierge program in 2019 and now has three practices across South Florida, where patients pay $2,500 a year.

“My philosophy is: It’s better to give world-class care to a few hundred patients rather than provide inadequate care to a few thousand patients,” Klein said.

Concierge physician practices started more than 20 years ago, mainly in upscale areas such as Boca Raton, Florida, and La Jolla, California. They catered mostly to wealthy retirees willing to pay extra for better physician access. Some of the first physician practices to enter the business were backed by private equity firms.

One of the largest, Boca Raton-based MDVIP, has more than 1,100 physicians and more than 390,000 patients. It was started in 2000, and since 2014 private equity firms have owned a majority stake in the company.

Some concierge physicians say their more attentive care means healthier patients. A study published last year by researchers at the University of California-Berkeley and University of Pennsylvania found no impact on mortality rates. What the study did find: higher costs.

Using Medicare claims data, the researchers found that concierge medicine enrollment corresponded with a 30%-50% increase in total health care spending by patients.

For hospitals, “this is an extension of them consolidating the market,” said Adam Leive, a study co-author and an assistant professor of public policy at UC Berkeley. Inova Health Care Services in Fairfax, Virginia, one of the state’s largest tax-exempt hospital chains, employs 18 concierge doctors, who each handle no more than 400 patients. Those patients pay $2,200 a year for the privilege.

George Salem, 70, of McLean, Virginia, has been a patient in Inova’s concierge practice for several years along with his wife. Earlier this year he slammed his finger in a hotel door, he said. As soon as he got home, he called his physician, who saw him immediately and stitched up the wound. He said he sees his doctor about 10 to 12 times a year.

“I loved my internist before, but it was impossible to get to see him,” Salem said. Immediate access to his doctor “very much gives me peace of mind,” he said.

Craig Cheifetz, a vice president at Inova who oversees the concierge program, said the hospital system took interest in the model after MDVIP began moving aggressively into the Washington, D.C., suburbs about a decade ago. Today, Inova’s program has 6,000 patients.

Cheifetz disputes the charge that concierge physician programs exacerbate primary care shortages. The model keeps doctors who were considering retiring early in the business with a lighter caseload, he said. And the fees amount to no more than a few dollars a day — about what some people spend on coffee, he said.

“Inova has an incredible primary care network for those who can’t afford the concierge care,” he said. “We are still providing all that is necessary in primary care for those who need it.”

Some hospitals are starting concierge physician practices far from their home locations. For example, Tampa General Hospital in Florida last year opened a concierge practice in upper-middle-class Palm Beach Gardens, a roughly three-hour drive from Tampa. Mount Sinai Health System in New York runs a concierge physician practice in West Palm Beach.

NCH Healthcare System in Naples, Florida, employs 12 concierge physicians who treat about 3,000 patients total. “We found a need in this community for those who wanted a more personalized health care experience,” said James Brinkert, regional administrator for the system. Members pay an annual fee of at least $3,500.

NCH patients whose doctors convert to concierge and who don’t want to pay the membership fee are referred to other primary care practices or to urgent care, Brinkert said.

*KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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medicare-advantage-2667180191 2 24

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/corporatization-of-just-about-everything

Tom Valovic

and

Common Dreams

July 21, 2022

an 623? few lnx https://milled.com/time/the-cover-story-planet-earths-future-now-rests-in-the-hands-of-big-business-AL5u1Lxjt1BFTGoG

back in the day, a Yale law professor named Charles Reich wrote a bestselling book called the Greening of America. His masterwork topped the New York Times best seller list and drew a ton of popular attention. Reich argued that American society was undergoing a major shift in cultural awareness (He used "consciousness", a word that no longer seems to be in vogue) and opined that this would lead to a major and lasting revitalization of our deepest cultural norms and values. It was a noble thought.

One reason the book drew so much interest is because of Reich's background. He was a former editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal and a friend of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. In writing about something as retrospectively "mushy" as the consciousness movement of the sixties, Reich's unique stance might then have been described as "establishmentarian as hippie" but also more contemporary than "old school". His impressive background provided both gravitas and a strong air of credibility to the prevailing Zeitgeist. (Fun fact: among Reich's students, William and Hillary Clinton.)

The sixties, of course, disappeared into the black hole of cultural amnesia that was the Reagan era. But as Reich continued his own personal and intellectual journey, he was having none of the social trend whereby many Boomer culture warriors eventually became yuppies, merrily plunging themselves into the consumer society they once railed against. Instead, and to his credit, Reich continued to develop his ideas and aspirations in the direction of the massive changes needed to right the ship of state. And many younger folks of his vintage learned and matured from the protests and educational rebellions of the Sixties.

In 1995, Reich followed up with a second book that was titled "Opposing the System" that offered a prophetic warning about what would happen if corporations became powerful enough to "run the show." Unlike his previous masterwork, the book was, for the most part, roundly ignored by the mainstream media. It was simply too radioactive. By chance, I happened to pick it up at a used bookstore and remember marveling at how it was shunted off to the remainder shelves after the smashing success of "The Greening of America." So thoroughly was this book buried in the collective memory that when the LA Times wrote his obituary (Reich died in 2019), it wasn't even mentioned.

Does "The System" Still Exist?

Whatever anyone might want to say about the excesses or over-reach of the Sixties, with the influential younger demographic of the time, there was a widespread perception and understanding that the US government was increasingly being influenced by corporations. But that was a bit too simplistic.The semi-invisible power structure that guided many policy decisions had far-reaching tentacles and was basically an interlocking directorate of corporations working in tandem with a variety of educational and governmental institutions. It was this system of values that constituted "the establishment." The fact that, in the current political perception, many Americans no longer perceive this phenomenon (which has now mushroomed many times over in power and influence) or think of it as an obstacle to positive social change, is unfortunate.Back in the Sixties, the process of understanding the embedded role of corporate power in politics gave rise to the maxim: "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

Reich's quixotic warning about the anti-democratic effects of excessive corporate control on the quality of our political life, of course, went largely unheeded. Since that time, corporate power has increased many times over and it has been ably argued that corporations now have effective control over Western governments in many important legislative and policy areas. What's troubling to contemplate is how easily we've come to accept this reality as the new normal.

Not only is there more corporate control in more areas of life but (worse) there has been consolidation of corporate power into monopolies that are so powerful that they seem unstoppable. In addition to Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Media, Big Ag, we now have the new kid on the block: Big Medicine. And sadly, the privatization ( now coded as "public/private partnerships") that was initially pushed by Republicans and Libertarians has now been embraced by mainstream Democrats and has been the case for many years.

If we are to ever untangle what's happening in US politics, we should consider taking Charles Reich's advice and revisiting the notion of "the system," a juggernaut of unquestioned values and influences feeding on itself, continually reinforced by the mainstream corporate media, and having a multitude of negative impacts on the quality of life. Equally important is moving beyond the illusion that our political parties operate the same way they did 30 or 40 years ago. It's precisely this illusion that keeps ordinary citizens from exercising the full spectrum of their rights and power while serving as the conceptual underpinning for massive wealth re-distribution to economic elites.

Corporations to the rescue? Don't hold your breath

It is possible that just about every major social and political mega-problem we're now facing can in some way be traced to varying degrees of corporatization—from renewed interest in war as a solution to international relations to Big Pharma's capture of health care to the influence of dark money in our political system to a climate crisis fed and ignored by Big Energy. In my opinion, this is a worthy topic to explore. Rest assured, however, that to counter this notion, corporate interests are vigorously employing massive and costly PR and propaganda campaigns to muddy the water.

As mentioned, as corporations engage in more intrusive involvement in social and political problems (not just in the US but globally), they're also busy re-positioning themselves as agents for social change, under the moniker of "stakeholder capitalism." This is often effected under another slightly Orwellian euphemism "public/private partnerships" (Read: government in the service of business). Many areas formerly under the purview of government are now open season for powerful corporations including the climate crisis and the exploration of space. (My metaphor for this is opening up a fast-food franchise on the Titanic.)

The purported desirability of these new initiatives was made abundantly clear in several articles appearing in an April 2022 issue of Time magazine. One of them, addressing the climate crisis, advised: "Planet Earth's Future Now Rests in the Hands of Big Business." In the article we learn that:

"The U.S. Department of Energy has partnered with private companies to bolster the clean energy supply chain, expand electric-vehicle charging, and commercialize new green technologies, among a range of other initiatives. In total, the agency is gearing up to spend tens of billions of dollars on public-private partnerships to speed up the energy transition…..Across the Biden Administration, and around the world, government officials have increasingly focused their attention on the private sector—treating companies not just as entities to regulate but also as core partners….For some, the emergence of the private sector as a key collaborator in efforts to tackle climate change is an indication of the power of capitalism to tackle societal challenges; for others it's a sign of capitalism's corruption of public institutions."

In other words, it's not enough that many corporations have despoiled the earth through systematic abuse of the profit motive and the widespread capture of regulatory agencies (Just one example: the FDA now receives major portions of its funding from Big Pharma).Instead of acknowledging culpability for their role in these problems, corporate entities are busy thinking about how they can make more money on the climate crisis and the other mega-problems facing humanity. Nice.

Next up: The corporatization of space

Once again, let's draw on the self-declared wisdom of Time magazine for guidance. (This is a publication that's now in the Big Tech/Big Media" camp as it's now owned by the CEO of Salesforce.com). In the same issue, another article gushed over the fact that corporations are poised to dominate the exploration and use of space:

"….NASA made it clear that when that clock does toll, the U.S. will be getting out of the space station game, likely for good. Instead, the space agency signed a $415.6 million seed money deal with three companies—Blue Origin, Nanoracks, and Northrop Grumman—to develop their own private space stations, on which NASA and other customers could lease space for professional crews and tourists. The article goes on to point out that, in a press statement, a NASA spokesperson boasted that…." NASA is once again leading the way to commercialize space activities" and that "we are partnering with U.S. companies to develop the space destinations where people can visit, live, and work."

There are many other examples of the corporate capture of public functions could be mentioned. It's arguable, of course, that some of these efforts have effected positive change under the right circumstances. But uncontrolled and uncontrollable market forces are no substitute for thoughtful and enlightened public policy and democratic norms. Granted, this is in short supply these days but allowing corporations to fill that void is hardly a solution.

As our glorious planet continues to experience crisis after crisis, it's sad and troubling that there seems to be no shortage of profiteers looking to make an easy buck off the spoils. It seems abundantly clear that the top-down corporate model of governance is fundamentally anti-democratic by its very nature and the waning power and direction of our democratic institutions worldwide has much to do with this fact.

Given these realities, the first task at hand is to foster a widespread recognition that the stakeholder capitalism being pushed by the Davos crowd with its call to accept the public/private partnership model is little more than a clever PR inversion. As such, much of it can be placed in the same bucket as greenwashing and other forms of corporate virtue signaling. Only with the deeper conceptual change that Charles Reich tried in vain to inspire will it be possible to make a sustained commitment to cleaning up the corporate takeover of our political system, eliminating pay-for-play politics, and restoring the kind of democratic governance that Americans deeply long for.

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Unbelievably dangerous': Top Democrat slams Gov. Noem for using the National Guard as a 'private militia'

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

July 01, 2021

The top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee is blasting South Dakota Republican Governor Kristi Noem for fulfilling the request of a wealthy GOP donor who asked her to deploy....nat'l gd in texas abbott border

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ABBOTT PVT $ FOR wALL 621, ALSO TAX $?

we must keep the homeland pure, immaculate, virginal vs dark invasion/infection; we need strict fr and wALL TO REPELL THEM/OTHER/ENEMY

critics denounce Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick's 'invasion' rhetoric on immigration

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/dan-patrick/

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disaster capitalism, desperation

austerity --> fiscal control bd unelected // flint mich emergency mgr --> pvtization aha

puerto rico [trump want to sell it?!]

now try pvt water?! kpfa 6/27/18

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ninjas

more corp SOP BS

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/observers-of-questionable-election-audit-in-arizona-were-required-to-sign-ndas-report/

a pvt (intel) corp, will not disclose proprietary methods; taking pvt $ no disclose

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/never-heard-of-them-anonymous-arizona-gop-ballot-auditing-firm-unknown-its-home-state/

An Arizona judge is demanding more information about a Florida-based ballot firm's audits of the 2020 presidential election results as others raise concerns about the firm's reputation.

According to Politico, Cyber Ninjas consulting firm has caused a stir with its controversial audit of voting results in Maricopa County, and many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are asking: who are the Cyber Ninjas?

In Arizona and the firm's home state of Florida, no one seems to have a clue who they are.

When Christian Ziegler, vice-chair of the Republican Party in Florida was asked about the firm's founder, Doug Logan, she admitted she had no idea who he is. Like many other Florida Republican leaders and lawmakers, Ziegler said, "Doug Logan? Cyber Ninjas? No. I don't know these guys. Never heard of them."

On Monday, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) and other Democratic leaders also criticized the firm's audit as Superior Court Judge Christopher Coury in Phoenix demanded more information about it. On Monday, April 26, Hobbs appeared on "Cuomo Prime Time" where she expressed concern about the audit as she insisted it is yet another attempt by Republicans to "appease" the voters in their party.

"A group of Republicans are continuing to try to appease their base who refuse to accept that ... Trump lost Arizona and that he's not the president anymore," Hobbs told CNN's Chris Cuomo.

Hobbs also noted that her office has been focused on working "with a lawsuit that's been filed to try to address the security's concerns at a minimum, but at this point, this seems like such a farce that it would be a good idea to stop it."

Amid Republicans' push for election audits, organizers have reportedly been very selective when it comes to revealing details about who will be conducting the audits and if the selected teams will be bipartisan.

CNN also reports that organizers have "ignored requests from election integrity groups to allow nonpartisan election administration experts to observe the process," adding that "journalists who want to report on the endeavor are allowed to do so only if they agree to participate as election observers, and will be barred from taking notes or video."

Hobbs shared her reaction to the scarcity in the details.

"We have so many concerns about this exercise," Hobbs said Monday. "I kind of don't want to call it an audit. I think that's an insult to professional auditors everywhere because they're making this stuff up as they go along." She added, "I think there was a high level of expectation that whoever had their hands on the ballots and the equipment would adhere to some level of security measures and transparency, and that clearly has not happened."

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https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Portal:Outsourcing_America_Exposed

not global mfg but pvtization:

NEW REPORT - Pay to Prey: Governors Facilitate the Predatory Outsourcing of America’s Public Services

Pay to Prey-cover-cropped300pxW.jpg

Maggots, drug smuggling, sex with inmates. As if the news were not already bad enough, shocking new allegations of a murder-for-hire plot are emerging from Michigan as the media digs deeper into that state’s failed outsourcing of prison services. Michigan Governor Snyder continues to stand behind failed food contractor Aramark, who spent $570,000 lobbying in recent years.

The fiasco in Michigan is only one example of a national trend of outsourcing failures documented in new report by the Center for Media and Democracy. Pay to Prey: Governors Facilitate the Predatory Outsourcing of America’s Public Services, contains many other cases of outsourcing run amok generating worse outcomes for the public, often higher costs, lawsuits and scorching headlines.

In Pennsylvania, Gov. Corbett outsourced millions of dollars in state legal contracts to outside law firms (including one that later defended his unconstitutional voter ID bill) that are among his biggest campaign contributors. He is attempting to privatize liquor sales in a move that would benefit another group of deep-pocketed contributors.

In Ohio, Gov. Kasich’s privatized economic development agency has failed to deliver promised jobs, but is receiving a huge stream of funds from Ohio liquor sales. Exempt from open records, JobsOhio has little oversight or accountability.

In Florida, Gov. Scott championed initiatives to drug test state employees and welfare recipients, benefiting his drug testing company. Now he is privatizing Medicaid services in Florida after his family’s 'blind trust,' run by an associate, loaded up on healthcare investments.

In Maine, Gov. LePage gave a $1 million contract to a consultant to assess the state’s Medicaid program and the possibilities of privatization. The contract was cancelled after the firm’s report touting the benefits of privatization was found to contain plagiarized passages and erroneous data, but already a half million in taxpayer dollars had gone out the door.

While large corporations are the winners, all too often taxpayers are the losers when transparency, accountability and the public interest are sold out to for-profit firms.

Read the full report here.

Governors Who Are Outsourcing America

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett

Pennsylvania’s Office of General Counsel “serves as the Governor’s in-house legal counsel,” providing the executive branch with “expert, responsive and cost-effective legal services … for the benefit of the public.” In addition to the 498 attorneys employed by the state, the handling of legal business is frequently outsourced to outside counsel. Last year, the total bill for private law firms – footed by the taxpayers – amounted to a whopping $32.7 million in 2013 and $100 million over three years, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Outside counsel, it has been pointed out, is an insider’s game. A comparison between the firms used as outside counsel last year and their contributions to Corbett’s gubernatorial campaign of 2010 makes for interesting reading.

Read the rest by Mary Bottari and Jonas Persson -- Corbett Outsources Legal Counsel to Campaign Contributors -- on PRWatch.

Ohio Governor John Kasich

Ohio Gov. John Kasich

There’s a lot of money at stake in Ohio charter schools, which as a group will receive almost $900 million in 2014. Charters get about $7,200 per student in taxpayer funding, compared to about $3,500 per student in traditional public schools.

On paper, Ohio’s charter schools are operated by non-profit organizations whose governing boards hire management companies to operate the schools. The boards are supposed to have a strong oversight role and have the power to fire charter operators if they don’t measure up.

Read the rest by Jessica Mason and Mary Bottari -- White Hat’s Magic Trick: Transforming Public Schools into Private Assets -- on PRWatch.

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback

When he was elected in 2010, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback began to slash core government services and privatize the rest. His austerity politics resulted in the state being downgraded by S&P in August 2014, and his privatization initiatives have also drawn criticism, causing one leading Republican to state, “I had hoped that it wouldn’t be as extreme as it’s been … what we didn’t know was that Sam would use this state as crash test dummies for his own fiscal experiments.”

Kids receiving child support payments from absent parents would be among Brownback’s first crash test dummies.

Read the rest by Mary Bottari and Jonas Persson -- Governor Brownback Outsourced Child Support Services to Donor -- on PRWatch.

Maine Governor Paul LePage

Maine Gov. Paul LePage

Around the world, private firms have been given “carte blanche rights to mine local groundwater supplies at the expense of local populations, say experts.” In 1997, Swiss food giant Nestlé signed a contract with the privately- owned water services provider in Fryeburg, Maine, to buy freshwater in bulk for its Poland Spring brand of bottled water. Fearing that large-scale commercial water exploitation would lead to groundwater depletion and the Saco River drying up, the town of Fryeburg enacted a Land Use Ordinance that required that any company pumping more than 10,000 gallons of water a day get approval from the planning board. With a constant stream of litigation and appeals, however, Fryeburg Water Co. was able to buy time while continuing its moneymaking sideline business without interruption.

Read the rest by Jonas Persson and Mary Bottari -- LePage Supports Pumping Public Water for Private Gain -- on PRWatch.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder

Ideological slogans often trump facts when it comes to the outsourcing of public services. When independent studies are commissioned, the conclusions are often disregarded. In some cases, however, there seems to be solid research supporting the cost-efficiency of privatization. Such was the case in Michigan – at least at first glance.

Read the rest by Jonas Persson and Mary Bottari -- Governor Snyder Stands Behind Prison Privatization, Even After Maggots and Murder for Hire -- on PRWatch.

Florida Governor Rick Scott

Florida Gov. Rick Scott

Suffering from lung cancer? Here's a Tylenol and some warm compresses. Are your intestines escaping? Not to worry; here's some K-Y Jelly to shove them back in.

Between 2008 and 2013, Corizon Health -- the country's largest prison health care provider -- was sued 660 times for malpractice. But Governor Rick Scott's administration failed to take note of this history when it awarded Corizon a $1.2 billion contract in 2011.

Read the rest by Mary Bottari and Jonas Persson -- Inmates Dying After Governor Rick Scott Outsources Prison Health Care -- on Huffington Post.

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More Privatizers & Profiteers

Macquarie Group Limited — Privatized Toll Roads

Outsourcing America Exposed Map-Mark Fiore640.jpgMacquarie Group Limited is a publicly-traded (ASX:MQG) for-profit global investment bank that describes itself as “a global provider of banking, financial, advisory, investment and funds management services.”[1] Part of the international business, Macquarie Infrastructure Company, LLC, is a Delaware, Maryland limited liability company that is publicly traded in the United States (NYSE: MIC). The investment banking service and its numerous subsidiaries are involved in privatization of government assets across the board, including: toll roads, airports and airport related infrastructure, bulk liquid storage, ports, communications, media, electricity and gas distribution, water utilities, renewable energy, and rail and ferry assets across 25 countries.[2] The international group had revenues of $6.7 billion in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2013.[3][4] The U.S. LLC had revenues of over $1 billion in the fiscal year ending December 31, 2012.[5] On May 2, 2013, Macquarie Group announced a net profit of $846.8 million for ordinary shareholders, up 17 percent since March of 2012.[6][4]

Read our Special Report by Brendan Fischer -- Corporate Expressways, Brought to You by Macquarie and Transurban -- on PRWatch.

For more, see the full corporate rap sheet on the outsourcer Macquarie here.

Transurban — Privatized Toll Roads....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-a-con-artist-scammed-the-u-s-government-from-the-shadows/

no lnx

Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly September 17, 2020

On October 23rd, Garrison Courtney will be sentenced in court after pleading guilty to an elaborate fraud scheme that raked in at least $4.4 million from federal contractors. The tale reads like a Hollywood script. Courtney had a relatively undistinguished career as a spokesperson for the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. But apparently he studied up on spycraft and, as his high school drama teacher suggested, “Sometimes I think I trained him too well as an actor.”

Courtney presented himself to unwitting private companies as a CIA agent who could steer contracts their way if they gave him a salary and an office. To back up his story, Courtney produced memos on the letterhead of various federal agencies spelling out authorization for what he was doing and containing the forged signatures of high-level government officials. He also recruited current and former military leaders to a task force he named “Alpha214” and used them as unwitting props to validate his claims.

Incredibly, the now 44-year-old built enough of a reputation to actually place himself inside the National Institutes of Health as a watchdog over the allocation of no-bid contracts. What you have at that point is the proverbial fox inside the henhouse. But by that time, the scheme had started to unravel.

Some of the heroes of this story were lawyers at the companies Courtney swindled who began asking why they weren’t being paid under the contracts they had signed.

Navid Keshavarz-Nia was another hero. He had done cybersecurity and technical counterintelligence work for the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. After several months of working with Courtney, he fired off a resignation letter from Alpha214, distributed to its members, and addressed Courtney directly: “It is clear that I have been deliberately deceived, lied to and criminally victimized by you based on your numerous false statements.” At about the same time, the Justice Department began an investigation.

It’s not hard to figure out how this fraud could work. You take a skilled con artist and add it to the feeding frenzy for government contracts. Combine that toxic mix with something my colleague Gilad Edelman wrote for the Washington Monthly three years ago.

While the number of federal employees has basically flatlined for a half-century, the government has ballooned if you include another group in your tally: private contractors. As the size and scope of federal programs grew, but the number of civil servants stayed fixed, that labor had to get done by someone. Congress’s answer has increasingly been to contract with the private sector…

Very few Americans realize that this exact trend—using contractors to hide the true size and cost of a government mission—is not even close to being limited to the military. It’s ubiquitous. There has been a de facto political cap on federal workers since the 1970s, and every administration since at least Jimmy Carter’s has used contractors to get around it. Bill Clinton, who announced that “the era of big government is over,” harvested the end of the Cold War to cut 400,000 federal jobs, mostly in defense. But big government was only over if you ignored the contracting workforce, which kept rising by the hundreds of thousands. The Bush administration took things to another level, as contracting morphed from a way to sneakily expand government to an ideological goal in itself.

There are lessons from this tale that go beyond the importance of holding an individual like Courtney accountable for his crimes. Here’s how Edleman summarized the situation:

The key is to transcend the false choice of big government versus small government. The real choice is between a transparent and relatively competent big government of civil servants and a dysfunctional shadow big government of private contractors.

Whenever our government operates in the shadows, exploitation by con artists like Courtney is possible.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/a-cruel-experiment-how-46-million-people-were-trapped-by-student-debt

The democratic principle of tuition-free education in our country pre-dates the founding of the United States. The first public primary education was offered in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, and its legislature created Harvard College the following year to make education available to all qualified students. Even before the Constitution was ratified, the Confederation Congress enacted the Land Ordinance of 1785, which required newly established townships in territories ceded by the British to devote a section of land for a public school. It also passed the Northwest Ordinances, which set out the guidelines for how the territories could become states. Among those guidelines was a requirement to establish public universities and a stipulation that “the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” After the nation declared independence, Thomas Jefferson argued for a formal education system funded through government taxation.

Jefferson’s vision took form over the course of more than a century, as state and local governments began creating primary schools and then high schools. The federal government became involved in higher education in the 19th century with the creation of land grant colleges and other institutions, used primarily to teach agriculture and education after the Civil War. These institutions created opportunities for people who had long been locked out of the learning process, including formerly enslaved African Americans and impoverished people of all races.

State universities and colleges rapidly expanded as well. By the middle of the 20th century, low-cost or tuition-free education was available in many American states. After the Second World War, the federal government once again turned to education to promote opportunities for its citizens and economic growth for all. The G.I. Bill paid educational expenses for 8 million people, without regard to individual wealth, which helped create a robust middle class and contributed to the vibrant growth economy of the 1950s and 1960s. While those opportunities were still denied to many people as the result of racism, efforts were underway to improve educational access for people of color.

The Reagan era ushered in a belief that government programs, including education, stood in the way of people’s dreams and should be severely cut back. Public goods came to be seen as investments, ones that were purely economic in nature. For these reasons, among others, a nation that had expanded publicly funded education for centuries decided to reverse course. Instead of funding higher education on the principle that it benefits us all, the country began shifting the cost to individual students. in the 1950s, as part of the National Defense Education Act, student loans were created as an experiment in social engineering. Concerned about competition with the Soviet Union, policymakers wanted to increase students’ capabilities in math and sciences. To do that, the country needed more teachers. So, lawmakers offered loans to college students, with the opportunity to have half the loan canceled after 10 years if they became teachers.

The experiment failed. Researchers have not been able to prove that the student loan program led more people to become teachers, despite multiple attempts to do so. The experiment was also cruel. Over the years, the student loan program was expanded, with the claim that a student’s personal investment in their education was an “investment” that would pay off in higher wages. Banks and other private lenders were brought into the process and given considerable incentives and subsidies to issue student loans, without considering the burden being imposed on the student. This financial opportunity was given to banking interests that were already wealthy, with little thought of the resulting damage to an economically sustainable future.

Proponents of financializing the cost of higher education argued that it was cheaper to lend money to students than it was for federal and state governments to provide grants for their education, even after paying subsidies to the private sector for their loans. An entire industry grew up around this process. State and nonprofit guaranty agencies were created to insure the loans. These agencies got paid, no matter what: when loans were issued, when loans became delinquent, when borrowers defaulted, and when they collected on defaulted loans.

In response, most states created guaranty agencies so they could make money from people who needed to borrow to pay for ever-increasing tuitions and fees.Now, states had an extra incentive to cut funding for public higher education. Not only would they save on expenditures, but they could increase the need for students to borrow, which increased their revenue. In many cases, these guaranty agencies don’t handle the loans themselves. They pass the work on to private debt collectors who take collection fees and are aggressive in their handling of cases.

The system took on a life of its own. By the mid-1990s, student loans had surpassed grants in funding students’ higher education. But a system built on debt financing only works if borrowers pay back their loans. That led Congress to make the system even crueler with the Bankruptcy Amendments and Federal Judgeship Act of 1984, which exempted student loans from bankruptcy proceedings and subjected borrowers to draconian collection tools. These tools included wage garnishment without a court order and the seizure of Social Security checks and tax refunds. The Clinton and Obama administrations attempted to lessen the burden slightly by allowing the federal government to lend directly to students while introducing income-based repayment options, but the system’s fundamental cruelty remains unchanged today.

It is time to recognize that the cruel experiment in financing higher education through student loans has failed. It has captured 46 million people and their families in a student loan trap, including people who received vocational training, and has weakened the financial strength of higher education. Inescapable debt is a major driver of social collapse. It has made the racial wealth gap worse and weakened the entire economy, as debt holders are prevented from buying homes or consumer goods, starting families, or opening new businesses. It’s time to restore funds for higher education and cancel student debt for the victims of this failed experiment.

Learn more at Freedom to Prosper.

Mary Green Swig is a senior fellow at the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University and co-founder of Freedom to Prosper.

Steven L. Swig is a senior fellow at the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University and co-founder of Freedom to Prosper.

David A. Bergeron is a senior fellow for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress. Bergeron previously served as the acting assistant secretary for postsecondary education at the U.S. Department of Education.

Richard “RJ” Eskow is senior adviser for health and economic justice at Social Security Works. He is also the host of The Zero Hour, a syndicated progressive radio and television program.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/kushner-and-bannon-team-up-to-privatize-the-war-in-afghanistan/

Kushner and Bannon Team Up to Privatize the War in Afghanistan

Blackwater’s Erik Prince was a shoo-in for the plan. But who is Stephen Feinberg?

By Tim Shorrock

JULY 14, 2017

no lnx

Kushner has been busy, and not only with the Russians. This week, amid the hoopla surrounding his meeting with a Moscow lawyer about the 2016 election, the The New York Times published an intriguing story about his role in a plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan.

Last Saturday, Trump adviser in chief Stephen Bannon, with Kushner’s backing, went to the Pentagon to arrange a discussion between Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and “two businessmen who profited from military contracting,” the Times reported. These weren’t ordinary contractors: They were Erik Prince, the notorious founder of Blackwater, the all-purpose mercenary army, and Stephen Feinberg, a New York financier who owns and controls DynCorp International, the largest US contractor in Afghanistan.

At the meeting (which neither Prince and Feinberg would confirm), they urged the Pentagon to turn the war over to what they call “private military units” who would fight for profit as an alternative to the Pentagon’s recent proposal to send thousands more US military troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. To their apparent disappointment, Mattis, the Times reported, “listened politely” to their audacious proposal, but “declined to include the outside strategies” in a review of Afghanistan policy that is being led in the White House by Trump’s national-security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.

The Times story screamed conflict of interest. Prince, as most Americans know, cut his mercenary teeth sending his private army into Afghanistan with the CIA shortly after 9/11. He then became persona non grata in the US government after contractors under his command killed dozens of civilians in Iraq. But after selling his company and moving on to organize a private army for the United Arab Emirates, he became a key adviser to Trump on military issues. In an interview with Bannon’s Brietbart News a day after his Pentagon meeting, he spelled out his proposals.

To be sure, the war in Afghanistan, particularly logistics and surveillance operations, is already heavily contracted, as I’ve documented here over the years. But under Prince’s approach, the actual fighting would be done by mercenaries, presumably in his employ. The United States “would see CIA, special operators, and contractors working with Afghan forces to target terrorists,” he told Breitbart.“I say go back to the model that worked, for a couple hundred years in the region, by the East India company,which used professional Western soldiers who were contracted and lived with trained with and when necessary fought with their local counterparts.”

On Thursday, Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s deputy assistant for national-security affairs, seemed to endorse the proposals when he was asked about the Mattis meeting in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

“It’s not about bilking the government,” he said. “It’s about the opposite. It’s about saving taxpayer money. It’s about creating indigenous capacity.” Turning to Prince himself, Gorka had the highest praise. “This is man who hires former operators [from] a first-tier Special Operations Force, retired individuals.” They will go to Afghanistan “not to go and fight instead of somebody else, but to help the Afghans, to help local indigenous forces to protect their own territories,” he said. “So this is a cost-cutting venture. We’ve opened the door here at the White House for outside ideas because the last 16 years have been disastrous.”

Feinberg’s expertise is much broader: He helps provide the capital that feeds the military-contracting industry. Through Cerberus Capital Management LP, the $30 billion private-equity firm he co-founded in 1992, Feinberg has acquired dozens of companies engaged in military and intelligence operations. As Bloomberg News reported in a detailed profile last February, “Feinberg has bought companies that refuel spy planes, train Green Berets, make sniper rifles and watch America’s foes from space.He’s handed out jobs, lobbying contracts and campaign cash to some of the most powerful people in the nation’s capital.”

Unlike Prince, however, he, is virtually unknown to the American public, and likes to keep it that way. For those who have never heard of him, here’s a snapshot of who he is, the significance of his private-equity industry, and how he and other national-security investors could benefit in the event that Mattis changes his mind and decides to send Blackwater—or its latest incarnation—back into Afghanistan.

Feinberg first came to public attention last February, after Cerberus informed investors that he might be appointed to a high-level position in the Trump administration that would require him to provide “voluminous information” about conflict-of-interest issues.Trump, it turned out, wanted Feinberg to lead a “broad review” of US intelligence agencies, and was also considering him for top spots at the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security.

Feinberg got in the door in part because he is a close friend of Bannon’s,who is notorious for his proposals to destroy “the administrative state” by privatizing or eliminating essential public services. During the 2016 campaign, Feinberg was part of a group of private-equity and venture-capital investors who advised Trump and became his “staunchest defenders” during the race, according to a Wall Street Journal report last November. Among them were Wilbur Ross, the chairman of WL Ross & Co., who is now secretary of commerce, and billionaire Peter Thiel, the co-founder of intelligence contractor Palantir Technologies Inc.

But after Feinberg’s name was floated to lead his review of intelligence, Trump got pushback from US officials who feared his involvement would “could curtail their independence and reduce the flow of information that contradicts the president’s worldview,” the Times reported. Meanwhile, lawmakers got nervous; at a Senate hearing in late February, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), said she was concerned that “an individual who runs a private equity firm” was being considered to review intelligence for Trump.

So Feinberg’s name quickly disappeared—until last week. Now, it appears that Trump has given the financier the green light to operate on his own, with help from Bannon and Kushner. It’s a two-front press, with Prince selling his mercenary interests and Feinberg his visions for his private-equity industry.

As US military and intelligence operations have been privatized over the past 15 years, the companies that work for the government have becoming increasingly reliant on deep-pocketed investors with strong ties to the Pentagon and the 16 agencies that make up the “intelligence community,” or IC.

Enter private equity. With their extensive connections to current and past national-security officials, and with access to huge pools of private capital that invest in their funds, private-equity firms have become de facto managers of the contracting industry. Their power is magnified by the huge number of mergers and acquisitions in recent years.

In the world of spying and surveillance, these deals have led to an incredible concentration in the industry, with five corporations now employing about 80 percent of all intelligence contractors. Many of these were reshaped, and owe their current market power, to private-equity funds such as the granddaddy of national-security investing, the Washington-based Carlyle Group.

Carlyle was led for many years by Frank Carlucci, a former deputy director of the CIA, who was a pioneer in the early years of privatized intelligence. Over a period of about 10 years, it bought (and then sold) many top contractors. Until recently, it owned a majority share of Booz Allen Hamilton, a key NSA contractor and a key adviser to the IC with extensive contracts in most major agencies in civilian and defense intelligence.

Another fund, Veritas Capital, sold DynCorp to Cerberus in 2010 and has relied for its advice on retired generals Barry R. McCaffrey and Anthony C. Zinni as well as Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state in the Bush administration. More recently, DC Capital Partners, an offshoot of Veritas, has become a key investor in intelligence with the purchase of military-intelligence contractor Michael Baker International. Its advisers include former NSA Director Michael V. Hayden.

Feinberg’s Cerberus is best known for its Republican executives, such as former vice president Dan Quayle and John Snow, who was George W. Bush’s treasury secretary. Quayle got his start as a top Cerberus executive during the 1990s buying and selling “distressed assets”—also known as bankrupt companies—in Asia. More recently, Quayle and Snow have been managing Cerberus’s investments in European property debt.

In the arena of national security, Feinberg’s firm has cultivated ties with some of the most established names in intelligence. One of them, according to the Bloomberg profile mentioned earlier, is Leon Panetta, who was President Obama’s CIA directorand “an adviser to Cerberus on security and intelligence matters.” Another is Michael Morell, the CIA’s deputy director under Obama who worked for Feinberg for a time after he retired in 2013, also according to Bloomberg.

So it’s not surprising that Feinberg’s pitch to Mattis this month was broader than Prince’s. His plan, reported the Times, “would give the C.I.A. control over operations in Afghanistan, which would be carried out by paramilitary units and hence subject to less oversight than the military, according to a person briefed on it.”

And then there’s DynCorp, the centerpiece of Cerberus’s huge investments in national security; few companies are as well positioned for the Trump presidency. DynCorp is heavily involved in all aspects of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for years has been engaged in military and intelligence operations, including flying planes for the drug wars in Central America, operating surveillance aircraft for the Afghan military, and training US-backed armies in Iraq and Liberia. It’s also much bigger than Blackwater ever was: In 2015, it was awarded a $100 million contract by the US Army to provide “advisory, training and mentoring services” to Afghanistan’s national army and police (Trump’s cutbacks at the State Department, however, have cut into its earnings in recent months).

Providing private warriors would not be the only function for Feinberg’s companies, however. Trump, for example, has said he is pushing the Pentagon to create “safe zones” in Syria, where US military forces and civilians from the US Agency for International Development would “protect” Syrians fleeing from the war. This plan has yet to come to fruition, but could be rolled out after the US and Russia organize their cooperative relationship in Syria announced by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson after Trump’s recent meeting in Germany with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

This is exactly the kind of operation DynCorp is experienced in—and why it’s a major player in the International Stability Operations Association, the lobbying arm of the private-security industry. “DynCorp is a highly successful provider of critical support to military and civilian government institutions, and also have important commercial business in aviation, infrastructure development, security and logistics,” the company’s description claims on the ISOA website.

Feinberg, if he is successful in pressing Mattis, would be in a perfect position to take advantage of these actions, which were once called “nation-building” but after the Iraq War were renamed “stability operations.” But whether Mattis goes along is another question. As the Times noted, “while Mr. Mattis believes that Mr. Prince’s concept of relying on private armies in Afghanistan goes too far, he supported using contractors for limited, specific tasks when he was the four-star commander of the Pentagon’s Central Command.”

So, even with business as usual, Feinberg could find an angle.

Tim ShorrockTWITTERTim Shorrock, who has been reporting on Korea for The Nation since 1983, is a Washington, D.C.–based journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.

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grift based on free mkt gubmint bad BS

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-says-he-didnt-approve-of-border-wall-project-but-these-key-players-bragged-of-his-approval

After Steve Bannon’s arrest on Thursday, Donald Trump tried to put a Grand Canyon-sized gap between himself and the “We Build The Wall” border scheme. Bannon, Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato, and Timothy Shea were indicted on counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The federal indictment says the crew pilfered “hundreds of thousands of dollars” and a Bannon-controlled nonprofit received more than $1 million in funds.

The federal government is seeking to take possession of the fraudulently purchased items, like the flashy boat Kolfage purchased and used in recent “Trumptilla” boat parades. Incredibly enough, Bannon and Kolfage recorded a video promoting their scam fund and folks, you are not going to believe this—Bannon actually jokes they are filming in Saint-Tropez in southern France before adding: “We are on the million dollar yacht of Brian Kolfage. Brian Kolfage, he took all that money from Build The Wall.” Kolfage then lets out an awkward laugh. Watch them joke about the fraud below. You cannot make this up.

[twt mma] after you collect yourself, watch the video below this because it just keeps getting better. First up, let’s revisit Trump’s statement trying to put daylight between himself and the We Build The Wall project. He repeatedly says he “didn’t like it” and thought it was “showboating and maybe looking for funds.” In a stumbling response, he repeatedly said he never approved of the project and Bannon aside, that he didn’t know anyone involved. As you’ll see below, most of the folks involved in the project said otherwise.

Let’s listen to former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has been described as a “racist traveling con man” because of his history of helping cities enact racist laws and then billing them to represent them in court cases they inevitably lose.

[vid: t i feel bad about bannon charges]

kobach is legal counsel for We Build The Wall, because of course he is, and he recorded an “interview” with Jennifer Lawrence, who is also listed on the We Build The Wall website as the communications director for the organization. Listen to Kobach describe his conversation with Donald Trump and brag that Trump said: “I want the media to know this project has my blessing.”

It should be noted that just before Bannon’s arrest on Thursday morning byfederal postal inspectors on a yacht off the coast of Connecticut, federal investigators were also serving a warrant on Lawrence and another associate, Dustin Stockton. The pair told CNN that “heavily armed federal agents” served the warrant and confiscated their cell phones.

No doubt, Kobach must be sweating. Going after lower-level employees is a sure sign they’re angling for bigger fish. And while Kobach bragged about Trump’s full-throated approval, he wasn’t alone. Lexi Churchill of ProPublica found other examples claiming Trump’s full endorsement. Amanda Shea, wife of the recently indicted Timothy Shea, shared a photo of the crew with Donald Trump in August 2019, with a caption saying: “A summer of winning came to a high note in the Hamptons. I had the absolute pleasure and honor of spending time with President Trump who had a lot of questions about the wall We The People built through We Build The Wall. He was impressed, but more importantly, incredibly personable and easy to talk to. I forgot that I was speaking with one of the most powerful men in the world.”

Shea also touted the meeting on Twitter.

Churchill also found an interview Kolfage did with The Gateway Pundit in which Kolfage bragged of Trump’s support, saying: “President Trump loves what we are doing.”

And wherever a right-wing grift exists, you know Junior isn’t far behind. Of course he promoted the wall and congratulated Kolfage on “[t]his is private enterprise at its finest. Doing it better, faster, cheaper than anything else. What you guys are doing is amazing.”

Trump’s Acting Homeland Security Director Chad Wolf, who a federal court ruled is illegally serving in the role, called the group’s work a “game changer” and said he “welcomed” their efforts.

So it would seem this is another in a long list of lies from Donald Trump. He welcomed this group’s efforts right up until ProPublica reported on the shoddy construction of the privately built wall, which was in danger of falling over. Nevertheless, the contractor, Fisher Industries, was awarded a massive government contract to build Trump’s wall and Trump reportedly “personally and repeatedly” intervened to make sure Fisher was awarded the project.

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8/20 see esper on pvt mil rx? // mar-a-lago crony in VA GRIFT? extraction

an 220

trump endorsed a risky antidepressant for veterans. Lawmakers want to know if his **Mar-a-Lago pals** had a stake in the drugmaker

Isaac Arnsdorf / ProPublicaFebruary 27, 2020

House Democrats requested emails and financial records as they investigate why the president told the VA to “corner the market” on a Johnson & Johnson drug.

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DN attacks by kochs go back to 1971

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/8/19/usps_louis_dejoy_:{privatization}:

After massive public outcry against cuts to mail service ahead of November’s election, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has announced he will suspend changes to the U.S. Postal Service until after the election, when a record number of voters are expected to cast ballots by mail. President Trump has admitted he’s working to undermine the USPS in order to make it harder to vote by mail in November. We speak with Lisa Graves, executive director of the policy research group True North Research, who says Louis DeJoy is “the most partisan person, in 100 years at least, to head the Postal Service” and warns that U.S. democracy is at stake. “We need to really hold this Postal Service accountable...

:{:{}:

Lisa Graves, but can you lay out what’s going on and the deep concern that, yes, Louis DeJoy, who has, with his wife, something like $75 million to $100 million invested in competitors and contractors to the U.S. Postal Service, that already major changes have taken place? They’re just revoking the ones that were leading up to the election, though they say they’ll introduce them right after.

LISA GRAVES: Well, that’s right, Amy. And I think that we’re at a true crisis point in terms of our democracy and with our Postal Service. And that’s because we have the most partisan person, in a hundred years at least, to head the Postal Service, in Louis DeJoy, who has deep financial conflicts and deep personal ties to President Trump. This is also being pushed forward by Mike Duncan, who was a major fundraiser for Mitch McConnell for the Senate Leadership Fundand is aright-wing partisan who helped stand up American Crossroads, and also at the instigation, in essence, of Steve Mnuchin, who has tried to push additional pressure on the Postal Service, in essence, in my view, to accomplish what really is Charles Koch’s long-term goal of privatizing our Postal Service. So, we have a deep crisis in our country.

The announcement by the postmaster does not reverse the things that have already happened, that he’s already implemented, including the removal of many mail sorting machines. And so, we need to really hold this Postal Service accountable. Actually, I think Louis DeJoy needs to be removed. And we need to reform the Postal Service so we do not have two of the most partisan men ever at the helm of our Postal Service.

That Postal Service belongs to us, even though Charles Koch, as I documented with In the Public Interest and Bold ReThink, that organization has been targeted by Charles Koch for privatization since the 1970s. So, I’m hoping that the members of Congress will respond to citizens who are clamoring to protect our Postal Service, make sure we get our ballots on time, make sure we get medicines on time and checks on time, and really reform the Postal Service and get it the money it needs to survive and thrive in this corona crisis.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Lisa Graves, in the few minutes we have left, could you talk a little bit more about this hidden effort by Charles Koch to privatize the Postal Service, that has gone on almost unknown by most Americans for so long?

LISA GRAVES: Yes, I was really surprised that he really began staking the men, urging for the Postal Service to be privatized in the 1970s. And when he became the biggest funder for the Libertarian Party in 1976, its platform expressly called for the abolition of the Postal Service. Then, in 1980, when his brother ran for vice president, the Libertarian Party also called for the abolition of the Postal Service. Then he helped to stand up, with the Reagan administration, a privatization commission, with his right-hand man on it, which again called for abolition of the Postal Service.

And then they brought on board to Citizens for a Sound Economy, which is now Americans for Prosperity, the leading advocate of privatizing the Postal Service, who then George W. Bush put on the Board of Governors of the Postal Service in 2003. And that man, James Miller, helped push through the terrible law in 2006 that saddled the Postal Service with unprecedented debt to pay for decades of future retiree health benefits. And that’s the debt that has really hampered the Postal Service in its ability to have a better financial position, and it also limited the Postal Service from opening banks and offering banking services, as well as increasing the rates of first-class mail beyond a penny a year. And so, that really throttled the Postal Service. And that’s the long-term cause to basically prepare it for privatization, which is Charles Koch’s longtime goal.

AMY GOODMAN: Last minute, also, already, the effect — right now the Department of Veterans Affairs has been forced to find other ways to ship mail-order prescriptions to vets all over this country. And it’s not only vets. So many people rely on the Postal Service just to get medicine.

LISA GRAVES: Yes, it’s a true crisis. And I think that if Louis DeJoy thinks that he can issue a press statement and walk away from the damage he’s caused, he’s wrong. The American people are not going to tolerate the destruction of our Postal Service. Millions of Americans rely on it, in small cities and big towns, for medicines and checks. And we need it to work properly. We need it fully funded. We need it to have coronavirus relief just like other businesses and entities in America.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, who Charles Koch is?

LISA GRAVES: Charles Koch is one of the richest men in the world. He’s one of the richest men in America. And he leads Koch Industries, which is one of the largest privately held corporations in the world, which has a long record of using its funds to advance his political causes.

AMY GOODMAN: Were you surprised that the Postal Service turned around to the extent it did yesterday? I mean, we’re talking about massive outcry. Even Donald Trump, whose bidding DeJoy was doing, tweeted out, ”SAVE THE POST OFFICE!”

LISA GRAVES: Yeah, they’re clearly hearing the heat. So, the question, as Nancy Pelosi said, is: Will they reverse the things that have happened, not just stop doing it? Stopping it, we already see the damage done. The question is, a true reversal to the status quo before Louis DeJoy became the postmaster general this summer.

AMY GOODMAN: Lisa Graves, we want to thank you so much for being with us. And we have to stop saying November is the election, because people who vote by mail are voting in the next weeks, and that goes on for more than a month. Lisa Graves, executive director of the policy research group True North, with a new report we’ll link to, “The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service.”

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aha pseudo-populism trashes expertise (of science and gubmint), free mkt says all gov't inept, the only real expert is pvt biz/accounting consultant, which lead to more hollowing out: mck wants to keep all data propietary so can sell to mult gov't agy, HENCE EXTRACTION

death spiral, pro pub 720:

Given that McKinsey consultants operate as advisers, with government officials charged with making final decisions, it can be hard to identify the firm’s responsibility for any given decision. But the firm’s government work has been steadily rising in the wake of a multidecade hollowing out of government (a trend McKinsey has promoted and ridden). Today, that increasingly means that if you examine the government’s response to the pandemic, you’re likely to find McKinsey’s fingerprints.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/us-corporations-a-driving-force-behind-unprecedented-wave-of-global-land-privatization-report/

a study released Tuesday by the Oakland Institute details an “unprecedented wave of privatization of natural resources that is underway around the world”—one that is largely being driven by the United States and its allies.

According to the progressive think tank’s report (pdf), “Driving Dispossession: The Global Push to Unlock the Economic Potential of Land,” governments around the world—particularly in developing countries—are often put under pressure by financial institutions and Western agencies to open up land for so-called “productive use” by miners, agribusiness interests, and other corporate entities intent on exploiting natural resources for profit.

The U.S. in particular, the report says, is a “key player in an unfettered offensive to privatize land around the world.”

With deforestation and fossil fuel extraction helping to fuel the climate crisis, governments are being pushed in a direction that’s “just the opposite of the drastic shift we need to win the struggle against climate change,” Frederic Mousseau, policy director of the Oakland Institute and lead author of the report, said in a statement.

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“Most of the land on our planet, especially in the Global South, is public land or land held under customary tenure systems [and] is seen as an obstacle to exploitation and economic growth,” Mousseau said.

The Oakland Institute included in its report six case studies in Ukraine, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Zambia, Papua New Guinea, and Brazil, finding that global land privatization is often directly driven by U.S. interests.

[twt]

zambia has been affected by what the Institute calls a recent “surge of American and European startups attempting to apply blockchain technology to land registries,” referring to the digital ledger created for Bitcoin.

The Zambiangovernment is partnering with Medici Land Governance (MLG), a blockchain company and subsidiary of the U.S. online retailer Overstock.com, to assist with land registration and titling. According to former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, the use of blockchain “will help unlock trillions of dollars in global mineral reserves that are inaccessible due to unclear land governance systems.”

In Sri Lanka, a U.S. government entity known as the Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC) approved a five-year compact for the country in 2019, offering the Sri Lankan government $480 million to map and digitize public lands in order to “promote land transactions that could stimulate investment and increase its use as an economic asset.”

“The proposed MCC compact would shift control of millions of hectares away from the state towards private interests,” the report says, and was proposed by a U.S. entity formed in 2002 by Congress with the stated goal of “reducing poverty through growth.”

“In practice, poverty alleviation has taken a back seat to promoting private sector growth,” the report continues. “This has translated to countries shifting their policies in adherence to a neoliberal economic framework—including the privatization and commodification of land—in exchange for substantial financial grants.”

MCC compacts throughout Africa have “allowed investors to acquire land at bargain prices to facilitate large-scale industrial agriculture at the expense of smallholder farmers,” the Oakland Institute added.

The study also points to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s aggressive push to assume control of Indigenous territories in the Amazon Rainforest, appointing a member of one the country’s most powerful agribusiness families to head the Ministry of Agriculture. Illegal land invasions and massive fires driven by agriculture and mining interests have threatened Indigenous people while contributing to deforestation and the climate crisis.

As the Institute published the report while the Covid-19 pandemic is upending the global economy, the report points out that “returning to normal is not an option.”

Instead, the economic crisis “must be used as a catalyst to address the systematic issues surrounding the rampant overexploitation of natural resources that has driven the climate crisis to its current state.”

Rather than erasing local governance and negating individual autonomy, governments must instead build systems that incorporate a diversity of ownership and tenure systems, and focus on a development path that serves the people instead of one that takes the land away from them for corporate profits.”

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see betsy no waste crisis // katrina?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/besty-devos-denounced-for-new-craven-public-school-privatization-scheme

with the Trump administration planning to demand that Congress devote a large chunk of the state and local education funding in the next Covid-19 relief package to a new grant program for private and religious schools, the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers on Thursday accused Education Secretary Betsy DeVos of attempting to exploit the pandemic to advance her privatization agenda.

“It is telling that, after spending more than three years doing nothing to help the public schools that 90 percent of children attend, Betsy DeVos races to divert resources into private hands 48 hours after the Supreme Court’s decision in Espinoza,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement, referring to the high court’s ruling Tuesday that religious schools cannot be excluded from taxpayer aid programs.

“With our country dealing with a pandemic, an economic recession, and structural racism, she’s spied an opening to exploit this crisis to resuscitate her failed agenda,” said Weingarten. “And it’s especially sickening that, in the middle of a national reckoning over race, when poor schools are in desperate need of funds to reopen safely, DeVos hijacks the anniversary of the Civil Rights Act to shift support away from where it’s needed most.”

“DeVos’ craven attempts to divide and privatize would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high,” Weingarten added.

mcClatchy reported Thursday that the Trump administration intends to ask Congress “for a ‘one-time, emergency appropriation’ for a new grant proposal” that would “be provided to states to distribute to nonprofit institutions that disburse scholarships to qualified students who want to attend non-public schools.”

“The White House is seeking to have 10% of the amount that Congress approves for state and local educational agencies set aside for the grants,” according to McClatchy. “Trump will also seek approval of $5 billion in federal tax credits for businesses and individuals who donate to the scholarship programs.”

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, warned in a statement Thursday that “Secretary DeVos and President Trump are using this pandemic as an excuse to push an ideological privatization agenda that would divert much-needed funds away from our public schools that serve approximately 90% of students across the country.”

“Right now, our public education system is facing unprecedented challenges—public schools are scrambling to implement safety protocols with limited funds, millions of education jobs are on the line due to looming budget shortfalls, and families across the country are struggling with a chaotic, uncertain reality,” Murray said.

“On the anniversary of Civil Rights Act of 1964, it’s also important to note the pandemic has exacerbated severe racial inequities that have long existed in our education system,” the Washington Democrat continued. “If Republicans have any sincere interest in addressing these inequities, they should show it by working with Democrats to invest in public education and address systemic racism rather than siphoning resources away when they’re needed more than ever.”

never waste a crisis: disaster capitalism poster child

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/betsy-devos-openly-admits-shes-using-the-pandemic-to-further-her-private-school-choice-agenda/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/obama-closed-an-agency-that-accredited-a-university-with-no-faculty-or-students-then-betsy-devos-saved-it/

no lnx

Obama closed an agency that accredited a ‘university’ with no faculty or students. Then Betsy DeVos saved it

Written by Daily Kos February 16, 2020

If you have never heard of Reagan National University, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, you’re not alone. But like many small colleges you’ve never heard of, this one boasted (at least until this month) full accreditation as sanctioned by the federal government.

There’s just one small problem.

By all appearances, at present it has no students, no faculty and no classrooms.

As an investigation for USA Today by Chris Quintana and Shelly Conlon found, this institution of higher learning was accredited by the Department of Education under the auspices of Trump-appointed Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. Or more precisely, it was accredited by an “approved” and sanctioned agency of DOE with a track record so dismal that, back in the good old days (known as the “Obama administration”) when the federal government was actually being run by competent people who worked for the interests of American ciitizens, it had been summarily shuttered and put out to pasture.

The agency in question, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges & Schools, has a history of approving questionable colleges, with devastating consequences. It accredited ITT Tech, Corinthian Colleges and Brightwood College, massive for-profit universities whose sudden closures last decade left thousands of students without degrees and undermined the value of the education of those who did graduate. Those closures led President Barack Obama’s Education Department to strip ACICS’ powers in 2016.

After a Federal Judge ruled that the Obama Administration had failed to consider a substantial number of documents that ACICS had submitted to appeal its closure, DOE was ordered to reconsider its decision, which it did. DOE career employees again found that ACICS failed to meet appropriate standards in its accreditation process.

But by then Trump acolyte and billionaire-by-marriage Betsy DeVos, who, following standard Trump-appointee procedure, was proceeding to reverse every single action taken by the prior administration, no matter how sensible or helpful to the American people, had begun to remake the Department. DeVos reinstated the ACICS agency despite its horrid past record of promoting colleges that exist solely to rip off American students (usually poorer ones and disproportionately students of color).

Since its short-lived disbandment, the agency had lost many colleges as “members” and, as Quintana and Conlon note, lost their “membership fees” as well. It needed money, and fast. So, apparently it was time for some quick calls to those “institutes of higher learning” out there.

Accreditation is the key to obtaining federal grant and loan money for students who want to attend college. Of course, that money then goes straight to the “accredited” college. But as USA Today found out, “Reagan National University” is a very strange college. To begin with, when the reporters attempted to learn more about the college itself, its website links were all dead. They still are.

Adding further to the mystery, “[n]o students or graduates could be found on LinkedIn or Facebook.”

When USA Today tried to contact faculty from this so-called college, they could find none. People whose names were listed on the “college’s” website swore they’d never heard of or taught at Reagan National University. Other names had absolutely no internet history, something quite unusual for academics. Phone calls to the University ended in curtly disconnected lines. Attempts to physically visit the school were similarly unavailing, yielding locked offices. Peering through the window, a vacuum cleaner and some insulation were visible.

As the USA Today investigation found, ACICS specializes in accrediting “for profit” colleges, the same ones notorious for ripping off students with phony promises of inflated job prospects and providing worthless degrees. But since the Obama administration shut it down, its members have dwindled from 290 in 2016 to 63 at present. ACICS told USA Today that Reagan had somehow met its stringent accreditation standards, but it refused to provide any details on how that may have occurred.

Michelle Edwards, CEO and president of ACICS, defended the council’s accreditation process in emails this month to USA TODAY. ACICS first accredited Reagan in 2017, though Edwards said the university had to address some areas where it was initially out of compliance. She declined to say what those areas were.

But hey, ACICS pulled out all the stops to get Reagan National U. up to snuff! In January 2019, it sent an (apparently) sternly worded letter to its accredited so-called college, informing Reagan that its job placement rate was a whopping 0%. Of course, the agency’s standard procedure provided a window of time for an institution to “show cause” why its accreditation should not be pulled in such an instance. For Reagan, that “window” expired in May, 2019. According to the agency CEO, “Reagan” provided some sort of satisfactory information to ACICS (we’re not told what that was), and the “show cause” order was lifted.

But in December, 2019, ACICS really laid the hammer down.

This time accreditors raised concerns about the language in a course catalog and the university’s grading system. It also hinted at more existential issues, such as a lack of evidence of a qualified person to run the business programs. And the computer science program didn’t have the materials necessary to teach.

It’s not clear who ACICS was talking to at “Reagan,” if they were actually talking to anyone at all. This entire shoddy episode reeks of either purposeful negligence or something worse. As Antoinette Flores, with the Center for American Progress who studies accreditation asks, how could this agency possibly have accredited a “school” with no faculty and no students?: “You accredited this institution. How did you miss this?”

In February of 2020, while USA Today was conducting its investigation, “Reagan National University” voluntarily withdrew its accreditation.

The USA Today investigation found something that provides a clue to exactly what “Reagan National University” is. It seems that in 2011, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement visited another questionable institution, called the “University of Northern Virginia” on “suspicions” that it was operating to exploit the issuance of visas through legal loopholes for foreign visitors rather than acting as an actual educational institution. That university was shut down by the state of Virginia because of its lack of accreditation in 2013, but popped up again, listing an address in South Dakota—the same address used by “Reagan National” in its corporate filings. It even listed the name of its agent as “Xianhua Fan”, seemingly the same name as Reagan’s president (in its business filings spelled as “Xuanhua Fan,” although the official “website” listed president of the University was a fellow named “Harold Harris”).

South Dakota, as the authors of the USA Today article point out, is probably not the ideal place to go to college: “State officials merely ask colleges whether an accrediting group has approved them — they don’t independently hold universities accountable.”

If it seems that all of this should have been obvious to ACICS, the agency DeVos stepped in to save, it should. The article describes the many criticisms and problems that agency has, including denial of recognition by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, a university-member body that sets stringent standards for accreditation.

But ultimately, as the article notes, this is all traceable back to DeVos and the Trump administration philosophy of rolling back every regulation in favor of business interests, no matter who is harmed in the process.

The education secretary wants to cut back the rules governing accreditation. Fewer regulations could allow colleges to implement new training programs swiftly to fill holes in the workforce, she says — an approach cheered by for-profit colleges like the ones accredited by ACICS.

Critics argue these rollbacks will make it easier for shoddy or predatory institutions to take advantage of students. They have pointed to the high-profile closures of several for-profit colleges over the past decade as a need for more regulations to protect students, rather than fewer.

What this all boils down to has nothing to do with learning or “education,” and everything to do with political campaign contributions from the “for-profit” college mill industry and lining the pockets of the investors that fund such scam schools. As noted by Jeff Bryant of the Campaign for America’s future,”The favors Trump and DeVos are granting to the for-profit college industry reflect the generosity of campaign contributions the sector has generally showered on Republicans, especially since the advent of the regulatory constrains issued in the Obama years.”

And whether those colleges actually have any faculty or students, or whether they even can provide degrees, is apparently not a major concern.

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One of our nation's most popular federal agencies is at-risk of being privatized by the Trump administration. In June 2018, the White House announced proposals to privatize the Postal Service. Now, with the current Postmaster General Megan Brennan announcing her departure effective January 2020 - the possibility is becoming increasingly more real.

With the imminent departure of the current Postmaster General, there is a growing danger that the Trump administration would jump at the opportunity to select someone to replace Brennan who is willing to take the initial steps towards privatization.

With the Postmaster General's wide powers to shape the mission of the USPS, Brennan's successor could hand over parts of the service to private, for-profit making corporations and prepare it for a wholesale sell-off.

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pvtize foreign policy?!

aha: expert // to norms (eg civ servent amb maie yovanovich masha

trump /bannon calls himself a disruptor (like the clint e rogue cop who does not play by rulebook and gets his own brand of justice);

some talk early on that we need to codify into law;

in part djt prolly broke them b/c he simply was to dumb or inexperienced to know they exist, or to understand they exist for a legit reason; another possibility is that they do not fit (we have never had a full on bizman prez before?)

aha: djt/bannon present as disruptor, but basically used elim or norms, experts and SOP for self-ish graft/power grab [perry and lev and igor do side deal anga]

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-rudy-giuliani-how-americas-mayor-became-trumps-grifter/

no lnx

The rise and fall of Rudy Giuliani: How ‘America’s mayor’ became Trump’s grifter

Written by The Washington Monthly November 18, 2019

Rudy Giuliani was a shoo-in for attorney general or secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in a nascent Trump administration. Not only was Giuliani “America’s Mayor” following his command of the situation on 9/11, he was a former federal prosecutor, presidential candidate, and an early validator—if late endorser—of Donald J. Trump.

Life looked pretty rosy for the ambitious pol, with a clear path to power and privilege, given his expertise.

He didn’t want the jobs proffered, however. He wanted something bigger.

Whether he was done with the law or just wanted something that approximated the power and prestige of the presidency, he postured and heavily lobbied to be Trump’s secretary of state. As the former mayor of America’s most important city, he was regularly in the company of foreign dignitaries and, of course, 9/11 gave him a global stage from which to show off his leadership skills.

But translating international experience and foreign hobnobbing into policy focused on America’s global role required diplomatic skill not often associated with New York moxie. It would have been a hard sell—even to a pliant Republican-dominated U.S. Senate. After all, John McCain—and even Lindsey Graham 1.0—were actively looking out for America’s national security interests back then.

Giuliani’s jones-ing to become America’s lead diplomat seemed to have more to do with a desire for his own publicly financed jet and private traveling press corps than any real interest or ability to negotiate long, hard hours toward solutions that required uncomfortable trade-offs. He wanted the position’s perks and platform more than the work—or the extraordinarily demanding work schedule that comes with the job.

Fast forward to 2019, and the Giuliani scorned by Jared Kushner has become the roiling Rudy who plays Donald Trump’s personal attorney on TV. Giuliani has never met a Sunday news show he doesn’t like. Trump has turned to this anti-matinee idol and put personal business and state policy in the hands of a freewheeling, out-of-control—and sometimes crazed—Giuliani. His uncanny ability to stay simultaneously both on message and off—yet claim to be reliably consistent and coherent—has allowed him to play rough in all positions of Trump’s political defense and remain untouched.

Until now.

Now he’s all lawyered up, as investigators in the U.S. House release State Department officials’ closed-door testimony implicating Giuliani in Trump’s move to withhold military aid from Ukraine unless it agreed to investigate Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Giuliani so desperately needed to play the globetrotting role of secretary of State that he got to become Trump’s “Shadow Secretary.” In that role, he used presidential proximity to guide America’s foreign activities, fire its diplomats, bully its allies, and bank on the nation’s sheer power to leverage lethal aid into forced foreign state-sponsored oppo research on 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.

Biden became the target of the externally run, illicitly operated Giuliani Shadow State Department, doing the Trump-Kushner-Pompeo trio’s dirty work while operating with Oval Office assurances that his free hand and opaque operation was guarded by attorney-client privilege. This questionable privilege was also supposed to protect Michael Cohen, Trump’s previous personal attorney. Cohen is now serving a prison sentence for doing Trump’s shadowy business.

A one-man, oversight-free, power-drenched Shadow State Department is a heady thing. Giuliani recognized that he no longer had to play by the same rules as a government agency. He could operate the way Betsy DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince, did with his paramilitary organization, Blackwater. Renamed Xe, Blackwater was a private entity conducting a contracted war, freed from the constraints of treaty obligations, multilateral engagement, long-standing bilateral relations, protocol, congressional oversight, budgetary limits, press access, or full transparency.

Giuliani was as free to disregard established foreign policy and practice as Prince’s locked-and-loaded organization was to end-run military rules of engagement.Bonus points: Giuliani also was able to profit as a free agent. Who was going to question his private authority when the imperial presidency, with its seemingly unchecked privilege, had his back and could dangle a potential blanket pardon?...

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trump-just-launched-a-stealth-attack-on-medicare/

no lnx many

Trump just launched a stealth attack on Medicare

Written by Diane Archer / Common Dreams October 7, 2019

Watch out, older Americans and people with disabilities! President Trump just announced a plan to give corporate health insurers more control over your health care. His new executive order calls for “market-based” pricing, which would drive up costs for everyone with Medicare, eviscerate traditional Medicare, andsteer more people into for-profit “Medicare Advantage” plans.

Seema Verma, the Trump appointee who heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), may not have warned Trump about the slew of government audits revealing that many Medicare Advantage plans pose “an imminent and serious risk to the health of… enrollees.” They also overcharge taxpayers to the tune of $10 billion a year.

In the last few years alone, CMS’ limited audits have highlighted major issues with Medicare Advantage plans. Reports from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and Government Accountability Office (GAO) have underscored these issues. They have recommended that CMS increase its oversight of Medicare Advantage plans and its enforcement efforts.

A Medicare Payment Advisory Commission report indicates that the problems with Medicare Advantage may be even more far-reaching than the government audits indicate. The Medicare Advantage plans have failed to turn over reliable and complete claims data, as required by law. Without this data, it’s not possible to know whether they are covering the health care services they are paid to provide or to oversee them to the extent necessary.

Last month, Senators Sherrod Brown, Amy Klobuchar, Chris Murphy, Richard Blumenthal, Bernie Sanders and Debbie Stabenow laid out several serious malfeasances by these corporate Medicare insurers—including UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, Cigna and Humana—in a detailed letter they sent to Verma.

The insurers’ wrongdoings are systematic. They are ongoing. They endanger the health and financial well-being of millions of people. They undermine the financial integrity of the Medicare program and harm the U.S. Treasury. Yet, to date, CMS has failed to develop, let alone execute, a plan to hold these insurers accountable for violating their legal obligations and to ensure their members get the health care to which they are entitled.

Tens of billions in overcharges are one big problem. Medicare Advantage plans have been overcharging the government for their services for many years now, by claiming that their members are in worse health than they actually are in order to increase payments. To make matters worse, they have refused to pay back the tens of billions in overpayments that the federal government has made to them. UnitedHealth successfully fought to keep the government from collecting this money.

Another major concern is that Medicare Advantage plans are failing to cover the care their members need and are entitled to. Government audits show that Medicare Advantage plans are inappropriately delaying and denying care and coverage to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of their members. This puts patients’ health and safety at risk. Thousands of people end up paying for care that should have been covered—or foregoing care altogether.

CMS has not named or flagged these corporate health plans on its Medicare website or notified people in any other way of plans with serious violations, as it had agreed to do at the recommendation of the Office of the Inspector General. So, people with Medicare are unaware when they enroll in a Medicare Advantage plan that the government has found to be jeopardizing the health and safety of its members. Instead, CMS continues to give four- and five-star ratings to some of these health plans. In the process, it misleads older adults and people with disabilities about their performance.

What’s more, CMS has found that a sizeable number of Medicare Advantage plans have for years issued highly inaccurate provider directories; and, the GAO has noted “concerns about ensuring enrollee access to care.” Many of these health plans have narrowed their provider networks. GAO suggests that it is not at all clear which of these Medicare Advantage plans have an adequate number and mix of health care providers in their networks.

To date, the Trump administration has been steering people into Medicare Advantage plans, without regard to their deficiencies. And, it has failed to provide people with Medicare with meaningful information about their health plan choices as required by law. It is on a reckless path, promoting the business interests of Medicare Advantage plans that violate the law over the health care needs of vulnerable Americans.

The administration and its congressional allies are playing a game of bait and switch with older adults and people with disabilities. They allow Medicare Advantage plans to lure people with benefits that traditional Medicare does not offer, such as dental care and transportation services to the doctor, without exposing their failings. The Trump administration’s goal is to fully privatize Medicare and shift more costs onto older and disabled Americans.

To be clear, Trump’s executive order does nothing to hold the Medicare Advantage plans accountable for their fraudulent overcharges or their inappropriate denials of care and coverage. Rather, it rewards them. It gives them even more discretion regarding the services they cover and the freedom to create new bells and whistles to lure in members. The health and financial well-being of older and disabled Americans hangs in the balance.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-trump-administration-is-sabotaging-veterans-access-to-health-care/

no lnx

The Trump Administration is sabotaging veterans’ access to health care

Written by Suzanne Gordon, Jasper Craven / Washington Monthly September 13, 2019

On June 6, the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs deployed seven staffers to five veterans’ hospitals across the country. Their goal: to monitor the rollout of a new law set to accelerate the outsourcing of hundreds of thousands of veterans served by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to private-sector providers.

But this critical monitoring work was actively undermined by officials inside the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). According to a House report obtained by the Washington Monthly, Congressional staff faced “coordinated and unprecedented obstruction” by national VA staff in these oversight efforts.

For months, lawmakers had been largely frozen out of efforts to build the programs and write the rules to implement this law, formally called the VA Mission Act, leading to widespread concern among both legislators and veterans’ advocacy groups. But in early June, when the staffers were able to exercise limited oversight to find out what was truly happening, their fears were confirmed. “VA did not adequately prepare facilities, providers, or veterans for the transition,” their report reads.

The VA Mission Act is widely considered the most significant—and ideologically motivated—veterans’ law in a generation. Passed by a GOP-controlled Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump, it established a sweeping new private sector healthcare program, the Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP) and granted the Veterans Affairs Secretary, Robert Wilkie, with wide latitude to set eligibility criteria that determines when veterans can use private-sector care.

The law garnered significant support from powerful healthcare interests, and savvy conservative veterans’ groups who have a great deal of influence in Trump’s Washington. But it was also supported by traditional veterans’ service organizations and some Democrats. This is largely because it expanded services to disabled veterans, but also because the final text contained stringent requirements that veterans could only be moved into private facilities for legitimate clinical needs, or if they faced burdensome wait or drive times at their nearest VHA clinic, assuaging the concerns about VA privatization. (Care inside the VHA, while often maligned in the media, is generally cheaper and better, with shorter wait times than what’s offered in the private sector.)

Still, Democrats and veteran advocates have criticized the Mission Act as a duplicitous drive toward privatization. Secretary Wilkie has insisted that it does no such thing, but he has largely left Congress in the dark as implementation has ramped up. In turn, tensions between the VA and the Hill have intensified. Over the last several months, Wilkie has sniped at House Democrats on Twitter, launched a broadside against the department’s public sector union (which was subsequently criticized by more than 100 lawmakers), and skipped an oversight and investigation hearing. In closed door meetings, congressional staff say VA officials have offered conflicting answers over the law’s cost and eligibility standards.

“Very little is being shared,” a congressional staffer told the Monthly. “VA will say one thing one week, and a different thing the next. The whole process is a shit show.”

Hill staffers hoped the committee’s site visits would bring some clarity, but they soon realized that the VA was trying to prevent them from happening all together. Its Office of Congressional and Legislative Affairs issued guidance to medical center staff that “congressional staff ‘shadowing’ medical center leaders or staff is not permitted;’” it required the staffers be escorted by a public affairs officer or other designee at the facilities; and it mandated that all questions be pre-cleared by national staff, or at least referred directly to them.

In the end, the VA blocked congressional staff from speaking to key employees at four of the five hospitals they visited. At one hospital, staff weren’t even allowed to venture beyond the hospital lobby.

During their visit to the VA’s medical center in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for instance, they were not allowed to meet with emergency management staff to discuss ongoing health and humanitarian work after Hurricane Maria. (Wilkie refuted the findings of the separate House report on Puerto Rico’s VA after NBC News wrote about it.)

Despite this obstructionism, Hill officials came away from the visits with a number of troubling findings. While they were denied access to VA’s new Decision Support Tool, a software program that is used by an authorized staff member to determine a veterans’ eligibility for private sector care, staff unearthed credible reports that the tool was malfunctioning. Specifically, the tool was slow, prone to crashing, didn’t list all community providers, and did not load eligibility data for the drive time standards.

According to the congressional report, these workarounds likely compromised “VA’s ability to ensure accurate eligibility.” One staffer bluntly acknowledged to the House committee: “I think we are sending more people to the community than we probably should be.”

This was a serious problem since, as the House report states,“community providers are ill-prepared to treat the high volume of veterans expected to be pushed to the private sector as a result of the Mission Act.” A VA spokeswoman said the department has since fixed the tool.

While the VA has already signed contracts with roughly 5,000 urgent care providers to treat veterans, House and Senate staffers said the VA’s Office of Community Care hasn’t provided Congress with the parameters or requirements of these and other contracts, despite multiple requests.

In response to questions from the Monthly, a VA spokeswoman insisted the “premise of your inquiry is false.” She pointed to a recent op-ed from Wilkie defending the Mission Act’s implementation. The spokeswoman further contended that it was House staffers, not the VA, who stopped engaging in MISSION implementation and oversight talks. A House staffer disputed this claim as “wholly inaccurate,” and said it was the VA that stopped giving them updates, beginning in June.

In many ways, these problems are eerily similar to what happened the last time lawmakers pushed veterans care into the private sector—through the VA Choice Act in 2014. That August, a scandal was exposed at a VA hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, where administrators were rigging scheduling data as part of a widespread effort to cover up wait times that averaged 115 days.

Immediate reform was called for in Congress, and a bipartisan agreement quickly emerged. The final package, called the Veteran’s Choice Program, allocated $10 billion to pay for private care and only $5 billion for the VA to hire more doctors and staff. An additional $1.3 billion was used to lease space at 27 facilities in 18 states to expand coverage options.

The act was billed as a three-year temporary measure, a band-aid that would last until more permanent improvements to the department’s capacity were achieved. But this work has never been completed. Instead, Washington has let the VA’s vacancies balloon to over 45,000.

Moreover, since its inception, Choice has been plagued by administrative failures that often complicated care for veterans. Many of these were carried out by two federal contractors tasked with scheduling appointments and coordinating medical records between the VA and private providers. In the first year of the Choice program, these two companies, Health Net Federal Services and TriWest, notched a 13 percent success rate in scheduling out-of-network appointments. The Inspector General later found that 82 percent of veterans who sought care through the Choice Act did not receive an appointment within the promised time frame. (TriWest has continued to coordinate private sector appointments under MISSION through a sprawling series of contracts worth more than $1 billion.)

TriWest’s performance seems to be similarly dysfunctional under the Mission Act.A VHA source told the Monthly that a large West Coast outpatient clinic has referred more than 600 veterans to the TriWest Community Care Network mental health care clinic since June. Nearly three months later, only 157 have received an appointment. Many of the rest have grown tired of waiting and have given up. Others have returned to the VA clinic because they couldn’t find another community provider.

Robert Anderson, a Vietnam veteran, has faced similar problems with TriWest in New Mexico. For three months now, Anderson says he has been seeking a second opinion on his back issues to little avail. “The outsourcing to Tri West is a joke,” Anderson told the Monthly. “They have called me no less than four times to ask the same questions about preparing an appointment time with the University of New Mexico health center.”

Worse yet, he added, “cutbacks have left the staffing of our medical center like a ghost town with vets coming and going but no one home really. The dental lab has probably 20 hygienists’ little rooms but only three staff for all the thousands of vets needing dental care … Vets are suffering and paying the price right now of privatization.”

The understaffing of departmental facilities combined with the outsourcing of care is quickly resulting in the gutting of the agency. Hospital directors are losing patients across the country. One medical director at a VHA facility in the South told the Monthly it was losing 20 to 30 percent of patients to the private sector.

This outsourcing not only pads the pockets of the private sector, but it can deeply disrupt the kind of care integration and coordination that has resulted in stellar patient outcomes at the VHA. As a nurse practitioner from a Northwest facility told the Monthly, precious time that could be spent on clinical care is now wasted trying to track down patient information from private sector doctors who have no incentive to provide it. This has resulted in massive backlogs—which, according to an August Inspector General Report, are set to “significantly increase” under Mission.

Taken together, the Trump administration is perpetuating a dangerous cycle to further the case for VA privatization. Veterans, now facing fewer clinical resources and delays in care, may themselves clamor under these conditions for the private sector as a seemingly better alternative. But privatization, as we are seeing, will ultimately lead to care that is more expensive, less accessible, and not tailored to the unique needs of those it’s supposed to serve.

Suzanne Gordon is the author of The Battle for Veterans’ Healthcare: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Policy Making and Patient Care and the forthcoming Wounds of War: How the VA Delivers Health, Healing, and Hope to the Nation’s Veterans.

Jasper Craven is a freelance reporter interested in overlooked policy changes at the local, state and federal levels. He has written for The Nation, Vermont Digger, The Boston Globe, and the Chicago Tribune, among other outlets.

Water Rights Group Calls on Newark Officials to Resist Privatization of City's Water Supply Amid Lead Crisis

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Residents of Osceola township are watching water levels in local streams drop drastically since Nestlé moved into town and started pumping their water to sell for massive profits. And a small group of local volunteers has taken Nestlé to court.

For years Nestlé has tried to crush this committed group of residents so it can pump even more water to sell at an eye-watering profit.

This dedicated group in Osceola has been locked in a two-year legal battle against Nestlé --but after mountains of legal challenges, the group is drowning in debt.

So they’ve asked for your help today Pat. The final decision on whether Nestlé can pump more water is right around the corner -- and if they can’t get some money to their lawyers soon, this fearless group risks losing everything to Nestlé.

Can you chip in $1 to keep Nestlé’s greedy hands off Osceola township’s precious water?

Right now, Nestlé is pumping 250 gallons of water a minute or more than 350,000 gallons every single day from Osceola Township for just $200 a year.

And in their battle to stop this outrageous water-grab, this tiny group of volunteers is over $100,000 in debt.

Their lawyers have fought tirelessly by their side, but they can’t continue without getting paid. Losing their lawyers now would leave them in debt with nothing to show for years of work against Nestlé, and that’s exactly what the mega-corporation wants.

But you can make sure their fight isn’t over yet. Nestlé has millions to throw at this court case, but this group of dedicated fighters in Osceola has you. With your donation today they can keep their lawyers and make sure they have the best legal team on hand in these last critical months so that Nestlé can’t pump more of their precious water.

raised 50K defense

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3. ProPublica also reported this week on how electronic monitoring devices such as ankle bracelets are driving defendants into debt. Private companies charge defendants hundreds of dollars a month to wear the surveillance devices. If people can’t pay, they may end up behind bars. In Illinois, lawmakers recently passed a bill that would require the Illinois Department of Corrections and the Prisoner Review Board to collect data on how electronic monitoring devices are being used and post that information publicly. Learn more about that in this story from WILL-Illinois Public Media.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/how-this-1971-memo-from-a-conservative-supreme-court-justice-infiltrated-every-institution-in-us-society-and-hoodwinked-american-citizens/

The powers-that-be have progressively neutered Americans politically. They brainwashed them into believing that the government was some third entity instead of the reality that it is we-the-people. This misguidance was a well-orchestrated attack by those who feared Americans were getting too smart, thus putting their wealth supremacy at risk.

The Powell Manifesto was instrumental in the hoodwinking of our citizens. They infiltrated every institution in our society, including schools, churches, and private sector entities. But most importantly it created purported think tanks like the Heritage Foundation that released studies that had the semblance of objectivity, reality, and gravitas that was all but a mirage.

In a recent rant on Politics Done Right, I pointed out that the Plutocracy intends that we see government as some abstract evil entity. Their intent is clear and systematic.

Convince Americans that the government is a separate entity.
They demonize the government by implying it is a separate entity and as such, are without concern that it will alienate we the people since in effect in people’s mind government is no longer we the people.
Make government so unbearably bad that people clamor toprivatize all government functions.

Please listen to the entire video.

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https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-the-government-from-offering-free-online-tax-filing-thank-turbotax

GUTTING THE IRS

Congress Is About to Ban the Government From Offering Free Online Tax Filing. Thank TurboTax.

A bill supported by Democrats and Republicans would make permanent a program that bars the IRS from ever developing its own online tax filing service.

ust in time for Tax Day, the for-profit tax preparation industry is about to realize one of its long-sought goals. Congressional Democrats and Republicans are moving to permanently bar the IRS from creating a free electronic tax filing system.

Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee, led by Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., passed the Taxpayer First Act, a wide-ranging bill making several administrative changes to the IRS that is sponsored by Reps. John Lewis, D-Ga., and Mike Kelly, R-Pa.

In one of its provisions, the bill makes it illegal for the IRS to create its own online system of tax filing. Companies like Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, and H&R Block have lobbied for years to block the IRS from creating such a system. If the tax agency created its own program, which would be similar to programs other developed countries have, it would threaten the industry’s profits.

“This could be a disaster. It could be the final nail in the coffin of the idea of the IRS ever being able to create its own program,” said Mandi Matlock, a tax attorney who does work for the National Consumer Law Center.

The Free File Alliance, a private industry group, says 70% of American taxpayers are eligible to file for free. Those taxpayers, who must make less than $66,000, have accessto free tax software provided by the companies. But just 3% of eligible U.S. taxpayers actually use the free program each year. Critics of the program say that companies use it as a cross-marketing tool to upsell paid products, that they have deliberately underpromoted the free option and that it leaves consumer data open to privacy breaches.

The congressional move would codify the status quo. Under an existing memorandum of understanding with the industry group, the IRS pledges not to create its own online filing system and, in exchange, the companies offer their free filing services to those below the income threshold.

Experts have long argued that the IRS has failed to make filing taxes as easy and cheap as it could be. In addition to a free system of online tax preparation and filing, the agency could provide people with pre-filled tax forms containing the salary data the agency already has, as ProPublica first reported on in 2013.

One member of the Free File Alliance explicitly told shareholders that the IRS “developing software or other systems to facilitate tax return preparation … may present a continued competitive threat to our business for the foreseeable future.”

The IRS’ deal with the Free File Alliance is regularly renegotiated and there have been repeated, bipartisan efforts in Congress to put the deal into law.

Those efforts have been fueled by hefty lobbying spending and campaign contributions by the industry. Intuit and H&R Block last year poured a combined $6.6 million into lobbying related to the IRS filing deal and other issues.Neal, who became Ways and Means chair this year after Democrats took control of the House, received $16,000 in contributions from Intuit and H&R Block in the last two election cycles.

Neal, who describes himself as a longtime champion of the existing Free File program, has argued that it would “would help low- and moderate-income taxpayers.”

Free File Alliance Executive Director Tim Hugo called it “a great idea when you can provide a great product — free tax returns — to Americans at no cost to the federal government.” An H&R Block spokesperson said the company believes “Free File should be the subject of ongoing improvement, and we are committed to working with all parties to strengthen and improve Free File on behalf of the American taxpayer.”

Spokespeople for Neal, Lewis and Kelly did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the provision. A companion Senate bill with the same provision has been introduced by Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore.

While efforts to make the IRS’ deal with the tax preparation industry permanent have fizzled in the past, critics are particularly worried this year. The Taxpayer First Act also includes a provision that would restrict the IRS’ use of private debt collectors to those above a certain income. A Wyden spokesperson said the current bill is a “bipartisan, bicameral compromise so it includes priorities of both chairmen and ranking members.” Wyden “supports giving the IRS the resources it needs to offer more services to taxpayers,” the spokesperson added

Trump’s HUD wants to expand flawed program that is ‘privatizing public housing’

It leaves vulnerable residents at the mercy of developers.

DANIELLE MCLEAN

FEB 27, 2019

https://thinkprogress.org/a-flawed-public-housing-program-leaves-vulnerable-residents-at-the-mercy-of-developers-66a0ee5b2321/

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pro pub 119

“Doubling Down”: With Private Care Push, Trump’s VA Bucks Lawmakers and Some Veterans Groups

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https://www.alternet.org/how-republicans-sold-out-veterans-health-care-and-wastefully-funneled-money-private-companies

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.It was supposed to give veterans a way around long wait times in the VA. But their average waits using the Choice Program were still longer than allowed by law, according to examinations by the VA inspector general and the Government Accountability Office. The watchdogs also found widespread blunders, such as booking a veteran in Idaho with a doctor in New York and telling a Florida veteran to see a specialist in California. Once, the VA referred a veteran to the Choice Program to see a urologist, but instead he got an appointment with a neurologist.

The winners have been two private companies hired to run the program, which began under the Obama administration and is poised to grow significantly under Trump. ProPublica and PolitiFact obtained VA data showing how much the agency has paid in medical claims and administrative fees for the Choice program. Since 2014, the two companies have been paid nearly $2 billion for overhead, including profit. That’s about 24 percent of the companies’ total program expenses — a rate that would exceed the federal cap that governs how much most insurance plans can spend on administration in the private sector.

According to the agency’s inspector general, the VA was paying the contractors at least $295 every time it authorized private care for a veteran. The fee was so high because the VA hurriedly launched the Choice Program as a short-term response to a crisis. Four years later, the fee never subsided — it went up to as much as $318 per referral.

“This is what happens when people try and privatize the VA,” Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, the ranking Democrat on the Senate veterans committee, said in a statement responding to these findings. “The VA has an obligation to taxpayers to spend its limited resources on caring for veterans, not paying excessive fees to a government contractor. When VA does need the help of a middleman, it needs to do a better job of holding contractors accountable for missing the mark.”

(Read more about how ProPublica and PolitiFact did the analysis.)

The Affordable Care Act prohibits large group insurance plans from spending more than 15 percent of their revenue on administration, including marketing and profit. The private sector standard is 10 percent to 12 percent, according to Andrew Naugle, who advises health insurers on administrative operations as a consultant at Milliman, one of the world’s largest actuarial firms. Overhead is even lower in the Defense Department’s Tricare health benefits program: only 8 percent last year.

Even excluding the costs of setting up the new program, the Choice contractors’ overhead still amounts to 21 percent of revenue.

“That’s just unacceptable,” Rick Weidman, the policy director of Vietnam Veterans of America, said in response to the figures. “There are people constantly banging on the VA, but this was the private sector that made a total muck of it.”

Trump’s promises to veterans were a central message of his campaign. But his plans to shift their health care to the private sector put him on a collision course with veterans groups, whose members generally support the VA’s medical system and don’t want to see it privatized. The controversy around privatization, and the outsize influence of three Trump associates at Mar-a-Lago, has sown turmoil at the VA, endangering critical services from paying student stipends to preventing suicides and upgrading electronic medical records.

A spokesman for the VA, Curt Cashour, declined to provide an interview with key officials and declined to answer a detailed list of written questions.

One of the contractors, Health Net, stopped working on the program in September. Health Net didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The other contractor, TriWest Healthcare Alliance,said it has worked closely with the VA to improve the program and has made major investments of its own. “We believe supporting VA in ensuring the delivery of quality care to our nation’s veterans is a moral responsibility, even while others have avoided making these investments or have withdrawn from the market,” the company said in a statement.

TriWest did not dispute ProPublica and PolitiFact’s estimated overhead rate, which used total costs, but suggested an alternate calculation, using an average cost, that yielded a rate of 13 percent to 15 percent. The company defended the $295-plus fee by saying it covers “highly manual” services such as scheduling appointments and coordinating medical files. Such functions are not typically part of the contracts for other programs, such as the military’s Tricare. But Tricare’s contractors perform other duties, such as adjudicating claims and monitoring quality, that Health Net and TriWest do not. In a recent study comparing the programs, researchers from the Rand Corporation concluded that the role of the Choice Program’s contractors is “much narrower than in the private sector or in Tricare.”

Before the Choice Program, TriWest and Health Net performed essentially the same functions for about a sixth of the price, according to the VA inspector general. TriWest declined to break down how much of the fee goes to each service it provides.

Because of what the GAO called the contractors’ “inadequate” performance, the VA increasingly took over doing the Choice Program’s referrals and claims itself.

In many cases, the contractors’ $295-plus processing fee for every referral was bigger than the doctor’s bill for services rendered, the analysis of agency data showed. In the three months ending Jan. 31, 2018, the Choice Program made 49,144 referrals for primary care totaling $9.9 million in medical costs, for an average cost per referral of $201.16. A few other types of care also cost less on average than the handling fee: chiropractic care ($286.32 per referral) and optometry ($189.25). There were certainly other instances where the medical services cost much more than the handling fee: TriWest said its average cost per referral was about $2,100 in the past six months.

Beyond what the contractors were entitled to, audits by the VA inspector general found that they overcharged the government by $140 million from November 2014 to March 2017. Both companies are now under federal investigation arising from these overpayments. Health Net’s parent company, Centene, disclosed a Justice Department civil investigation into “excessive, duplicative or otherwise improper claims.” A federal grand jury in Arizona is investigating TriWest for “wire fraud and misused government funds,” according to a court decision on a subpoena connected to the case. Both companies said they are cooperating with the inquiries.

Despite the criminal investigation into TriWest’smanagement of the Choice Program, the Trump administration recently expanded the company’s contract without competitive bidding. Now, TriWest stands to collect even more fees as the administration prepares to fulfill Trump’s campaign promise to send more veterans to private doctors.

https://www.alternet.org/economy/privatization-myth-here-are-5-ways-conservatives-free-market-ideology-can-destroy-public

defacto pvtization? buy water for nothing?

Nestlé is trying to crush a tiny town of less than 2,000 people. All to keep sucking their most precious resource -- water.

Right now, Nestlé is pumping 250 gallons of water a minute or more than 350,000 gallons every single day from Osceola Township. Bottling it up, and selling it off for massive profit. And guess how much Nestlé pays?

Just $200 a year. Yes, you read that right.

But the community of Osceola is fighting back: it’s gearing up to appeal a court decision that outrageously let Nestlé take more water from the tiny township.

This tiny community is up against the might of Nestlé. Its legal costs are spiralling and Nestlé is still trying to bully it into backing down.

===

AN 12/18

Don’t let the Trump administration corporatize Medicare

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/save-us-postal-service-heres-corrupt-scheme-privatize-precious-american

Unable to find a fatal flaw in our far-flung public mail delivery network, the anti-Postal Service forces manufactured a fake flaw. In 2006, then-president George W. Bush, congressional Republican leaders, the powerful "privatizer lobby" (including FedEx, UPS and Wall Street speculators) and Koch-funded think tanks and Astroturf front groups colluded to put a one-of-a-kind paper "debt" on the books of USPS. Congress enacted a postal-service "enhancement" provision requiring the public postal corporation to pre-fund the health and pension benefits for all postal-service retirees 75 years in advance! Think about that. This arbitrary, wholly unprecedented, legislated requirement to pay now for the retirement benefits of future employees (including those not even born yet) has piled a false cost of about $5 billion a year on the debit side of the agency's balance sheet.

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...new super PAC, the Koch network lost many of its big bets in 2018, including those placed on Matt Rosendale in Montana and Leah Vukmir in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin also saw the unseating of a Koch-network favorite, Gov. Scott Walker. Americans for Prosperity Action, one of many Koch-network groups that spend big money to influence elections, aided two incumbents in Iowa races, both of whom lost, and failed to elect prospective Nevada governor Adam Laxalt. (Freedom Partners, another Koch network group, criticized Laxalt’s opponent in a Facebook ad for taking campaign contributions.)

AFP Action reportedly spent at least $75,000, and in some cases spent as much as $300,000, on each race it targeted. At a July summit for donors in Colorado Springs, Charles Koch, CEO of Koch Industries and the network’s patriarch, pledged to spend something like $400 million on the 2018 election cycle.

Also at the conference, Koch promised that the network would be “much stricter” with whom it backs going forward. He criticized President Donald Trump’s protectionist policies, indicated the network might be open to working with Democrats, and presented a series of network priorities that break somewhat from the current Republican playbook and past Koch-precedent. These included education, criminal justice reform and “uniting people who have been previously divided.”

Trump’s tweet about how the “globalist Koch brothers” had “bad ideas” and were “no longer relevant” came soon after.

Though the Koch network did manage to help beat Sen. Claire McCaskill in Missouri and Phil Bredesen in Tennessee, 2018 was a far cry from the 2010 Tea Party wave when the network was at the crest of its power and influence. The group has made overtures to Democrats and progressive causes in the past, but the aftermath of the 2018 election could mark the moment where the network changes its approach in a big way.

:{Koch surrogates have been alluding to a coming shift. Gabrielle Broad, the host of } (a sort of internet chat-series produced by Americans for Prosperity:{), tweeted a link to a Bloomberg article entitled “Koch Network Looks to a More Bipartisan Tone Following Midterms.”}:

“We see an opportunity to engage the American people to address some of the toughest problems facing our country,” said Broad’s tweet. “Exciting work ahead!”

James Davis, a network spokesman, toldBloomberg “a majority of Americans are rightly frustrated with the seeming inability to come together to solve major societal problems.”

According to Davis’s LinkedIn, he is both executive vice president of Freedom Partners, a Koch network group, and president of In Pursuit Of, a communications and marketing agency with strong ties to the white house. In Pursuit Of has seen an editorial director and a deputy director of writing go to work in the Trump administration as “special assistant(s) to the president” according to ProPublica. Davis also has a recommendation on his LinkedIn from former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

Though the Koch network has stopped short of financially backing Democratic candidates, the network drew the ire of the Republican National Committee thanks to its unwillingness to back Kevin Cramer when he ran against Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.). They also famously sat out the general election between President Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016. The network breaksfrom Republicans, especially those aligned with President Trump, in its assertion that any funding for a border wall should be bound to action protecting immigrants who benefit from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

The network aligned itself with the American Civil Liberties Union and other liberal groups in support of the Florida ballot initiative that restored voting rights to Americans with felony convictions, (with some exceptions for those convicted of violent crimes) and it pushed for the First Step Act to become law.

Co-sponsored in the House by Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Doug Collins (R-Ga.), The First Step Act aims to reduce recidivism by introducing programs for inmates such as vocational training and improved drug rehabilitation. President Trump recently indicated he supports the act, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have supported the legislation for some time.

Under the First Step Act, the Bureau of Prisons would be compelled to create an “earned time credit” program, allowing inmates to shave days off their sentences by participating in jobs training and other programming. The act also mellows mandatory minimum sentencing requirements. The First Step Act would also expand the use of “algorithms that try to predict future behavior” according to the Marshall Project. Some worry reliance on algorithms could worsen existing racial or class disparities in the prison system.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) oppose the bill, saying that it is too narrow and does not deliver comprehensive reform.

The network also funds the Safe Streets and Second Chances program which is beta-testing a prisoner reentry model that would prioritize convicted people serving out more of their sentences at home. When the program was introduced in Texas, it was “headquartered” at Unlocking DOORS. Unlocking DOORS lists Geo Reentry Services, a Geo Group company, as a partner.

In part, the network appears to view mass incarceration as a matter of government waste. Accordingto the Koch Industries’ website, around three times as much is spent on incarceration than is spent on K-12 education.

The Kochs have not always embraced this more progressive approach to criminal justice. Back in 1994, the Kochs co-sponsored a conference for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) with the Corrections Corporation of America. The conference promoted the sort of “tough on crime” rhetoric that the First Step Act pushes back against. Both Charles and David Koch received an “Adam Smith Award” at the event. An ALEC task force was also instrumental in developing “three strikes you’re out” laws and mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

More recently, the Koch network has helped pay for political ads supporting “tough on crime” politicians. One ad, which calls out a Louisiana Democrat for supporting then-President Obama in his efforts to reduce sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, actually attacks policies for which Charles Koch has expressed support. That did not stop Koch Industries from donating to the candidate who sponsored the ad, David Vitter, who identifiedas a member of the Tea Party movement and was one of the only two Senators to vote against Hillary Clinton’s confirmation as secretary of state. A Koch network super PAC also backed Vitter’s campaign.

According to UnKoch My Campus, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a State Policy Network affiliate, was instrumental in establishing the “Right On Crime” philosophy which advocates increased reliance on private prison systems, privatized parole and increased electronic monitoring. The State Policy Network is a Koch-affiliated group. An accidentally released 2010 tax document from the Texas Public Policy Foundation showed they received funding from Koch Industries as well as Geo Prison Group, another GEO Group company, whose website touts the company as a “complete electronic monitoring solutions provider.”

With more big money backing Democrats anyway, it is hard to predict if the left will embrace the new Koch network. President Obama incited laughter:{:{ at an NAACP event when he applauded the Kochs for their positions on criminal justice reform}:, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren has } :{for funding climate change denial research on the Senate floor. Koch Industries is also one of the most prolific contributors of greenhouse gases in the United States, and they’ve given tens of millions to groups who deny climate change. It is hard to imagine them selling the increasingly }:climate-hawkish:{ democrats on many of their policies.}:

Still, the Koch network is nothing if not adaptable. Their dozens of interlocking nonprofits, PACs and think tanks continue to reorganize and adapt to the shifting political landscape, and in spite of the recent departure of David Koch from the family’s political and business operations (making the iconic “Koch brothers” moniker archaic), Charles Koch is confident.

“We’ve more progress in the last five years than I did in the previous 50,” Koch said at the Colorado Springs conference. “All we have to do to capture (these opportunities) is to do the very thing that made Frederick Douglass such an amazing, principled social change entrepreneur: stand by our principals at whatever the cost. Resist all temptations in short-term gain.”

PRISONS Pennsylvania to end prison book donations, forcing inmates onto pricey eBook platform ROB BESCHIZZA

privatized probation

http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/outsourcing-probation-a-lucrative-and-growing-industry-140129?news=852293

Privatization of the criminal justice system has extended beyond prisons that are run for profit and now includes probation operators making a buck off Americans who have violated the law.

Quietly over the past four decades, private probation companies have gone into business in 40% of U.S. states, most of them in the South. Georgiaalone has 34 businesses providing probation services.

These entrepreneurs have replaced county offices that used to oversee individuals given probation instead of jail time for their offenses.

But the switch from public to private probation has resulted in excessive financial costs levied on probationers, some of whom have been threatened with incarceration for not paying these companies on time.

Circuit Judge Hub Harrington called the private probation system in Harpersville, Alabama, a “judicially sanctioned extortion racket.”

Take for example Sentinel Offender Services, a $30 million enterprise operating in four states. An investigation by NBC News found that Sentinel demanded payments for fees from low-income probationers and resorted to arrest warrants to force the issue, regardless of the individuals’ financial status.

All of this despite a 1983 federal ruling that said that people on probation cannot be imprisoned for being indigent.

In Florida, private firms can add as much as 40% in surcharges on top of the debt owed by probationers. In Illinois, the add-on fees can amount to 30% of the standing debt.

TheBrennan Center for Justice says that at least nine states allow companies to charge probationers excessive fees.

Former law enforcement officials control this industry—at least in Georgia—having leveraged their connections into profitable contracts. “This is completely dominated by retired state probation people and wardens of state prisons,” Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “They created this industry for themselves.”

Theydid so after Georgia passed a law in 2000 that transferred state probation services to the counties, thereby allowing local courts to outsource those services to private companies. They are allowed to handle all probation cases other than those involving felons.

Bobby Whitworth, the former head of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, accepted payoffs in return for helping to pass that law. He was eventually imprisoned on public corruption charges for having done so.

“My problem [with private probation services] is with…the fact that people are getting rich off the poorest people in society,” Steve Bright, senior counsel for the Southern Center for Human Rights, told the Journal-Constitution. “Many private probation companies don't do anything but collect checks from people. Perhaps someone who has run a loan company would be better qualified.” by -Noel Brinkerhoff, Danny Biederman

To Learn More:

How Private Probation Companies Make Money From the Those They Trap in the Justice System (by Aaron Cantú, AlterNet)

Connections Matter in Ga. Private Probation Industry (by Rhonda Cook, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

'Cash Register Justice': Private Probation Services Face Legal Counterattack (by Hannah Rappleye and Lisa Riordan-Seville, NBC

compiled a bit of info in my petition to End For Profit Probation: http://www.change.org/petitions/end-for-profit-private-probation-of-misdemeanor-cases-in-the-united-states

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pvtization boosts inequality

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-cohen/how-privatization-is-fuel_b_13173324.html

11/16

Johnny Cash was a man of colorful stories, and “One Piece At a Time” is no exception. In the 1976 song, Cash works a Detroit assembly line making Cadillacs that he can’t afford. “Every day I’d watch them beauties roll by and sometimes I’d hang my head and cry,” he sings.

So Cash comes up with a plan. He’ll “steal” a car by taking one part home each day in his lunchbox. For twenty-five years he steals parts one by one without the factory owner noticing. By the end of the song he has a transmission from 1953 and an engine from two decades later, but altogether he has a fully functioning Cadillac, a beauty of his own.

A similar story can be told about American government.

For decades, parts of government at all levels, federal, state, and local, have been handed over one by one to the private sector. As public budgets have tightened, crucial public goods and services like education and transit have been outsourced in the name of efficiency and cost savings.

Everyone benefits when government creates and supports goods and services designed to deliver widespread prosperity. But privatization, a key pillar of recent political attacks on government, has slowly weakened welfare programs, infrastructure, and much more.

All the while we’ve hardly noticed what we’ve lost.

In public education, school bus drivers and cafeteria workers have been outsourced and a new form of privatized education has proliferated.Charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated, are threatening the financial stability of school districts from Los Angeles to Massachusetts.

In infrastructure, corporations have raised water rates and bad deals have complicated transit policy. Who could forget Chicago’s notorious parking meter debacle, in which the city leased their meters to banking giant Morgan Stanley for $1 billion under value? The deal has made it much harder for the city to make environmentally sustainable changes to transit planning, like bike or bus lanes, for the length of the lease — a whopping 75 years.

In social services like food assistance and Medicaid, handing control over to the private sector has shifted the burden to the backs of the most vulnerable families, while corporations likeXerox and Lockheed Martin skim profits off the top.

And across many sectors, from emergency services to the criminal justice system, Wall Street banks and private equity firms have found ways to siphon taxpayer dollars into the pockets of investors.

Like the owners of the Cadillac factory, we’ve missed the bigger picture as we’ve lost control of government piece by piece.

But the cost has been much more than one missing car. Our analysis, published in the report, “How privatization is increasing inequality,” shows that privatization is helping fuel America’s historic inequality, the defining issue of our time.

Public sector work long offered a stable, middle class life. But many public workers employed by private contractors have plunged into poverty because of declining wages and benefits. Outsourcing has been particularly harmful to women and people of color, as nearly 60 percent of public sector jobs are held by women and one in five black workers are public workers.

Privatization has also impacted the public at large. Governments, strapped for cash, have increasingly allowed private contractors to charge fees to subsidize or completely fund a good or service. “Offender funded” electronic monitoring, in which a person awaiting trial or on house arrest or probation must pay for their own ankle monitor, is a tragic example of this growing practice. In 49 states and the District of Columbia, the cost of an ankle monitor — as high as $40 a day — can be passed along to the person ordered to wear it.When people fall behind on payments, the company providing the monitor can charge them late fees, and those who can’t afford to pay can even be sent back to prison or jail. If the mission of our criminal justice system is to reduce crime, trapping people in cycles of fees and debt isn’t the way to do it.

Thedismantling of government has also perpetuated racial segregation. One glaring example tells the story. Schools in Minnesota’s Twin Cities metropolitan area, which were once some of the most desegregated in the country due to strong state civil rights laws, are now being resegregated. Charter schools, which are exempt from many Minnesota state laws including those concerning integration, have exacerbated this dangerous trend.

All of these dynamics add up to a disturbing reality. As public money has dwindled, privatization in its many forms has often appeared as a solution. A charter school here, a privately operated public bus system there. But taken as a whole, the decades-long experiment with privatization has intensified a misguided distrust in government and increased inequality.

Public goods and services, by bringing economic and social value to everyone, especially the most vulnerable, ensure a healthy and just society. It’s high time we invest in them and take them back.

This post originally appeared at The Hill.

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AN msnbc

STEPHANIE RUHLE (HOST): In today's money, power, politics: private prisons. They are cashing in on President Trump's get-tough policies at the border. Since 1997, the Federal Bureau of Prison has paid private companies to build and operate prisons to ease capacity at government-run facilities. The share of federal prisoners nationwide held in private prisons has surged from just 3 percent in the late 90's to more than 20 percent today. The biggest factor fueling growth is, you guessed it, immigration detention centers.

Who are these companies? CoreCivic, also known as CCA; Management and Training Corporation, known as MTC; and the GEO Group are three of the biggest players in the private prison business. Together, they operate some 14 federal facilities nationwide, providing 27,000 beds for federal inmates, and that is growing.

That growth was under threat when the Obama administration attempted to phase out all contracts with private prisons. The big three players decided to take action, and theyspent big on the 2016 campaign. Guess how. GEO donated $1.1 million to Republican candidates and political action committees. CoreCivic spent another $1.1 million on lobbying efforts. And MTC spent nearly half a million bucks to do the same. And those efforts, they certainly paid off.

When President Trump reversed the phase out decision early in his administration, that is despite a2014 lawsuit accusing GEO of forcing immigration detainees to work for little or no pay by threatening them with solitary confinement. Sounds like slavery, doesn't it?Critics say the private business model encourages cost-cutting and even slavery to boost its bottom line profits. And guess what? It's working.

Since President Trump's election, shares for GEO have shot up 25 percent, while CoreCivic stock is 12 percent higher. MTC is not publicly traded, but its revenues are said to be robust. I want to point out some of the larger shareholders, if you want to check your 401(k), BlackRock and Vanguard, and granted, they may own them as part of an index, but they choose to do them.

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https://www.democracynow.org/2018/6/6/the_battle_for_paradise_new_intercept

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electric and schools close/pvtize charter

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/4/19/headlines/puerto_rico_14_million_lose_electric_power_in_island_wide_blackout

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/01/socialize-costs-privatize-profits/

There’s a truism about the U.S. political-economy, one being shared by an increasing number of people from all walks of life and political persuasions: the game is rigged!

There are two aspects to the rigged game. One involves the privatization of public services, the outsourcing of public needs to private contractors. Parallel to privatization has been a second con, one more hidden and far more insidious, the rigged roulette – the privatization of profit— that ensures that corporations win and the public get’s stuck with the consequences, the long-term bill.

Privatization is brilliantly simple and has been working efficiently for generations. The ordinary U.S. taxpayer gives up a portion of his/her take-home pay in the form of taxes, whether at the job or at the pump. Like a great vacuum cleaner, “government” at every level of the state apparatus sucks up these dollars. In turn, it doles out the dollars to private contractors who, like pigs at the trough, never stop sucking-up the dollars.

Parallel to the privatization scam is a con that has long been hidden yet is far more insidious. Under this version of Russian roulette, corporations have easily gotten away with the consequences of their deeds. Land was cheep, air and water unlimited, minerals abundant, workers expendable, a sucker was born everyday and you always had friends in government to bail you out when the house of cards collapsed. Who cared about industrial waste, polluted groundwater, ill workers or failed banks, everything was replaceable. Someone else will foot the bill.

In Washington, DC, political insiders – along with their media consorts — are acting out assigned roles in a grand Noh theatre performance, dancing the sequester minuet. They take their positions, move in well-orchestrated patterns, give their well-rehearsed speeches and scheme how to cut the budget to best serve their corporate backers. And in the mean time, the ordinary American gets screwed.

* * *

In the 19^th century, as Howard Zinn reminds us, government subsidized the building of canals, the establishment of a merchant marine and the laying of thenation’s first continental railroad system, giving away 100 million free acres — often land once belonging to the native inhabitants — to the railroad tycoons to sweeten the deal.

A generation earlier, the noted historian Charles Beard found a not dissimilar alliance of business interests and government entities in collusion to appropriate taxpayer dollars for private gain. The construction of roadways, public buildings, navy yards and army posts was outsourced to private contractors. When asked who was behind all the public-funded infrastructure construction, he replied: “Business men and farmers who want lower freight rates.” “There is not a chamber of commerce on any Buck Creek in America that will not cheer until tonsils are cracked for any proposal to make the said creek navigable.” These companies not only had infrastructure built to improve their businesses, but had the taxpayer, their customers, pay for it. The game remains rigged.

The privatization scam involves real money. PolitiFact estimates that in 2009 the combined federal and state/local governments sucked up $3.4 trillion. The fed took in the largest portion, some three-fifths ($2.1 trillion) in revenues, compared to the states/localities that collected an estimated $1.3 trillion in taxes. In 2009, the U.S. GNP was $14.1 trillion. Do the math; follow the money.

The classic example of the privatization scam involves the military-industrial complex. In his legendary farewell address, President Eisenhower warned, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” In the half-century since his telling observation, it’s only gotten worse.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimates that, in 2010, the U.S. spent $235 billion on arms. It identifies the top 5 contractors as:

#1 — Lockheed Martin = arms sales: $35.7 billion, profit: $2.9 billion;

#2 — Boeing = arms sales: $31.4 billion, profit: $2.9 billion;

#3 — Northrop Grumann = arms sales: $28 billion, profit: $2 billion;

#4 — General Dynamics = arms sales: $24 billion, profit: $2.6 billion;

#5 — Raytheon = arms sales: $23 billion, profit: $1.9 billion.

“Privatization” has become the new holy grail of corporate greed, promoted from prisons to schools to sports stadiums. Looking at the sports industry, Judith Grant Long, a Harvard professor of urban planning, argues “the costs of land, infrastructure, operations and lost property taxes add 25 percent to the taxpayer bill for the 121 sports facilities in use during 2010.” She estimates this to be about $10 billion more then the original forecast. Guess who picked up the tab?

The second form of privatization involves companies pursuing private gain without regard to the social consequences, often involving significant health and environmental costs. Those days are ending.

People now recognize, if only intuitively, that things have consequences. A factory or mine that pollutes or genetically-modified food products farmed will likely leave a footprint far longer then the company is in business. The management will walk away fat and happy, the workers, neighbors and consumers bearing the scars. Like Appalachian coalminers, the day-to-day tragedy of digging in a dark hole was nothing compared to the suffering they and their families faced above ground with pneumoconiosis cancer. Coal dust still hovers in Appalachia.

The classic example of the rigged roulette game of socializing costs and privatizing profits is the cigarette business. Evidence that cigarette smoking was linked to cancer was first raised in the mid-1920s and, over the next quarter century, the issue gained traction.

At a now famous meeting at New York’s Plaza Hotel on December 14, 1953, CEOs of six of the seven largest tobacco manufacturers met to orchestrate – “collude” in — a counterattacked. They crafted a well-financed, sophisticated astroturf campaign including smart advertisements, corporate-funded scientific “white papers” and influence peddling with the media and in the halls of Congress. This campaign effectively dragged out legal scrutiny for another quarter century. Profits mounted as more and more smokers got sick and died.

On April 14, 1994, seven tobacco company executives (known as the Seven Dwarves) swore before a Congressional hearing that nicotine was not addictive. In 1998, the attorney generals of 46 states finally signed the Master Settlement Agreement with four of the largest tobacco firms. The deal required the tobacco companies to pay annually a minimum of $206 billion over the first 25 years of the agreement. However, according to one estimate, between 2000 and 2004, smoking continued to cause more than $193 billion in annual health-related costs, including smoking-attributable medical costs and productivity losses.

The most recent version of the rigged-roulette privatized profit scam is the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bank bailout. Many have raised serious questions about the program, none more so then Neil Barofsky (the former TARP Inspector General and author of Bailout) and Elizabeth Warren (former chair of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel and now Senator, MA). One estimate places the total amount of the U.S. government bailout at $16.9 trillion, including expenditures by the Treasury, Federal Reserve and other agencies.

The most egregious expression of maximizing social costs for private gain is the extraction of coal, oil and gas sectors. The associated costs of doing business in the energy industry are nearly impossible to calculate. These companies get subsidies, tax breaks and historically walked away from the messes they left behind. However, as President Obama weighs his decision regarding the Keystone pipeline and Governor Cuomo decides about fracking in New York State, one would only hope that they consider the human, environmental and economic consequences of their decisions.

A 2009 NIH report, “Mortality in Appalachian Coal Mining Regions: The Value of Statistical Life (VSL) Lost” (you have to love bureaucrat speak), found that “annual age-adjusted deaths in coal mining areas ranged from 3,975 to 10,923 … . Corresponding VSL estimates ranged from $18.563 billion to $84.544 billion … .” To this day, the human costs of coal mining, including mountaintop removal, are not included in the real cost of coal.

Another indicator of the real cost of coal is suggested in a 2011 report by the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, “Full Cost Accounting for the Life Cycle of Coal.” It places the environmental costs caused by what it terms “all the aspects of coal’s life cycle” at roughly $500 billion annually. In addition, it notes that environment damage adds up to $0.17/kWh to a user’s bill.

Shedding more light on the complexity involved in calculating the social costs of the extraction industries, findings from a 2008 National Academy of Sciences report, “Climate change and health costs of air emissions from biofuels and gasoline,” are alarming. “For each billion ethanol-equivalent gallons of fuel produced and combusted in the US, the combined climate-change and health costs are $469 million for gasoline, $472–952 million for corn ethanol depending on biorefinery heat source (natural gas, corn stover, or coal) and technology, but only $123–208 million for cellulosic ethanol depending on feedstock (prairie biomass, Miscanthus, corn stover, or switchgrass).” Guess who pays the costs?

In the wake of the Newtown, CT, shootings and the one-year anniversary of the killing of Trevon Martin, attention is being directed to the social costs of firearms. IBIS World, a research firm, projects that in 2012 the guns and ammunition industry will hit $11.7 billion in sales and have $993 million in profits.

The social costs resulting from gun violence are difficult to calculate. The University of Chicago Crime Lab estimates it annually at $100 billion. The Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE) estimated the cost of gun violence in 2010 at $174 billion in terms of work lost, medical care, insurance, criminal-justice expenses and the victim’s pain and suffering.

Still other business sectors take advantage of socialized costs to fatten their bottom line. Thefood industry consists of the inter-linked network of agriculture, packing, retail and fast-food companies that feed the nation. Last year Reuters ran a damning exposé on the social costs associated with obesity. It reported that 34 percent of the public was obese and 6 percent were extremely or “morbidly” obese. Further findings included: the U.S. spent $190 billion annual on medical costs associated with obesity; the Mayo Clinic spent more than four times more for health care on an obese worker ($5,530) — i.e., with a body mass index or BMI of 40 – then a smoker ($1,274); the airline industry spends $5 billion annually for additional jet fuel needed to fly heavier Americans; and drivers spend $4 billion annually more for gasoline so cars can carry heavier passengers.

Similar calculations can be developed for still other industry sectors. Product packers know little of the requirements of the waste disposal industry, yet landfills are clogged, municipalities overwhelmed by garbage and consumers swamped in a sea of non-recyclable plastics. The nuclear industrycould find backing from neither private capital nor insurance companies; no wonder, it is a federal insured and subsidized private industry. Guess whose paying for it?

A final example is the telephone companies. It illustrates how social costs can hard the nation’s communications infrastructure and very economic future. They’ve pocketed an estimated $360 billion through questionable rate increases, subsidies, tax breaks and overcharges. Instead of building out the “information superhighway” promised by Al Gore two decades ago, they directed the money to building-out 2^nd-rate wireless businesses, overpaying their executives and rewarding stockholders – and all at the customer’s expense. As a result, the U.S. has become a 2^nd tier communications nation, ranked 15^th in broadband.

* * *

The great con of modern capitalism, one dimension of what the Situationists called the spectacle, is the ability by the ruling class to expropriate social wealth for their private gain. One of the ways it artfully does this is by fleecing the state’s coffers.

The twin cons of privatization and the privatization of profit reveal the inherent crisis of capitalism. Without public subsidies through a zillion well-orchestrated scams, what would be the real costs of true free-market, predatory capitalism? Could private capitalism survive without Americans paying twice, as consumers and taxpayers, to subsidize it?

David Rosenwrites the column, Media Current, for Filmmaker and regularly contributes to AlterNet, Huffington Post and the Brooklyn Rail, check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com; he can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.net.

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https://www.alternet.org/economy/do-you-want-pay-toll-private-investors-when-you-ride-trumps-federal-highways-thats-his

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pvtize PR preppa electricity post whitefish

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will "officially shut off" food and water aid to Puerto Ricofour months after Hurricane Maria devastated the island.

"The reality is that we just need to look around. Supermarkets are open, and things are going back to normal," Alejandro De La Campa, FEMA's director in Puerto Rico, told NPR. "If we're giving free water and food, that means that families are not going to supermarkets to buy."

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privatized probation

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https://www.c-span.org/video/?436568-1/after-words-peter-edelman

After Words with Peter Edelman

Professor Peter Edelmantalked about his book Not a Crime to Be Poor, in which he argues that courts are exploiting the poor by charging excessive fines and fees for minor crimes. He was interviewed by Representative Hank Johnson(D-GA).

...

Puerto Rico’s governor says he’s moving to privatize the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, known as PREPA. It faced widespread criticism after Hurricane Maria destroyed the island’s power grid, and PREPA’s then-director signed a $300 million contract with a tiny Montana company linked to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Many activists have warned politicians would use Hurricane Maria to privatize the power authority, which is now the largest public power utility in the United States.

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PVTIZATION 2

Ted Cruz Admits Trump Accounts Are Designed to Privatize Social Security Over Time

One advocate said the Texas Republican laid bare the “two-pronged strategy to push Social Security privatization: Creating the Trump accounts with one hand and gutting the Social Security Administration with the other.”

“A Total Sham”

Weaponizing Financial Distress

A History Of Abuse

From Blackwater to Bounty Hunting

Trump official slammed for saying this policy is 'backdoor to privatizing Social Security'

Unbelievably dangerous': Top Democrat slams Gov. Noem for using the National Guard as a 'private militia'

GUTTING THE IRS

Congress Is About to Ban the Government From Offering Free Online Tax Filing. Thank TurboTax.

A bill supported by Democrats and Republicans would make permanent a program that bars the IRS from ever developing its own online tax filing service.

“Doubling Down”: With Private Care Push, Trump’s VA Bucks Lawmakers and Some Veterans Groups

Don’t let the Trump administration corporatize Medicare

PRISONSPennsylvania to end prison book donations, forcing inmates onto pricey eBook platformROB BESCHIZZA

After Words with Peter Edelman

PRISONS Pennsylvania to end prison book donations, forcing inmates onto pricey eBook platform ROB BESCHIZZA