HIGHLIGHTS
- Unions take lead in resisting power grab
- Disappearing date is a danger to us all
- Fire Sale: Private equity profits from disasters
JUMP: EDUCATION | INFRASTRUCTURE | PUBLIC SERVICES | THE REST
First, the Good News
1) National: Federal unions are taking the lead in resisting Trump’s power grab, The Washington Post reports. “During the AFGE annual legislative conference this week, including in a packed hotel ballroom on Monday and during a large rally across from the Capitol Building on Tuesday, a long line of senators, representatives, union leaders and civil rights activists didn’t focus on demands for greater pay and benefits’ protection, as was the usual fare in previous years’ gatherings. Rather, Trump’s power push was a central focus.”
Grace Segars reports that the federal “workforce is organizing with new urgency. As Mark Smith, president of National Federation of Federal Employees Local 1 in San Francisco, told The New Republic, the response to the Trump administration’s actions has been immediate. There has been a dramatic uptick in employees wanting to join the union in recent weeks, to the point where ‘we couldn’t process the sign-up forms fast enough,’ Smith said. ‘I literally just don’t even have time to process them all. It’s the largest growth in membership I’ve ever seen in 10 years,’ Smith continued. ‘I think everybody is getting an education in what unions are for, and why we have them.’”
“The answer to these problems is not to join the effort to root out supposed waste and fraud, says Bryce Covert, also in The New Republic. That concedes the argument that the government is bad and deserving of drastic change, up to and including dismantling entire departments. That premise has to be wholeheartedly rejected. Instead, Democrats must argue that the government is good—that it is our collective effort to protect each other from the worst that can befall us. It’s not perfect, but it is worth protecting. Failing to do so will only result in more chaos, more crises, and more deaths.”
2) National: “Join the Fight for Public Education and Democracy,” says Evelyn Aissa, co-director of the Partnership for the Future of Learning. “We will not concede. We will show up for our public schools. We will show up for each other and our future. We also understand that the administration’s best hope at consolidating the unconstitutional power it seeks is by intimidating lawmakers so they bend to its will and the rest of us to preemptively concede our rights and be silent in our opposition. We will not concede.”
3) National: Kudos to Good Jobs First for reporting on the years of government subsidies Musk’s Tesla Inc. has received. That’s besides the vast amount of public money Musk’s SpaceX gets as the result of privatization of the U.S. space program. Reuters reports that as $22 billion. And The Lever reports SpaceX just got another $7.5 million as Musk’s minions run around trying to terminate the Department of Education. Conflicts of interest much?
4) National: Rep. Mike Levin and veterans’ organizations are demanding protection of veterans’ programs from Trump-Musk cuts and potential privatization. “I’m worried that by shrinking the VA, making it harder to deliver to veterans the benefits they deserve, and potentially compromising veterans’ personal data, the Trump Administration and DOGE are laying the groundwork to privatize the VA. We cannot let this happen.”
5) National: Let’s hear it for the Black Studies Podcast, which always offers stimulating and informative programs on the history and current activities in the discipline of Black Studies. Last week host John Drabinski interviewed veteran activist Noliwe Rooks, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University where she is also founding director of the Segrenomics Lab. Rooks is a vigorous proponent of public education and foe of privatization.
6) Maryland: The Baltimore Sun reports that “the Maryland Transportation Authority approved three contracts, each worth $20 million, for management and inspection services contracts in the Francis Scott Key Bridge reconstruction project. The deals were awarded Wednesday to Greenman-Pederson Inc./Gannett Fleming Inc., a joint venture; Michael Baker International Inc./STV, Inc., a joint venture; and AECOM Technical Services Inc. The firms will provide various services, including constructability reviews, detailed inspections of all construction work and assistance to MDTA’s compliance officers with the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise goals associated with the project.”
7) Think Tanks: State Futures and the State Innovation Exchange (SiX) are hosting a virtual rapid response briefing this Thursday, February 20, to discuss the state-level impact of recent federal executive orders and explore strategies for legislative responses. Webinar registration here.
8) National: Writing in The New Yorker, Jessica Winter reports on what the assault on public education means for kids with disabilities. “One of those orders directed Cabinet agencies to review how states can use federal funds to “support families who choose educational alternatives to governmental entities, including private and faith-based options.” In other words, the Trump Administration wants to nationalize the K-12 voucher programs already offered in seventeen states, in which public money is rerouted to parents who want to put it toward tuition at a private or parochial school or toward homeschooling expenses. (…) Dan Stewart, the managing attorney for education and employment at the National Disability Rights Network, a legal-advocacy group, told me that, through these executive orders, ‘this Administration is engaging with education at the micro level as well as the macro level. It’s looking at curriculum, which is traditionally in the power of the local schools and the state, at the same time that it’s looking at different ways of moving public dollars out of the system.’”
The right wing is joining the fight. Carol Burris reports that “seventeen states have joined a lawsuit to eliminate Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Section 504 guarantees that individuals with disabilities have equal access to benefits and services from any organization that receives federal funding, including schools.”
9) National: Writing in LA Progressive, Henry Giroux reports that “Concurrently, President Trump issued the ‘Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families’ executive order, aiming to enhance school choice by redirecting federal funds to support charter schools and voucher programs. This policy enables parents to use public funds for private and religious school tuition. While proponents claim that this legislation empowers parents and fosters competition, in reality, it is a calculated effort to defund and privatize public education, undermining it as a democratizing public good. As part of a broader far right assault on education, this policy redirects essential resources away from public schools, deepening educational inequality and advancing an agenda that seeks to erode public investment in a just and equitable society.”
10) National: John Klyczek has just published an excellent, detailed, 5,000 word deep dive on “TrumpED 2025: School Choice Corporatization, Social Impact Finance, and the Dismantling of the Department of Education” in Unlimited Hangout. Klyczek is the author of School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education(TrineDay Books).
11) National: On an episode of the CounterPunch Radio podcast, “Erik Wallenberg and Joshua Frank talked with Jesse Hagopian about his new book Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education. Jesse has taught in the public schools for over 20 years, serves on the Black Lives Matter at School steering committee, organizes for the Zinn Education Project, and founded the Ethnic Studies course at Seattle’s Garfield High School. He is an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine, the co-editor of Black Lives Matter at School and Teaching for Black Lives.” [Audio, about 50 minutes]
12) National: Brian Lehrer’s podcast did a show on “Public Education Cuts: What To Expect Under Trump 2.0.” On the show was “Dana Goldstein, education reporter at The New York Times and the author of The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (Anchor, 2015), reports on how Elon Musk and DOGE have started to do that, and how their plans will affect schools and education, and how Trump’s pick for Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, fits in with the White House’s agenda.” [Audio, about 22 minutes]
13) National: “We’ve Been Essentially Muzzled.” The Department of Education has halted thousands of civil rights investigations under Trump. “Historically, the bulk of investigations in the office have been launched after students or their families file complaints. Since Trump took office, the focus has shifted to “directed investigations,” meaning that the Trump administration has ordered those inquiries. ‘We have not been able to open any (investigations) that come from the public,’ said one longtime OCR attorney who asked not to be named for fear of losing their job. Several employees told ProPublica that they have been told not to communicate with the students, families and schools involved in cases launched in previous administrations and to cancel scheduled meetings and mediations. ‘We’ve been essentially muzzled,’ the attorney said.”
14) Florida: In an op-ed in the Pensacola News Journal, Domani Turner-Ward, a graduate student in the University of West Florida, says UWF’s new trustee picks show a breach of integrity. “One example of this is the appointment of Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy. In July 2024, Kissel wrote an article titled, ‘Putting Public Colleges on a Path to Privatization’ in which he argues that states should stop funding public colleges. He says that ‘four-year’ college programs are severely over-enrolled’ and that this problem began with the GI Bill. To support the need for privatization, Kissel also references a ‘culture of speech suppression’ faced by conservatives and moderates at public universities. There is no evidence that such an issue exists at UWF. If Kissel pursues privatizing UWF, it will skyrocket costs for students and limit the university’s ability to reach communities it has traditionally served. UWF currently ranks eighth in the nation and first in Florida on the Best for Vets list. While the GI Bill fully covers tuition at public universities, it only covers tuition partially at private universities. Privatizing UWF would create a significant economic barrier for those who wish to attend, including the many veterans in our community. It aims to solve problems that don’t exist in the process of creating many new ones.”
15) Washington: Public social housing likely approved in Seattle. “Seattle housing advocates look to have defeated Amazon, Microsoft, and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce this week with the likely passage of a ballot initiative to fund social housing through an ‘excess compensation’ tax on city businesses paying salaries of over $1 million. According to early returns for a special election Tuesday, 68.32% of voters backed funding for social housing and 57.55% chose to fund it specifically with the proposed tax. Advocates estimate that the 5% marginal tax on $1-million-plus salaries could raise around $53,000 per year for affordable housing, funding 2,000 units in 10 years. ‘This victory is just the latest sign that Americans are fed up with overpaid CEOs—and want to use tax policies to crack down on the problem,’ Sarah Anderson, Inequality.org co-editor and global economy project director at the Institute for Policy Studies, told Common Dreams.”
16) National: Municipal bond advocates are fighting the good fight for tax exemption in the upcoming federal budget. “Toby Rittner, president and CEO of the Council of Development Finance Agencies. ‘Communities use bonds to finance their built environment, infrastructure, schools and future growth needs. The housing industry uses bonds for affordable, senior and workforce housing. There are no alternatives to bonds and the United States is the only country in the world that has a market of this nature.’ The battle for the budget is underway pitting tax cuts against paying for the Trump administration’s new priories as advocates for keeping the tax-exempt status of municipal bonds work on maintaining a valuable tool. ‘Losing tax-exempt bonds would devastate American communities and set economic development efforts back decades,’ said Toby Rittner, president and CEO of the Council of Development Finance Agencies.” [Sub required]
17) National: Will the budget reconciliation process (if there is one) eliminate infrastructure funding? Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Kimberley Strassel poses some political choices Republicans will face. One will be the funding bill. “The other will be the GOP’s ‘reconciliation’ bill, in which it hopes to fund Trump priorities, extend tax reform and cut spending. There is money to be clawed back from recent legislation, including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Republicans are cheering the administration’s halt on further allocations from the $5 billion Biden electric-vehicle charger program, but are they willing to give up the obscene amounts flowing to their own solar companies, transit systems or chip projects? Separately, how hard will red-state governors kick back against obvious reforms to Medicaid or education grants if it means fewer federal dollars to state budgets? If Republicans carry down this road, they risk destroying their own DOGE experiment, rendering it ineffective or the overseer of a spoils system in which bad Democratic spending dies, while bad Republican spending thrives.” [Sub required]
18) New York: yes! magazine has an interesting excerpt from a new book comparing what happened to one public housing co-op that privatized and another that did not. “Leave the program, and cooperators can sell their share for whatever they can fetch in the market—no small amount in the rabid real estate market of New York. But leaving also means the loss of affordability for the next generation of owners, and the threat of rising costs at home for those who don’t wish to sell out. This is the choice put before the residents of St. James and Southbridge in my book Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons.”
19) International/United Kingdom: Daniel Fisher, an Assistant Professor in Management at the University of Sussex, weighs in on What Public-Private-Partnership Scandals Can Tell Us About Wrongdoing in the Water Industry. “While other findings show that PPPs can support important public service needs, such as public health, research by my colleagues and I examines a consistent pattern in UK PPP scandals and wrongdoing. Over the past decade and a half, billions of pounds of taxpayers’ funds are unaccounted for. This appears to be largely because private interests have been prioritized over public needs. As a researcher of PPP wrongdoing, the reasons for many of the scandals seem obvious. My colleagues and I studied parliamentary inquiries and reports that have scrutinized PPP wrongdoing. This research can tell us a great deal about the UK’s predicament with regard to the failings in the water industry. The first lesson is that, in general, many PPPs are motivated actually to reduce the quality of the services they deliver. One parliamentary inquiryfound that contracting services out from the public to the private sector had become a ‘transactional process’ where cost-cutting is favored and the ‘knock-on cost’ to users results in a lower-quality public service.”
20) International: Nation of Change has an article on “Foreign Companies Driving the Global Privatization of Domestic Infrastructure” by John P. Ruehl. The article was produced by Economy for All. “The geopolitical implications of these foreign investments in infrastructure are undeniable,” writes Ruehl, “with national security concerns forcing China to sell its stake in the U.S. Port of Long Beach in 2019. Yet such investments are only becoming more common globally. While they may strengthen economic ties between countries, they reduce accountability, risk undermining sovereignty, and disconnect public services from local oversight, sidelining effective public planning in favor of enriching foreign entities. This trend appears likely to continue, requiring more responsible approaches to maintaining a healthy balance between the necessity for infrastructure investment and public needs. Shorter contracts, profit-sharing models, and performance-based agreements could help countries and companies showcase their development models and expertise—potentially even at lower costs than local providers. However, profit maximization remains the driving force, particularly when financial entities dominate the field.”
21) National: Shahrzad Habibi, Research and Policy Director of In the Public Interest, says The Purge of Federal Websites and Data is Everybody’s Issue. “As an organization dedicated to research, we find the sudden disappearance of pages and datasets from U.S. government websites to be very troubling. The collection and dissemination of accurate data and findings fuel research all over the nation, in academic programs, think tanks, hospitals, private labs, and in state and local governments. But this isn’t just a problem for researchers whose projects or even life’s work have been interrupted or derailed. It’s the human cost of this loss that should worry all of us. More than 8,000 web pages across a dozen U.S. government websites were purged, and while it covers everything from a veterans’ entrepreneurship programs to a NASA site, the purge of webpages and datasets related to public health is particularly alarming. The purges, which include more than 3,000 pages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have removed information and articles about vaccines, tuberculosis surveillance, veterans’ care, women’s health, HIV testing and prevention measures, Alzheimer’s warning signs, and overdose prevention training, among many other topics. The datasets that have disappeared include large-scale national health surveys, indices, and data dashboards that are essential for policy makers and the public.”
22) National: Locking up human beings for profit is more profitable than ever. “On an earnings call Tuesday, the head of a huge private prison company celebrated the Laken Riley Act and Donald Trump’s anti-immigration executive orders. The new law and Trump’s policies are expected to lead to a flood of detention and deportation, with the private prison firm predicting that the government could ultimately need up to 200,000 new beds to hold immigration detainees. CoreCivic is so excited by its daily calls with the Trump administration that it is spending at least $40 million to renovate facilities even before inking new contracts, CEO Damon Hininger said on the call for investors. ‘I have worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career with the company,’ Hininger said, adding that he expects ‘perhaps the most significant growth in our company’s history over the next several years.’ With $2 billion in revenue, CoreCivic is a publicly traded company that dominates the private prison market along with another company, the GEO Group, which will not report its fourth-quarter earnings until later this month.”
Meanwhile, Stateline reports that, under the pressure of Trump’s moral panic over crime and immigration, states are struggling with the increasing cost of prisons. “States face new financial constraints after years of revenue growth, and lawmakers are looking for ways to cut back. So even though states might have increased spending on public safety in recent years, experts expect the corrections budgets for jails and prisons to level off, according to Brian Sigritz, the director of state fiscal studies for the National Association of State Budget Officers. ‘The public safety requests will have to be weighed against the other funding priorities,’ Sigritz told Stateline.”
23) National: How is private equity driving up the cost of fighting wildfires? Jim Hightower has the receipts. “What would cause any town or city to run short of this essential piece of its community infrastructure? Answer: old-fashioned greed, coming from a modern-day monopolistic construct called ‘private equity.’ Essentially, this is a fast-money Wall Street scheme, encouraging very wealthy investors to buy up established businesses and either plunder their assets or consolidate several of them into a monopoly. It has targeted everything from health care to newspapers—and now, your local fire department. Until recently, making and selling fire trucks was a competitive business, with family-owned manufacturers operating in every region of America.”
“However, (as detailed by BIG, a unique newsletter investigating monopolies) about a decade ago a private equity outfit began an industry ‘roll up,’ consolidating independent truck companies into a national conglomerate named REV Group. It now controls nearly half of U.S. fire truck sales. What REV mainly revved up was its profits by doubling the sticker price for trucks to more than a million dollars each. Worse, REV increased delivery time for a local department’s order from about a year to as a long as four years, meaning old trucks break down and can’t respond to catastrophes. For example, the Los Angeles fire chief reports that in last month’s horrific wildfires, more than 100 of the city’s 183 fire trucks were out of service!”
Yesterday The New York Times ran an extensive piece on the crisis of the fire truck shortage. “Chuong Ho, a firefighter and union leader who was among those who reported for work on Jan. 7, said many of the firefighters who were available to help that day could not be ‘to the front lines. ‘We didn’t have a spot for them,’ Mr. Ho said. That breakdown, records show, was in part a result of the city’s failure to hire enough mechanics to keep the rigs in service. But there was also a deeper problem: For years, the fire truck industry had been ratcheting up prices on new rigs and failing to meet delivery dates of those that were ordered. Some departments have waited years for replacement vehicles while hunting the internet for parts to keep their older rigs going. Those problems have compounded in recent years as Wall Street executives led an aggressive consolidation of the industry in a plan to boost profits from fire engine sales. One company, backed by a private equity firm, cut its own manufacturing lines as part of a streamlining strategy and then saw a backlog of fire engine orders soar into billions of dollars.”
“One of the companies Rev Group acquired was Ferrara in 2017. Mr. Carpenter, the fire chief in Arkansas, said he had noticed changes since then beyond just the rising costs for firefighting vehicles. Before, he said, when he needed a part for a Ferrara repair, he would call a contact named Charlie who would ship him the part the next day. But last year, when one of the department’s vehicles needed parts, it took more than 10 months, leaving him without one of his eight rigs for nearly a year. ‘It’s a nightmare,’ he said.”
24) National: A DOGE’s breakfast? DOGE’s Czar is planning to loot Medicare, says The American Prospect’s Maureen Tkacik. “In one of his last acts at the agency, Smith introduced a new program called the Geographic Direct Contracting Model, or ‘Geo,’ by which all remaining traditional Medicare beneficiaries were slated to be automatically assigned on the basis of their residence to a value-based care organization to which CMS would pay a flat annual fee to assume their health care ‘risk.’ Geo contractors would be virtually unregulated, though they would be held to a medical loss ratio minimum requiring them to spend at least 60 percent of their revenues on care. The Biden administration scrapped Geo in early 2021, but kept a slightly less radical Smith plan with a similar goal of stealth total privatization after renaming it ACO REACH, for ‘Accountable Care Organization Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health.’”
25) National: What does a $2 million per dose gene therapy reveal about drug pricing? ProPublica reports:
- A Record Price: The gene therapy Zolgensma helped children born with a fatal disease, spinal muscular atrophy, grow up to run and play. But the cost was stunning: $2 million per dose.
- Cashing In: While taxpayers and small charities funded the drug’s early development, executives, venture-capital backers and a pharma giant have reaped the profits.
- Priced Out: The drug’s cost adds to the nation’s ballooning bill for prescription drugs and puts Zolgensma out of reach for kids in many low- and middle-income countries.”
26) National: “Efficiency−or empire? How Elon Musk’s hostile takeover could end government as we know it.” Allison Stanger reports that “one historical parallel in particular is striking. In 1600, the British East India Company, a merchant shipping firm, began with exclusive rights to conduct trade in the Indian Ocean region before slowly acquiring quasi-governmental powers and ultimately ruling with an iron fist over British colonies in Asia, including most of what is now India. In 1677, the company gained the right to mint currency on behalf of the British crown. As I explain in my upcoming book Who Elected Big Tech? the U.S. is witnessing a similar pattern of a private company taking over government operations. Yet what took centuries in the colonial era is now unfolding at lightning speed in mere days through digital means. In the 21st century, data access and digital financial systems have replaced physical trading posts and private armies. Communications are the key to power now, rather than brute strength.”
27) National: From chains to ankle bracelets and now to smartwatches, private prison companies are cashing in. Blair Paddock reports in The Nation. “It’s an opportune time for prison behemoths to plan for the future of the industry. Stocks of two key players in private prisons, CoreCivic and Geo Group, soared after President Donald Trump won reelection in November. Both were sponsors of the conference. Not to mention that Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, lobbied for Geo Group. And Trump wasted no time after his inauguration to reverse a Biden administration policy that had directed the Justice Department not to renew contracts with private prisons. (…) On a November earnings call, a GEO Group official said they “stand ready to provide additional services and resources to help ICE meet its future needs” as Trump takes an aggressive approach to immigration, including increasing the number of people held in detention facilities and the number of people monitored who are not detained. ‘We believe we have the necessary technology and staffing resources to scale up the current utilization of the [Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, or ISAP] contract by several hundreds of thousands and upward to several millions of participants,’ George Zoley, executive chairman and founder of GEO Group said on the call.”
28) Oklahoma: Oklahoma Watch reports that despite years of scandals across the nation, “the Oklahoma Department of Corrections is planning a similar transition from in-house to privatized food service. A pending request for proposal, set to close on Feb. 21, seeks a food service provider capable of feeding nearly 20,000 state prisoners daily. The agency plans to have the outside food vendor assume food service operations by late summer. (…) The request for proposal calls for bidders to have at least a decade of large-scale correctional food service experience. Once awarded, the vendor and corrections department would develop a master menu that meets minimum nutritional requirements. The agency is also bidding out its commissary service to a private vendor. One of the largest commissary vendors in the U.S., the Union Supply Group, is owned by Aramark, sparking concern among prisoner advocates that vendors might intentionally serve bland food to drive up sales of higher-margin snack foods.”
29) National: Veteran reporter Seymour Hersh recalls a key point from Thomas Frank: “The George W. Bush administration, which came to office in 2001 and responded to the 9/11 attacks by Al Qaeda by invading Iraq, also saw itself as a political enemy of the federal government, and, writes Frank, eventually suggested that half of all federal positions had to be open ‘to bids from the private sector.’ How did that work out? Frank writes that in ‘each of the Bush administration’s great initiatives—antiterrorism, the recovery from Hurricane Katrina, and Iraq reconstruction—privatized government played a starring role and proved itself a gold-plated botch.” Frank concluded that the consequence of the conservatives’ ‘unrelenting faith in the badness of government is . . . bad government.’”
30) National: Labor journalist Hamilton Nolan says we are in dangerous territory in the system of labor relations. “Republican anti-union presidential administrations have always weaponized the NLRB against organized labor by naming anti-union bastards to run it. Then Democrats put more pro-union people on it, and so it goes. Still, even anti-union NLRBs still, to some extent, are bound by the framework of labor law. They can get less enthusiastic about enforcing it, and their general counsels can undertake efforts to make regulations more anti-union, but the process has always been somewhat deliberate and characterized by this legalistic back-and-forth. Something different is happening now. Corporate America is in the midst of a concerted legal effort to destroy the NLRA altogether and have the NLRB declared unconstitutional. Trump has, in a blatantly illegal move, fired a Democratic NLRB member, denying the board a quorum. This effectively allows employers to escape labor law enforcement indefinitely. (…) So? Let’s not waste time deluding ourselves. The courts are unlikely to be our saviors now. What can’t be won in the courts will have to be won in the streets. The pendulum is swinging deep down into the pit. What can you do? You can organize your workplace. And you can learn to love strikes. We’ll get back to the mountaintop, but it’s going to be a long climb up.”
31) National: Artificial intelligence (AI) is infiltrating the U.S. government, Howard French reports in Foreign Policy. “In recent days, while Trump and Musk have justified these actions as urgent and long-overdue measures to increase government efficiency and cut waste, it has become increasingly clear that Musk’s power also risks subordinating U.S. interests and institutions to the surging AI industry, a highly competitive frontier of the economy in which Musk is heavily invested. The range of potential conflicts of interests is little short of astonishing. If Musk and Trump overcome the rising tide of court orders temporarily blocking many of these early power grabs—whether through successful judicial appeals or simply defying the courts—there will be little to stop the massive and sudden incursion of AI into the nitty-gritty of government. If left unchecked, DOGE’s access to sensitive and confidential information about millions of Americans contained in Treasury Department records and elsewhere could deliver what may be the most lucrative commodity in the coming decades—data—into the lap of the country’s new AI baron.” [Sub required]
32) International/Honduras: Marcia Perdomo reports that Crypto Bros are Trying to Bankrupt Honduras for Scuttling Their Private Cities. “U.S. based libertarians and entrepreneurs have longed to build their own private city somewhere in the world where they can set their own laws and eliminate regulations. In 2009, following a military coup in Honduras, the crypto bros got what they were looking for: A deeply corrupt government involved in drug trafficking — and willing to hand over chunks of national territory to the highest bidders in the name of attracting foreign investment. From the start, the idea prompted widespread opposition in the country, but the legislative framework was imposed and contracts were signed regardless. Now that the government of Xiomara Castro has fought to overturn the legal regime enabling private cities, an investor group called Próspera, made up of three U.S. companies, is suing Honduras for almost $11 billion. Their suit is one of 15 active cases against Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere, for at least $14 billion in known claims.” See also the report The Corporate Assault on Honduras.
33) International/United Kingdom: As some American conservatives are again dreaming of cutting or privatizing Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare, we would do well to recall one of the greatest privatization disasters in history: Britain’s privatization of retirement security over 40 years ago. Let’s let Forbes, via CNN, pick up the story during their coverage of George W. Bush’s similar effort in 2005: “But one need only look to Britain, once held up as a model by pension reformers, to see how the lofty ideals behind privatization can easily go awry. Britain now has a state pension system that’s so stingy and a system of private accounts so inadequate that it has the potential to create a generation of impoverished retirees. In fact, Britain’s experience has been so bad that it’s effectively dismantling a system strikingly similar to what the White House is proposing here.”
And then there’s this: “Call it Thatcher’s timebomb: the great council housing selloff, a crisis hidden in plain sight.”