HIGHLIGHTS
- ITPI hosting webinar on corporate attacks on public water
- Education Wars: Interview with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider
- The Oil Company-University connection
JUMP: EDUCATION | INFRASTRUCTURE | PUBLIC SERVICES | THE REST
First, the Good News
1) National/Save the Date: On September 17, 2024, at 7 pm eastern, In the Public Interest, Keep Water Affordable, Save Chester Water Authority, NOPE, Food & Water Watch, and Freshwater Future are hosting a webinar to illuminate the recent developments in water privatization. Following a brief overview of the new report, a panel of leaders in the campaigns to prevent the corporate takeover of water resources will review the ways in which corporations used their resources to pass legislation wildly favorable to their interests, including the privatization-paving Act 12 in Pennsylvania, and the ways community activists studied, organized, fought back, and won.
The discussion will feature Shar Habibi, Director of Research and Policy, In the Public Interest; Bill Ferguson, Co-Founder of Keep Water Affordable; Catherine Miller, Save Chester Water Authority; Kofi Osei, Towamencin Township Supervisor, and Mary Grant, Public Water for All Director, Food and Water Watch.
2) National: Check out this interview by In the Public Interest of Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider on the education wars, the title of their new book. “we find ourselves in a political moment when people feel very strongly about the education of their own children, and are fearful that if their kids don’t get enough schooling they won’t get ahead in life. And it is simultaneously a moment when we have a badly atrophied sense of the public good, and when we can hardly remember why we fund schools with our tax dollars,” Berkshire and Schneider say. But “since we started working on the book, the movement to defend public schools has really taken off. What started as a piecemeal, grassroots effort to respond to extremist school board candidates has grown much more sophisticated and organized. We think that’s a big part of why groups like Moms for Liberty are on the ropes right now. We mention a number of organizations in the book that are doing incredible organizing. Shout out to Save Our Schools Arizona, the Wisconsin Public Education Network, and Granite State Progress in New Hampshire.”
3) National: The Environmental Protection Agency has strengthened a rule limiting toxic air pollution from factories, refineries and other industrial facilities, The Washington Post reports, “reversing one of former president Donald Trump’s major environmental rollbacks. In an update posted on its website, the agency quietly signaled it had finalized changes to the ‘Once In, Always In’ rule, which requires facilities classified as ‘major’ sources of toxic air pollution to always maintain strict pollution controls, even if they are later reclassified.”
4) California: Fertility treatment availability could expand. “The bill would require insurance providers to cover infertility diagnoses and services. Right now, they only have to offer them. Democratic State Senator Caroline Menchivar from Van Nuys sponsored the bill and told the Assembly Health Committee in July that coverage would make treatment more accessible. For Californians struggling with infertility, the very existence of the family they hope to build can depend on income alone. The bill would cover in vitro fertilization, which has been in the news recently, after the Alabama Supreme Court banned the practice there in February.” The bill is awaiting Governor Gavin Newsom’s signature.”
5) Massachusetts/National: As school bus systems across the U.S. face collapse, here’s how one Massachusetts city solved its school bus driver shortage problem. The city of Worcester has managed to do something many districts have struggled to do: Fill all of their bus driver positions before classes began. “Working with the teachers union and their bus drivers the school system dropped the vendor they used and guaranteed drivers 30 hours a week making them full-time city employees, which gives “benefit to be into their health insurance and retirement.” They’re paid a little over $31 an hour making it a desirable switch “for people like Howard Conley, who left another transportation job to drive students instead with a smile.” The only way to get out of the school bus shortage for drivers “is to train new people otherwise we’re just gonna keep stealing them from each other and we’re never gonna get out of it.” [Video, about 2 minutes].
6) Nebraska: The partial repeal of private K-12 school vouchers has been certified for Nebraska’s November ballot. “Barring legal challenges, including at least one filed earlier in the day Thursday, Nebraskans will vote on the fate of Legislative Bill 1402 this November. The law is a modified version and replacement of its immediate predecessor LB 753 that was structured as a $25 million tax credit to encourage donations for “Opportunity Scholarships.” It passed in May 2023.”
7) Think Tanks: Is the “efficient markets” fan club throwing in the towel? Not quite yet but they’re crab-walking toward it. See this interview with their chief guru, Eugene Fama in the Financial Times. “The mania for all things artificial intelligence is the latest challenge to Fama’s theories, transforming the world’s stock market into an inverted pyramid resting precariously on a narrow clutch of companies worth trillions of dollars. These can add and shed hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of stock market value on virtually no news. As a result, even some Fama acolytes are losing their faith. ‘I think [markets] are probably less efficient than I thought 25 years ago,’ Clifford Asness, a hedge fund manager and a former research assistant to Fama, admitted to the FT in an interview last year. “And they’ve probably gotten less efficient over my career.’” [Sub required]
Meanwhile, the world is moving on. “Efficient markets” theory has been used as a bludgeon by antigovernment propagandists for decades, but government can be more efficient and effective than private enterprise.
Nathan Robinson pits his local DMV against Starbucks. “The private sector can create dismal, terrible experiences. The government can operate efficiently. Simple stories that portray the public sector as inevitably bureaucratic and useless are simply wrong. Now, you may say that government tends to be less effective, because it lacks accountability mechanisms, and even if there are exceptional instances like the Sarasota DMV, they only succeed by defying the natural drift of public institutions toward inefficiency. But I don’t see any reason why every DMV can’t operate as swiftly as my local one. I’m similarly skeptical of narratives about public schools being doomed to failure, because I attended a superb public school and there is no reason why that standard can’t be met elsewhere.”
8) National/Think Tanks: The Heritage Foundation wants to privatize public colleges and universities. Adam Kissel, a Visiting Fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Higher Education Programs under Trump and former senior program officer at the Charles Koch Foundation tells us why in the first paragraph of his new Heritage article: the First Amendment blocks the government from censoring free speech and/or requiring schools to toe the right-wing line, and privatizing them would allow them to enter the private zone where free speech has no or little protection. “Many advocates want what the First Amendment will not permit,” says Kissel.
This is a good example of how arguments for school privatization are shifting “from evidence-based arguments to ideological ones” (see No. 11 below also).
9) National/Think Tanks: A must-read, thoroughgoing article on how private, for profit energy companies are reaching into and influencing higher education has been written by Sofia Hiltner, Emily Eaton, Noel Healy, Andrew Scerri, Jennie C. Stephens, Geoffrey Supran, and published in WIREs.
“The evolution of fossil fuel industry tactics for obstructing climate action, from outright denial of climate change to more subtle techniques of delay, is under growing scrutiny,” the authors write. “One key site of ongoing climate obstructionism identified by researchers, journalists, and advocates is higher education. Scholars have exhaustively documented how industry-sponsored academic research tends to bias scholarship in favor of tobacco, pharmaceutical, food, sugar, lead, and other industries, but the contemporary influence of fossil fuel interests on higher education has received relatively little academic attention. We report the first literature review of academic and civil society investigations into fossil fuel industry ties to higher education in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. We find that universities are an established yet under-researched vehicle of climate obstruction by the fossil fuel industry, and that universities’ lack of transparency about their partnerships with this industry poses a challenge to empirical research. We propose a research agenda of topical and methodological directions for future analyses of the prevalence and consequences of fossil fuel industry–university partnerships, and responses to them.”
10) National: “Educators and all sections of the working class face an unprecedented assault on basic social rights,” writes the World Socialist Website. “The very existence of public education is at stake, the signs of which are visible everywhere. Schools are being shuttered by the dozens in communities across the US, and thousands of educators and other essential staff, such as librarians, school counselors and mental health workers, are losing their jobs. Those who remain eke out a living with low pay, high healthcare premiums and ever-increasing workloads. A Pew Research Center survey confirmed this nationally. Seventy percent of teachers reported understaffing, 98 percent said they had too much work, 77 percent said their job was “extremely stressful,” and over half (52 percent) said they would not advise young people to become teachers. Poverty was cited as the single greatest ‘major problem’ in schools, with chronic absenteeism and anxiety/depression of students close behind.”
11) National: Brad Onishi interviewed Dr. Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, on the controversial issue of school vouchers in the U.S. “They discuss the historical context of the voucher movement, tracing it back to economist Milton Friedman and its intersection with the Brown v. Board decision. The dialogue highlights the ideological motivations behind vouchers, linking them to conservative Christian nationalism and libertarian views on government regulation. Dr. Cowen offers a critical analysis of recent voucher programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C., presenting evidence of their negative effects on academic outcomes. The conversation also delves into the cultural and political forces driving the voucher agenda, especially during the Trump administration, emphasizing the shift from evidence-based arguments to ideological ones.” [Audio, about 35 minutes].
12) California: Huntington Beach is prepared to fight a state ban on library book bans, its city attorney says. Fresno is also wrestling with the issue of book bans. The bill is on Gov. Newsom’s desk. “The California Freedom to Read Act aims to address these and future attempts by ‘banning book bans.’ The proposed bill would require public libraries to maintain a publicly accessible collection development policy that guides the selection of materials and establishes a process for community members to share their concerns. It would also allow the public to request that materials be reconsidered for inclusion in the library’s collection. The bill would prohibit library materials from being excluded or limited solely based on subject matter, author or sources, among other things.”
13) Oklahoma: Brad Onishi and Dan Miller did a short segment on “the mixed messages of voting and Oklahoma’s aggressive educational policies” on their Straight White American Jesus podcast. They open the show with this famous declaration by the late Paul Weyrich (for background see this and this), the founder of the Heritage Foundation, creators of Project 2025 and many other Mandates for Leadership that have set out the programs of the right wing in America for decades. “Today on our episode, we want to first hear from a friend of the show, Mickey Dollins, who is a state rep in Oklahoma, who’s going to give us an update on education and some actions being taken against Ron Walters, a superintendent there.” [Audio, about 24 minutes].
14) North Carolina: Republican state lawmakers have agreed on a plan to fully fund school vouchers, and are expected to vote on it this week. “The legislature originally allocated $293.5 million for the private school vouchers for 2024-25. It adds $248 million to the program for this year, bringing the one-year total to more than $540 million. Democrats, led by Gov. Roy Cooper, have argued that the state should instead be spending the money on the state’s public schools. ‘Our public schools are struggling to hire teachers, bus drivers and other critical staff,’ Cooper said Thursday, noting thousands of teacher vacancies across the state. ‘That is a problem we can easily solve, but the Republicans who control the purse strings refuse to do it.’ Cooper noted that a public school loses money for every student who leaves to enroll at another school, including a private school.”
15) Pennsylvania: As we’ve reported many times in a number of ways, charter schools have siphoned off millions and millions of public education dollars without producing the results long promised by advocates—and the profiteers behind them. In the Public Interest has reported on the real estate/charter school industrial complex and the fiscal impacts of charter schools on school districts, among other topics. We’re happy to share with you a new report from our friends at Good Jobs First, a national policy resource center that promotes corporate and government accountability in economic development.
Pennsylvania Cyber Charter Schools Fail Black and Brown Students is the sixth in a series of quarterly reports the organization has produced that “looks at the relationship between race, ethnicity, and economic development.” It found Pennsylvania’s publicly funded and privately owned fully online cyber charter schools, which enroll 60,000 students—the highest number in the country–have lower graduation rates and performance measures across most subjects. The discrepancies are especially severe for Black and Brown students.
16) National/Utah: Our public lands are slipping away, says Mike Bader. “Utah claims that 18.5 million acres of “unappropriated” Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands must be turned over to the state because it has been deprived of the revenues BLM collects from grazing, logging and mining. History shows that as a condition of statehood, Utah agreed to not seek control of federal public lands. The Utah Enabling Act of 1894 established the terms and conditions for statehood and a constitution. The act was signed by President Cleveland on July 18, 1894. Under Section 12 the Act transferred a little more than 1 million acres of federal lands to Utah, not 18.5 million. It states: “The said state of Utah shall not be entitled to any further or other grants of land for any purpose…” No matter to the authors of Project 2025, who advocate for privatizing public lands and erasing America’s environmental and wildlife protection laws. The Utah lawsuit may be the first installment.”
17) National/Virginia: The federal government is hiding the ball on national park privatization, says New American Journal. “The federal government’s management of the National Park Service in Shenandoah National Park in Luray, Virginia has proposed to completely privatize all commercial operations in the park, including the campgrounds, without notifying the public or allowing public comments. The privatization plan is buried down in a press release about the new concessionaire contract, which is what the National Park Service calls private contractors. If you recall the documentary series produced by PBS film maker Ken Burns, who called the national parks ‘America’s Best Idea,’ you will remember how private ‘profiteers’ had to be removed from these special places in nature for the federal government to take them over for preservation and conservation. The mandate of the park service was also to allow affordable access to all members of the American public without regard to income.”
18) National: Trump’s infrastructure bank? Trump is pitching a sovereign wealth fund to pay for infrastructure. “Trump did not provide specifics on the proposal and added that the name ‘sovereign wealth fund’ may not be ‘appropriate.’ But the idea would be to create a fund, supported with tariffs on certain goods and other revenues, that would be managed by private managers and make strategic investments in U.S. infrastructure. (…) The idea marks the latest proposal for a national fund or bank that would be used to finance U.S. infrastructure. Supporters of a national infrastructure bank two weeks ago lobbied Democrats at their convention in Chicago to support a bill that would create a $5 trillion bank.” [Sub required]. Previous proposals for a national infrastructure bank have failed on political and policy grounds, as questions have been raised about democratic control of project planning, selection, and delivery under such a system, which the Biden administration and Congress did not include in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
19) Florida: In a front page story on its “Real Estate/Luxury Homes” section, The Wall Street Journal tells the story of a major confrontation between property owners and the public over beach privatization in Walton County on the Emerald Coast. “Beachgoers on the smaller slabs of public beach and along the perimeters of the larger ones have to keep an eye out for private-property signs—and sometimes security guard—blocking off areas where they can’t lounge. Earlier this summer, Georgia resident James Jordan rented a three-bedroom home for his family for four nights for about $3,200 total. With children and beach equipment in tow, the Jordan family used the public beach access most convenient to their rental. By midday, the public beach it led to was swarming with people. ‘In one word: crowded,’ said the 32-year-old father of three. ‘The hardest part was you could look across this imaginary line and see unused beach.’ Arguments over public versus private beaches have popped up in coastal communities across the country. The nearly decadelong debate plaguing South Walton is a hot-button topic in county meetings, on local Facebook pages and at area watering holes. It centers around one question: Should the public’s past use of beaches trump private-property rights?” [Sub required]
20) Louisiana: The Bayou State is encountering construction problems on its first P3. The Bond Buyer reports that “Louisiana has encountered a problem with its first public-private partnership, with the tolling and full opening of a new Belle Chasse bridge delayed for at least seven months. The bridge was to be fully opened in mid-April, but plans are delayed by subsidence of the newly constructed north and south approaches to the new bridge. The state has penalized the developer, Plenary Americas, $10,000 a day in liquidated damages since the mid-April deadline. As of Thursday, Sept. 5, that fine is $1.45 million.” [Sub required]
21) Missouri: Here they come. David Stokes, the director of municipal policy at the Koch/Sinquefield-backed Show-Me Institute, is pushing for the privatization of the Columbia water and electrical systems. That went so well in Jacksonville, after all.
22) New Jersey: Food & Water Watch outlines three reasons why Water Privatization Is a Bad Deal for New Jerseyans. 1) 1. Privatization Leads to Higher Costs and Higher Bills; 2) 2. Private Companies Put Profit Over People; and 3) Privatization Takes Away Local Control and Democracy.
“Publicly owned water and sewer systems provide residents with democratic control of their most essential resource” FWW’s Kate Delaney, Mary Grant, and Charlie Kratovil write. “Handing it over to a private company limits public accountability. With public ownership, residents can visit their elected officials and let them know if and how the water system isn’t serving them. If the officials don’t respond, the community can vote them out of office. However, privatization entirely eliminates these options. Residents don’t have a vote in the corporate boardroom. Moreover, privatization usually leads to a loss of transparency, as companies restrict public access to information. This transparency is key for communities to understand potential problems in their water systems and push for change.” Right on cue, New Jersey American Water has just garnered a rate increase from state authorities.
23) International: If public or private project staffers or even their bosses discover problems with large infrastructure financing schemes, will they face retribution for reporting it? How rigorous can project performance be in a hostile work environment? Does this affect the rhetoric of private or contractor efficiency and rigorous government oversight? These and other questions are raised in a new Financial Times report that half the staff of the European Investment Bank fear reprisals for whistleblowing.
“The bank’s internal survey, taken in 2023, shows that 50 per cent of staff feared “repercussion” if they reported any misconduct including bullying, harassment or fraud claims, The FT reports. “Only 14 per cent were satisfied with the outcome after they had spoken up over such misconduct, according to a leaked presentation seen by the FT. The findings come at a critical time for the famously insular institution, which Hoyer once described as “growing more or less undetected in the woods of Luxembourg”. EU capitals, under pressure to fund the bloc’s ambitious green transition and defence needs, are increasingly looking to the EIB and its €550bn balance sheet to meet those demands.” [Sub required]
24) International/United Kingdom: Thames Water, the failing centerpiece of Britain’s water privatization disaster, is lashing out at its regulator, OFWAT, for proposing cuts to its business plan. On top of that, “the UK’s biggest water supplier, which serves 16mn people in south-east England, said on Wednesday that it wanted to raise customer bills by £18.99 a month—or 52 per cent—by 2030 to fund investment in wastewater treatment and other improvements to its services. That could become a 59 per cent rise if given extra spending allowances by the regulator. Thames blamed the latest proposed increase on new projections for its customer numbers.”
In the comments below the FT story, one commenter says “TW appear to want to continue robbing their captive ‘customers’ with no fear of serious consequences for those running the company. There should be a police investigation into their behaviour & prosecutions undertaken for failure to undertake modernisation of infrastructure & repeated failure to stop sewage entering rivers, etc. work promised decades ago, which is negligent towards their consumers. The Water Act & environmental legislation needs to be more stringent, tougher on company bosses and make imprisonment an ultimate sanction for flouting the law.” Another observes, “The executive director of regulation and strategy at Thames Water used to be the CEO of OFWAT!!!!” [Sub required]
25) National: Writing in The New Republic, Jason Linkins outlines “Trump’s Diabolical Plan for the Federal Workforce.” He writes, “Trump and his allies—notably the far-right weirdos of the Peter Thiel Extended Universe, which includes vice presidential hopeful J.D. Vance—dream of purging the federal government of anyone who isn’t a true MAGA believer and bringing back a souped-up spoils system that would transform the government into an engine of retribution. Trump learned during his first term that the federal workforce was often a de facto blockade against his corrupt designs, simply because throughout its ranks are people who follow the rules. And while purging this workforce of its dedicated lifers and replacing them with cronies and trolls won’t make the civil service smarter or more efficient, it will reduce resistance to unlawful orders and create opportunities for corruption. Currently, federal employees are protected if they refuse unlawful orders. Trump wants to change that, so that the massive federal workforce might be transformed into the fist of an authoritarian president.”
26) National: A Trump term could end the Department of Veterans Affairs, Michael Embrich writes in Rolling Stone. “Thanks to the conservative Supreme Court, thousands of Veterans Affairs Department rules and regulations are now vulnerable to court challenges, a scenario that could be ignited by a new Trump administration. As a young political staffer, one of the first hard lessons I learned was that in politics, there are no coincidences. During Donald Trump‘s term as president, his administration’s push to expand private health care for veterans through the VA Mission Act sparked significant controversy. Although Trump framed the law as fulfilling his campaign promise to offer veterans more ‘choice’ in their health care, many major veterans service organizations saw it as a step toward privatizing the VA. They feared that the expansion of private care, which was estimated to cost billions, would drain resources from the VA’s facilities and degrade the quality of care veterans relied on.”
27) National: The American system of incarceration and immigration detention has been undergoing some sharp criticism this year. In January, the Associated Press released the results of a sweeping two year investigation that revealed racial bias and massive corporate profiteering off of prison labor. “Reporters also found prison labor in the supply chains of giants like McDonald’s, Walmart and Costco – and in the supply chains of goods being shipped all over the world via multinational companies, including to countries that have been slapped with import bans by Washington in recent years for using prison and forced labor themselves.”
More Perfect Union summarized it this way. “There are about 2 million incarcerated people across the country. Around 800,000 are in some type of work program. It’s a multibillion dollar industry. These jobs include everything from landscaping, raising livestock, and picking crops to work release programs in fast food chains or home repair. In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas, incarcerated workers are paid nothing for their labor. In other states the pay can be as little as a few cents an hour. Work release jobs sometimes pay the minimum wage, but workers can have their wages garnished for room and board at the prison.”
More Perfect Union says “Alabama is farming out incarcerated people to work at hundreds of companies, including McDonald’s & Wendy’s. The state takes 40% of wages and often denies parole to keep people as cheap labor. Getting written up can lead to solitary confinement. This is modern day slavery.” Watch the video. For more see the campaign by Worth Rises and other abolitionist organizations to End the Exception.
And a couple of weeks ago, Victoria Law, writing in The Nation, detailed the horrendous conditions that prisoners and detainees are being forced to endure before, during and after childbirth. “Extreme heat has long been a concern for incarcerated pregnant women and those behind bars with underlying health conditions.”
28) National: Trump says he will create a slash-and-burn “efficiency commission” aimed at cutting federal programs and eliminating “trillions” in improper payments. “The announcement came during an hour-long speech before the Economic Club of New York that veered frequently into lies. The proposed Government Efficiency Commission would be led by billionaire Elon Musk, who recently endorsed the Republican candidate and suggested the idea to Trump in an interview last month.”
29) Texas: Can a privatized boat ramp cut off access to public emergency services? Nueces County Emergency Service District 2 says, “Like many, ESD2 is also feeling the impact of the sale/privatization of Bluff Land informed that currently there is no ability for a lease to continue and it was necessary unless a purchase a was executed. ESD2 temporarily will have the boat on a trailer operational adjustments but more suitable/permanent options are already in play”
KIIITV reports “‘Obviously our boat being here has a tremendous operational value,’ Fire Chief Weston Beseda said. ‘We’ve been blessed operationally to respond straight to the boat and put it into the water.’ But after several years at the spot, the fire chief is having to come up with a new game plan after the owner of the marina has decided to privatize.”
30) National: WBUR looks at the state of space travel privatization after Boeing’s Starliner difficulties. “On Friday, Boeing’s troubled Starliner spacecraft heads back to Earth. NASA gave Boeing a contract to build it to carry crew to and from the International Space Station. Space X also got a similar contract. We take a look at how outsourcing space travel to private companies is going. Here & Now’s Lisa Mullins speaks with Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica.” [Audio, about 6 minutes]