privatization

Mother Jones Our Hats Are Off To You

How many Americans know that America has privatized prisons, the shares of which are listed on stock exchanges?  Free market ideologues provided cover for corrupt Republican politicians to divert taxpayers’ hard-earned money to favored political insiders with the false claim that prisons run by private owners are more cost effective.  A Mother Jones reporter took a job as a private prison guard and found that private prisons are places of unimaginable violence.

Global Capitalism Has Written Off The Human Race

Economic theory teaches that free price and profit movements ensure that capitalism produces the greatest welfare for the greatest number.  Losses indicate economic activities where costs exceed the value of production, thus investment in these activities is curtailed.  Profits indicate economic activities where the value of output exceeds its cost, thus investment increases.  Prices indicate the relative scarcity and value of inputs and outputs, thus serving to organize production most efficiently.

The Global Agenda: Privatizing the Planet

Debt, Debt Trading and Why It Is Important

You don’t have to repay the advance we gave you last week, provided you spend half of it next week.

A bit of history on debt from Prof. Buckley of the University of New South Wales (Australia),

The beginning was in the early 1980s. And in the beginning were bad loans, and from the loins of these bad loans sprang debt-equity exchanges, which quickly begat debt-for-nature exchanges, and then debt-for-education exchanges, and most recently, debt-for-health exchanges. And today, when all the begatting has been done, the progeny are known mostly as debt-for-development exchanges, or sometimes as debt-for-investment projects (by those who wish to suggest for the technique a more commercial focus).

Where is the exchange when a rich country offers to cancel some of its loans to a poor country, if the poor country spends money on a development project? That’s like our saying to our daughter, ‘You don’t have to repay the advance we gave you last week, provided you spend half of it next week’. [1]

Thus we observe early forms of debt trading, of sorts.

In the debt-for-health segment of the professor's report, we also note:

The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, is another UN initiative. It is a public-private partnership which seeks to finance public health initiatives in developing countries.[1]

The honorable professor mentioned the early 1980s, so let us examine a presidential-level cabinet meeting which was taking place in the White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, USA, at that time.