what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label water privatisation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label water privatisation. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Privatisation of public facilities stinks!

I’ ve already confessed on the blog that I was too open-minded in my attitude during the opening stages of Thatcher’s privatisation agenda. Who knows, I mused in the 1980s, perhaps private management skills and more competition can shake up these systems and make them more customer-friendly. Where there was indeed the possibility of competition (telecommunications and energy) the results have been defensible.
Elsewhere (railways, water, health, education etc) the results have been utterly disastrous and we all need to shout this from the treetops. Private ownership or management of public assets stinks!!
Cities worldwide are experiencing the failures of water privatisation. Unequal access, inflated prices, environmental hazards and scandalous profit margins are prompting municipalities to take back control of this essential service. A new book Remunicipalisation – putting water back into public hands from Corporate Europe Observatory, Transnational Institute and the Municipal Services Project examines this growing trend for water ‘remunicipalisation’. Case studies analyse the transition from private to public water provision in Paris, Dar es Salaam, Buenos Aires and Hamilton, and look at a national-level experiment in Malaysia.
The journey toward better public water illustrates the benefits and challenges of municipal ownership, but the book also highlights the stranglehold of international financial institutions and the legacies of corporate control, putting water in the context of the larger debate about ‘alternatives to privatisation’ and drawing lessons from these experiences for future action in favour of public services.

Most of us thought that the global crisis would loosen the grip of corporate power, neo-liberalism and deregulation and make voters more sympathetic to the traditional social democratic agenda. The opposite seems to have happened. We need a better understanding of the reasons for this. In my view there are at least three –
• the crassness of the new breed of social democrats (New Labour and others who chose to make Faustian deals)
• the power of the corporate media
• the sheer scale of the neo-liberal lobbying tentacles

Radical reform is blocked because the crisis has strengthened elite power over governing structures and highlighted the importance of what an important recent paper called "democratic disconnects" .
First, the crisis has discredited banking and finance but it has not disempowered financial elites because crisis has strengthened the power of conservative financial, bureaucratic and political elites within our governing structures. Second, a series of democratic disconnects have disempowered the critics of finance in the technocracy and civil society who have been unable to turn popular hostility into effective reform of finance. The disconnects are such that, after the decline of the mass parties, it is now structurally difficult to convert the radical technocratic agenda or civil society activism into effective policy reform. Our story is of a stifled revolution and the reassertion of power by traditional elites.
For this reason, it is all the more important that successes in driving back corporate power are properly reported. These examples of remunicipalisation are inspiring.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

worthwhile briefings


I mentioned yesterday a site which has tracked over the past decade the performance of commercial companies which have been given the opportunity to run public services both in Europe and globally. I’ve now had a chance to download and glance at the various briefing papers on its site about the costs to governments and consumers of allowing commercial companies to get involved with the management of services such as water and health – and it’s one large eye-opener. Privatisation has become a term to avoid – hence the proliferation of new terms such as PPPs. The various papers on the site give a blow-by-blow account of the breakdown of services; the government bailouts; the contractual complications – a never-ending list of disasters from around the world. I hadn’t realised that basically 2 giant companies dominate the water market. Nor that Czechia, Slovakia and Poland refused to take any more – and passed legislation recently to limit the role of the private sector in health services. And the Slovak Government has been hit with a 2 billion law-suit from one of the companies denied access to what they clearly regarded as rich pickings. The report of September 2010 on private water companies is a typical example of a great briefing.
And a good tough article from Stiglitz on the scale of greed in the USA The painting is one by the famous Ivan Christov (1900-87) of whom I know very little