Italy's PM: can I privatize water supply, guarantee private investors a minimum 7% ROI on investments in water supply infrastructure, avoid showing up at scheduled court hearings and build a few nuclear plants, please?
NO, you can't, answered nearly 30 million italians (
95% of the voters, 57% of the people that held the right to vote) in the latest italian national referendum, whose final results are just about to be
published (italian).
[more inside]
posted by elpapacito
on Jun 13, 2011 -
22 comments
Rep. Peter King (R-NY), not content with
questioning Muslim loyalty, has introduced
HR 607, the "Broadband for First Responders Act of 2011,"
to take away HAM radio from amateur operators, and sell it to he highest commercial bidder in order to fund some kind of separate internet for cops.
posted by Slap*Happy
on Mar 10, 2011 -
72 comments
Poverty is an abstraction, even for the poor. But the symptoms of collective impoverishment are all about us. Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid, and the uninsured: all suggest a collective failure of will. These shortcomings are so endemic that we no longer know how to talk about what is wrong, much less set about repairing it. And yet something is seriously amiss.
Historian Tony Judt, dying of Lou Gehrig's disease,
makes a passionate call for a new New Left.
[Previously]
posted by Sonny Jim
on Apr 10, 2010 -
59 comments
Roads To Riches (or We've Got a Bridge in Brooklyn to Sell You--Seriously) -- Why investors are clamoring to take over America's highways, bridges, and airports—and why the public should be nervous.--
...a slew of Wall Street firms—Goldman, Morgan Stanley, the Carlyle Group, Citigroup, and many others—is piling into infrastructure ... Assets sold now could change hands many times over the next 50 years, with each new buyer feeling increasing pressure to make the deal work financially. It's hardly a stretch to imagine service suffering in such a scenario; already, the record in the U.S. has been spotty. ...
posted by amberglow
on Apr 29, 2007 -
107 comments
Few things are more
sacred to Canadians than the nation's medicare system. After years of health spending cutbacks by conservative politicians,
debate rages over whether private providers should now be
allowed to compete with the public system. In British Columbia, where the government is shovelling tax dollars into the 2010 Olympics, patients are being
left to die in emergency rooms and long-term care facilities due to
overcrowding and
understaffing. Is it too late to save public health care? Should it be saved?
posted by 327.ca
on Apr 27, 2006 -
89 comments
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism --
...Although hotels and industry have already started reconstructing on the coast, in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and India, governments have passed laws preventing families from rebuilding their oceanfront homes. Hundreds of thousands of people are being forcibly relocated inland, to military style barracks in Aceh and prefab concrete boxes in Thailand. The coast is not being rebuilt as it was--dotted with fishing villages and beaches strewn with handmade nets. Instead, governments, corporations and foreign donors are teaming up to rebuild it as they would like it to be: the beaches as playgrounds for tourists, the oceans as watery mines for corporate fishing fleets, both serviced by privatized airports and highways built on borrowed money....
Naomi Klein on "reconstruction" money after natural disasters--and who benefits.
(Makes Wolfowitz seem like a less unlikely choice to head the World Bank after reading, too.)
posted by amberglow
on Apr 17, 2005 -
36 comments
AARP Says No To Bush ... The AARP is coming out strong against private Social security investment accounts, saying they "will actually make the problem worse, not better." In January they plan to spend
$50 million on an ad campaign opposing privatization.
Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly has also been awesome in pointing out that the common wisdom that Social Security is in trouble is
just not true.
posted by nathanrudy
on Dec 30, 2004 -
116 comments
Reclaiming the Commons "One of the great questions of contemporary American political economy is, who shall control the commons? "The commons" refers to that vast range of resources that the American people collectively own, but which are rapidly being enclosed: privatized, traded in the market, and abused." This is a fairly long, but incredibly well researched article about the "silent theft of our shared assets and civic inheritance".
posted by dejah420
on Aug 4, 2002 -
23 comments
Italy privatizes its culture. At least that's what will happen when a bill turning management of all of its museums sails through the Parliament this week. Critics of the Berlesconi-driven measure say that trying to turn culture into a profit center is foolish as there are only a few attractions that make any money now.
posted by MAYORBOB
on Dec 8, 2001 -
4 comments
