``...Here are the main ones for the U.S...''
Marta
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Thanks Marta, for the reading list. I finally couldn't stand it any longer and called Mary Lou, just after sending that post. I'll see her next Monday so I'll have a little time to chase down some of these.
It turned out that she was working on some legal background materials of the original 504 and ADA for potential methods to extend them into international law and how to adapt these for use within the legal framework of other countries.
So, any thoughts on that or anything related?
Rob Schaap posted an article published in the Australian Financial Review (GATS: The End of Democracy?) last Sunday (Re: post-Kyoto E-diplomacy) that holds:
``...Since negotiations began earlier this year, anti-globalisation activists have been warning that the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) poses a major threat to democracy and that proposed changes being negotiated will lead inevitably to the demise of most public services including health and education....
...close scrutiny of the GATS text and related World Trade Organization (WTO) documents reveals that there is a great deal of substance to these warnings...''
While I was reading this, I kept thinking about all those lost battles over extending US social services, education, and welfare to improve conditions for people with severe disabilities---and of course all the people originally envisioned as comprising the old war on poverty designation, disadvantaged.
So, getting back to Mary Lou and our conversation today, I started to outline this GATS article, to try and show her the relationship between what she is doing and the anti-globalization movements. Below is a rough outline of how I sketched it out for her---allowing the dark side of my imagination to roam free. You will recognize it as the basic privatized health care industry model. It is amended a little with some new variations added from the current privatized California utiliity nightmare.
The neo liberal means to exploit the destroyed welfare states of the earth. Here is the process as I see it.
(1) Eliminate the current financial implementation of the public service infrastructure (if there is any), while leaving its physical infrastructure and legal framework intact. These monies are headed somewhere else, namely out of the country.
If there is only a legal and policy framework but no money or concrete in place, even better, since these can be sold as development projects through extortion loans. This is the big promise of free trade in the first place, right?
But if there is a physical plant in place, great, because that's were our private contractor will set up shop. Under the new financial system, moneys are funneled through the oversight agency to the private contractor, perhaps through an intermediary, while `consumers' pay fees for service (see below).
(2) Next convert the government agencies that once administered and provided the services, into a monitoring and oversight system only. You can claim to be cutting bloated bureaucracy in the name of greater government efficiency. Some legal constructions might need minor adjustment, like getting rid of the punitive waste-fraud-abuse clauses in the oversight process, since under the new privatized system, there will be too much of that to keep track of anyway.
The main function of the oversight system will be to see that outside private contractors are being paid on a timely basis. Now if there was no oversight agency in the first place, even better. We have private versions of those too.
This is where the `financial services' contractors come into play. These are primarily insurance companies and commercial bank divisions that specialize in this part of process. They administer the private contracts, processing bills and claims, and then pay these off with someone else's money, while charging for this service. That someone else, is of course the government and the people. The people pay fees for service and the government makes up the difference to the private contractor, while the financial services contractor makes sure all this balances, plus their service charges, of course.
(3) And finally, for those services that can't be exploited and for which there are no international service providers bidding, just elimenate these all together. Perhaps in a gesture of progressive largess, allow them to run on some marginal and perpetually collapsing basis---just like here in the US. Sort of like wall flowers at a dance.
Well, that's all imaginary. Anybody have any idea how it will really work?
Chuck Grimes