[lbo-talk] London Underground's Privatization Experiment Dead as Remaining PPP is Bought Out

[Alan Rudy]

I think you are right about privatization, I'm not quite as sure about all
public-private partnerships.  My sense is, and I wonder if Chuck agrees,
that phenomena like the Berkeley-Novartis and Berkeley-BP deals aren't
supposed to fail, though they ARE supposed to succeed by transferring the
dead labor of long-term public investments in infrastructure, training and
(sometimes) prestige into profitably commodifiable knowledge and
technologies (sometimes recompensed in the form of sharing proprietary
knowledge or technologies, sometimes by means of technology transfer
payments, sometimes by profit sharing and sometimes generating a revolving
door - in real or serial time - between industry and the academy.)  That
there are ancillary consequences, like the move away from the historically
public (however contradictory) mission of state universities and a
prioritization of research and regional economic sponsorship over teaching
and citizenship (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this reflects a romanticized view
of the past), much less contingency over tenure, is all the better.

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 6:48 PM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:


> The part of the privatization story that no one seems to get, is that it's
> supposed to fail.....after a bunch of public money disappears into private
> pockets.
>
> You'd think that seeing this pattern repeat itself often enough would
> clarify....but as I keep saying: it's not an economic problem; it's a
> political problem.
>
> Joanna
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jordan Hayes" <jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com>
> To: "LBO" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 11:53:33 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
> Subject: [lbo-talk] London Underground's Privatization Experiment Dead as
> Remaining PPP is Bought Out
>
> "Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone sued the government twice in
> the early 2000s to prevent the full-scale contracting out of
> maintenance and work on the London Underground, which then-Chancellor
> of the Exchequer and soon-to-be-former Prime Minister Gordon Brown
> imposed on to the city beginning in 2003."
>
> [...]
>
> "One of the largest forays into re-privatization of a public
> transportation
> entity in the West has come to an end, less than a third of the way
> into
> what was supposed to be a thirty-year commitment."
>
> [ ... more at ... ]
>
>
> http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2010/05/11/london-undergrounds-privatization-experiment-dead-as-remaining-ppp-is-bought-out/
>
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-- 
*********************************************************
Alan P. Rudy
Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
Central Michigan University
124 Anspach Hall
Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
517-881-6319