Here’s our weekly analysis of privatization in the news and in communities nationwide, in order by sector. Not a subscriber? Sign up here.

THIS WEEK’S HIGHLIGHTS

• The Southern Poverty Law Center weighs in on  Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signing the state’s new “disastrous” private school voucher bill (at a religious school).
• Chicago’s privatized parking meter system took in  another $132.7 million in 2018.
•  CNN investigates  Wellpath, a new correctional health care corporation owned by private equity investors.

Special note: The Pennsylvania AFL-CIO issued a statement mourning the loss of union brother and ATU President Larry Hanley. “Brother Larry Hanley was an incredible example of labor leadership over the past four decades.  Beginning as a New York City bus driver, Brother Hanley passionately fought for community access to transportation and workers’ rights.  He demonstrated that when we fight for our workers, we fight for their community too.  He fought back privatization attempts to undermine mass transit, and mobilized union members across the country to lead the way in the fight for workplace safety.  His family and his union brothers and sisters are in our thoughts and prayers.”

EDUCATION

1) National: House Democrats are seeking to cut federal charter school funding, saying they are “deeply concerned” that Betsy DeVos’ Education Department “does not intend to be a responsible steward” of taxpayer dollars. The Washington Post reports “the legislation also says lawmakers are ‘concerned’ about a recent report issued by the advocacy group the Network for Public Education, which says that as much as $1 billion in federal money was wasted on charter schools that never opened or that closed because of mismanagement and other issues from 2009 to 2016. ‘Clearly, the tide is turning regarding charter schools,’ said Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, who co-wrote the report referred to in the legislation.”

2) National: Writing in Daily Kos, lifelong educator Arthur H. Camins counterposes two ways of looking at charter schools. One is the lens of “competition and associated risk” favored by billionaire supporters of charters who favor private boards over public boards. “Another lens is the common good and its explicit companion, cross-racial unity. It has no wealth and power to extend its reach. However, it has a distinct advantage.  It represents the vast majority of Americans. The questions you ask frame the answers you get. Let’s ask, ‘Do you favor single a democratically-governed, high-quality public education system for every child or two taxpayer-funded systems: One privately-governed and another democratically governed?’” 

3) National: Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters and the Network for Public Education notes the “paucity of anti-privatization pro-public education advocates at @Edwriters conferences; w/ these debates usually depicted as unions vs privatizers. Few skeptical voices on #edtech as well possibly relates to their funders.” 

4) National: AFT President Randi Weingarten sees a changing public narrative on education. “How do you create a paradigm shift so most of America is focused on that as opposed to the top-down, test-based, treat-students-as-a-number, treat-teachers-as-an-algorithm, and threaten schools, teachers and kids if you don’t succeed on math and English tests? And whatever Arne Duncan and the so-called ed reformers called it, what they were doing was using the market, competition, privatization and austerity as their tools to shake up a system, as opposed to meeting children’s needs as a dominant issue. (…) I’m optimistic because the narrative is changing. More and more people are saying, ‘Let’s actually focus on neighborhood public schools. And let’s actually strengthen them!’”

5) National: Journalist Eric Blanc (@_ericblanc), author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave & Working-Class Politics, joined Sam Seder of The Majority Report “to discuss teacher strikes in red states. The forces that touched off the WV teachers’ strike. How the weakness of unions in red states created an opening for more radical actions. The impact of the ‘education reform’ movement of the early 2000s. How WV’s history of labor militancy inspired the strikers.” 

6) National: Which hedge fund owned the largest stake in K12 Inc., the online charter school company, at the end of the 4thquarter? None other than Renaissance Technologies, whose former co-CEO Robert Mercer floated Steve Bannon’s boat before souring on the Trump strategist.

7) National: The Network for Public Education is inviting proposals from members for workshops at next year’s NPE National Conference in Philadelphia in March. The deadline is July 21. 

8) Florida: By signing the new “disastrous” private school voucher bill (at a religious school), Governor Ron DeSantis (R) “set his state on the path to further decimate its public schools through an unprecedented expansion of private school vouchers,” says the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Florida already diverts nearly $1 billion of scarce public funds to unaccountable, under-regulated private schools each year through several different voucher programs,” says SPLC. “This massive diversion of public funds has led the state to fall from 24th among states in per-pupil funding to the bottom 10.” The new law will revive a 20-year old legal battle. “The Family Empowerment Scholarship program would use public dollars for religious and other private schools and allow kids in middle-income families —families of four with annual incomes of $77,250 or below—to take part.” The Tampa Bay Times says “they approved the death sentence for public education in Florida.”

The Florida Education Association has announced an upcoming summit to discuss the state of Florida’s public schools. “‘We see this summit as the start of something big, a real grassroots movement that brings together many disparate voices for our schools,’ said FEA President Fedrick Ingram. ‘Along with the majority of people in Florida, we believe that public education is a fundamental good for this state and for the nation as a whole. But our neighborhood public schools are under attack—there’s no other way to describe it. ‘If public education is going to have a future in Florida, it’s time for the people who care about our public schools to step forward and take control of the conversation.’” Partners in the all day summit, next Saturday in Orlando, include the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, Black Women’s Roundtable, Equality Florida, Florida Education Association, Fund Education Now, Iniciativa Acción Puertorriqueña, League of Women Voters Florida, NAACP | Florida State Conference, and Pastors for Florida Children.

9) Florida: School custodians are continuing their fight against privatization in Hillsborough County. “Sixty percent of these employees are female employees, and 90 percent of these employees are minority employees, and so there’s an underlying factor here that will hurt already impoverished communities, families and students because these adults who take care of these kids are all attached to our public school students,” said FEA president Fedrick Ingram. “And if they lose their jobs, then there’s a ripple effect throughout the communities. There’s a ripple effect throughout our ZIP codes that are already struggling.” 

10) Florida: A charter school company is threatening to sue Polk County school authorities for turning down its application to open a school. After receiving the application, “the district’s charter school review committee, an advisory board, met the next day to discuss the application and eventually found multiple deficiencies with the school’s application in areas of governance, management and staffing, plans for student performance, parent and community involvement and its budget. The committee [recommended] 11-1 on March 14 to reject the application.” The school board then voted 3-3 to deny Bridgeprep Academy a charter school license in Polk County. One board member said he voted against the application because it was “more about a real estate venture” than anything else.

11) Mississippi: The Mississippi NAACP says “another school system is being attacked by the state’s aggressive privatization efforts. Attend the upcoming Community Meetings and make sure your voice is heard!” Read NAACP National’s 2016 resolution on charter schools. 

12) New Jersey: The New Jersey Education Association is inviting the public this Wednesday to “join NJEA members from across the state as they stand together to fight for Job Justice for Educational Support Professionals and affordable, quality health care for public school employees. Let’s provide more stability to New Jersey’s public schools by working to pass these three bills.” 

13) New Mexico: A Las Cruces charter school has hired a “school improvement evaluator” but declined to explain what services or duties his contract entails. “After the meeting had concluded, Lere told the Sun-News the information was confidential because his position had ‘personnel implications.’ (…) Before moving to New Mexico he had been the executive director of the Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center in Pueblo. Shortly after Lere’s retirement in 2017, a special audit ordered by the New Mexico state auditor’s office opined that for two years, Lere’s administration failed to report evidence that a Deming High School employee had embezzled as much as $145,000 in unaccounted funds between 2014 and 2016.”

14) North Carolina: The state senate has lowered performance standards for charter  schools and eliminated the enrollment cap. “Sen. Jay Chaudhuri, D-Wake, said the measure should be dubbed the ‘Rewarding Failure Act,’ noting that both of the virtual schools have received ‘D’ grades on the state’s annual school performance report cards in their first three years of operation and that students taking online classes through them haven’t met growth expectations. ‘We’re essentially rewarding these two schools that fail our students by increasing enrollments,’ Chaudhuri said.” USA Today reported last year that public school spending in North Carolina, at $9,217 per pupil, is the 6th lowest in the country, “one of the lowest per-pupil expenditures of any state and about $3,300 less than the U.S. average”; and that “eighth graders in North Carolina are less likely to be proficient in reading than students in most other states.” 

15) Pennsylvania: Auditor General Eugene DePasquale says a review of 179 cyber and charter schools “found a vast majority lacked updated policies on reporting child abuse until he contacted them this spring—and that nine schools flatly ignored his repeated requests to produce their reporting policies.” 

16) Pennsylvania: The Network for Public Education is calling on Pennsylvanians to oppose phony charter “reform” bills that will be voted on today. “One would mandate charters getting the right to use ‘unused’ district school buildings.” 

17) Tennessee: NewsChannel 5 reports that a federal investigation has been opened into whether any improper incentives were offered to pass Gov. Bill Lee’s school vouchers bill in the state House. “Rep. David Hawk, a Greeneville Republican, told NewsChannel 5 Investigates that Casada’s chief of staff, Cade Cothren, came to him the morning of the vote, telling him ‘the Speaker and I need your vote on the voucher bill. What do you want?’” 

18) Virginia: After a public outcry, Alexandria’s schools superintendent Dr. Gregory Hutchings has put the system’s custodians back in the budget instead of outsourcing their jobs. But the move doesn’t apply to all of them. “At issue was the long-standing promise the school board made to ACPS custodians more than a decade ago, which outlined an attrition plan that would allow the staffers to retire as their positions were filled by private contractors. The 10 custodians who will be outsourced would still receive a severance package and employment with the new contractor, Hutchings said. It also means that ACPS would outsource the custo dial services of one school as a result of the shift, and that current custodial staff will likely need to be moved to other schools.”

INFRASTRUCTURE

19) National: Big infrastructure developers and asset managers such as Cintra and Meridiam are busy lobbying on Capitol Hill to promote privatization and ‘public-private partnerships.’ In the lead is Suzanne Sullivan of SB Capitol Solutions, a former Senior Counselor to FAA Administrator Jane F. Garvey and deputy chief of staff at DOT, who lobbies for both companies.

20) National: Bills to raise the volume cap on Private Activity Bonds for infrastructure are mounting up in Congress. “The current volume cap on PABs issued for highways and freight improvement has just over $2.5 billion remaining that can be authorized by the U.S. Department of Transportation. (…) A total of $12.45 billion has either been issued or allocated of the $15 billion currently authorized by Congress. (…) ‘Public-Private partnerships are one of a myriad of tools the nation needs to bridge the $2 trillion infrastructure investment gap,’ [Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR] said in a press statement announcing the introduction of the bill.” [Sub required]

21) National: Writing in Jacobin, Andrew Wolf says the Uber strike last week was “not just a strike against Uber, but a strike against cities which allow the radical privatization and deregulation of critical city infrastructure. It’s not just a ‘sharing economy’ strike — it’s a strike for the right to the city.” See also Basav Sen’s “A Handout for Uber and Lyft Is No Replacement for Public Transit.” 

22) Illinois: The privatization disasters in Chicago just keep on giving, or more accurately, taking away. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that “Chicago’s parking meter system took in another $132.7 million in 2018, putting private investors on pace to reap a hefty return on their initial $1.16 billion investment with 65 years to go on the 75-year lease. Two other privatization deals also have resulted in windfalls for private companies. Four underground city-owned parking garages took in $34.1 million in 2018, while the privatized Chicago Skyway generated just under $99 million in cash, separate audits of those assets show. Not a penny of the combined nearly $266 million in revenues, once a key source of funding for city government, went to ease the $2 billion avalanche of tax increases imposed by Emanuel to solve the city’s pension crisis.”

23) New Jersey: Edison residents are demanding a public vote on an $810 million deal with Suez North America. “A 40-year deal is the longest possible that does not require voter approval and you forfeit regulatory oversite from the Board of Public Utilities making this deal worse than an outright sale,” Edison police officer-turned-mayoral candidate Keith Hahn said. “Add the ‘guaranteed revenue stream’ that Suez and (investment partner) KKR are going to collect along with the concerns of the township employees who have been given little to no information, it was clear something had to be done. Giving the power to the people who will be burdened with the results of this deal for the next 40 years only seems right. A binding referendum is the only way to accomplish that.” There will be another public hearing on June 6.

24) Pennsylvania: Is it back, this time in pieces? Several years ago there was an epic battle over efforts to privatize the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Villanova School of Business professor David Fiorenza, floating the idea of zero-based budgeting for the state turnpike authority, now tells the Bond Buyer “another option is to look to private certain parts of the Turnpike over the next few years.” [Sub required; see also U.S. PIRG Education Fund’s Road Privatization: Explaining the Trend, Assessing the Facts, and Protecting the Public]

25) Revolving door news: K&L Gates has been busy lobbying for privatization on behalf of American Water, according to lobbying records. In the lead has been K&L’s Stephen Martinko: “His diverse public policy and management experience includes service as executive director of the Port of Pittsburgh Commission; deputy staff director of the U.S. House of Representatives Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (T&I Committee); chief of staff to Congressman Bill Shuster (R-PA), chairman of the T&I Committee; professional staff member for the T&I Committee Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials; and director of floor debate for former House Republican Conference Chair Deborah Pryce (R-OH). He has also advised several political campaigns and President Donald Trump’s transition team.”

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND IMMIGRATION

26) National: On Friday, GSA posted presolicitation notices to lease space the federal government wants for residential facilities for children “who have no lawful immigration status” in San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas-Fort Worth. The deadline for expressions of interest is May 23 for all three.

27) National: CoreCivic held its investor call last week, and CEO Damon Hininger reported that the company’s revenues are up. “Our first quarter financial performance showed positive year-over-year growth across essentially every key metric. Total revenue in the quarter was $484 million, an increase of nearly 10% compared with the first quarter of last year. Each of our three business segments posted revenue growth with CoreCivic Safety growing at 7%; and CoreCivic Community and Properties both generating substantial year-over-year revenue growth of 23% and 65% respectively.” 

Hininger also struck a defensive note on what he called “false information” about the company housing unaccompanied minors and to tout the amenities in its South Texas family residential center, pointing to “for example, each of their residential complexes is equipped with a 775 square foot playroom, large screen TV, PlayStations, treadmill and exercise bike, board games, books and age appropriate toys.” 

On the finance side, EVP/CFO David Garfinkle said CoreCivic is in the hunt for credit, which should be interesting considering the recent successes of the prison-for-profit divestment movement. “We’ve got $325 million of unsecured notes maturing in April 2020. We’re thinking about that right now, obviously, about how we’re going to deal with that. Most likely, it will be paid off with our credit facility. We’ve got—we’ve got capacity today to pay it off, but it would—it would put that credit facility tight in terms of what its availability would be, if we were to just pay it off on the capacity today. So we’re looking at like a term loan B would be in the cards for us as we look out to the second half of the year.”

28) National: A CNN investigation has turned the spotlight onto Wellpath’s practices. “When two Florida public defenders wrote to the Broward Sheriff’s Office last week that a mentally ill woman, Tammy Jackson, had been forced to give birth alone in her jail cell, they slammed the facility and its medical staff for putting both her and her infant daughter at ‘grave risk.’ ‘Six hours and 54 minutes after asking for help, a [Broward Sheriff’s Office] tech notified medical staff that Ms. Jackson was holding her newborn baby in her arms, having delivered her baby without medication or the assistance of a physician,’ wrote the attorneys. ‘Your staff did not protect either Ms. Jackson or her child.’ While the media attention surrounding this incident has been on the jail itself, the medical provider hired by the sheriff’s office was the one directly responsible for Jackson’s care. The private contractor, Wellpath, is the largest correctional health care provider in the country—the result of a recent merger between a company called Correct Care Solutions, or CCS, and a smaller competitor, Correctional Medical Group Companies (CGMC). The Supreme Court has ruled that providing health care to inmates is mandated by the US Constitution. For Wellpath, this job is projected to bring in annual revenues of $1.5 billion.”

29) Alabama: The state is considering using a ‘public-private partnership’ model to build three new prisons, although the state may later decide to build and finance the prisons differently. “Five companies have responded to the state’s request for “expressions of interest” in building the prisons, which are being built partly in response to an ongoing class-action lawsuit and recent scrutiny by the U.S. Department of Justice. While the procurement process is in its infancy, ultimately the state wants to construct more than 10,000 beds for male prisoners in state-of-the-art facilities to relieve severe overcrowding and other inequities.” ADOC would operate the facilities and employ the staff. 

The Request for Expressions of Interest, the deadline for responses to which was April 10, contained detailed conditions on how potential bidders could shield information from freedom of information requests: “Respondent shall be responsible for defending its determination that the redacted portions of its submissions are confidential, trade secret, or otherwise not subject to disclosure. Furthermore, Respondent shall protect, defend, and indemnify the ADOC, the State of Alabama, and its departments or agencies for any and all claims arising from or relating to Respondent’s determination that the redacted portions of its proposal are confidential, trade secret, or otherwise not subject to disclosure. All of the above shall be acknowledged in the Respondent’s separate writing that must accompany the ‘REDACTED COPY.’” 

30) Florida/National: Florida Politics reports that the GEO Group is among the top winners in the state budget sweepstakes. “The Florida-based prison company scored big in the 2019-20 budget. Lawmakers set aside an additional $4.3 million to boost the per diem rate for housing prisoners and tossed in another $3 million for offender rehabilitation programs. With GEO operating five of Florida’s seven private prisons, it may as well back the paddy wagon up to the bank vault.”

31) Hawaii: Native Hawaiian filmmaker Ciara Lacy’s “new Independent Lensfilm Out of State took Lacy–like her subjects–from the islands to a very different place, a private prison in the Arizona desert, to tell the story of native Hawaiians discovering their indigenous traditions from a fellow inmate serving a life sentence.” 

32) International: Shares of the private security firm G4S tumbled last week on news that its Canadian rival Garda World Security dropped a potential bid for the scandal-ridden company. Shareholders are also in revolt over its chief’s retirement pay, the London Sunday Times reported yesterday. “G4S gained a reputation for being accident-prone after failing to supply enough security guards for the 2012 Olympics in London and overcharging taxpayers for the electronic tagging of criminals in 2013. Mr. Almanza appeared to have put that patchy record into the past until last year when the company was embroiled in fresh scandals at Birmingham prison and a youth detention centre in Kent.” [Sub required] 

PUBLIC SERVICES

33) National: Despite verbal commitments to lawmakers to the contrary, Veterans Administration secretary Robert Wilkie continues to push privatization. Wilkie was responding to their concerns after “months of sustained lobbying against [his predecessor] from allies of Concerned Veterans for America. The Koch-backed advocacy group supports an expansion of private-sector care for veterans—and Wilkie, since his confirmation, has deviated little from that goal.” 

34) National: Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourle says he would end Medicaid privatization in states like Iowa.

35) Alaska: Public service workers have denounced Gov. Dunleavy’s budget proposal, citing “job losses due [to] cuts in state funding and privatization of positions currently held by union workers. [Alaska AFL-CIO President Vince Beltrami] posited that Dunleavy’s budget would cost the state between 16,000 and 20,000 jobs.”

36) California: University of California workers are planning to strike this Thursday in opposition to jobs outsourcing. “The strike involves university professional and technical employees represented by the UPTE-CWA 9119 union, as well as members of the AFSCME Local 3299 union, which represents the university’s service and patient care technical workers. Together, the unions represent 39,000 UC workers.” AFSCME says “UC is growing, expanding, and making more profits, all at the expense of our future. Last year alone, UC Medical Centers’ operating profit was $684 million! AFSCME 3299 has filed Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges against UC’s new and unlawful efforts to bypass the union and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to outsource Patient Care, Service, and Skilled Craft jobs to low wage for-profit companies.”

Two years ago, the state auditor “found that many UC contractors paid wages far below the university minimum wage and did not offer comparable benefits. Through outsourcing, AFSCME leaders have said, the university is basically helping to lower the prevailing market wagesused as a barometer for how well AFSCME members and other employees are paid.”

37) Colorado: Moffat County is considering privatizing its libraries “after the Moffat County Board of County Commissioners gutted 77 percent of the system’s funding. (…) As a last-ditch effort to save the libraries from closure, the board is weighing the option of bringing in a Maryland-based management company, Library Systems & Services, Inc., to streamline human resources, accounting, library cataloguing and to introduce fresh intriguing programs for Moffat County residents of all ages.” LS&S reps will pitch the board today.

38) Illinois: Iroquois County is considering insourcing its snow removal and lawn care operations because they “are getting more and more expensive.”

39) Iowa: Progress Iowa is urging Iowans to attend their local town hall meetings to raise the issue of the state’s Medicaid privatization mess. “We can’t let this attack on Iowa’s most vulnerable continue. Stand up against Governor Reynolds’ Medicaid Mess at your local Medicaid town hall!”

40) Iowa/National: The Des Moines Register is applauding Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) for calling for a federal investigation into the privatization of Medicaid. “Iowans should consider sending thank-you notes to U.S. Sen. Robert Casey. The Pennsylvania Democrat is doing what Iowa’s senators have failed to do: Request a federal investigation into privatized Medicaid health insurance. (…) Now a senator who doesn’t directly represent Iowans is getting involved. Casey requested an investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). He cited media reports about for-profit insurers refusing to cover health care for vulnerable people and referenced a Des Moines Register investigation about care denials and endless appeals.”

41) Maryland/National: Taya Graham of The Real News Network discusses The Privatization of Public Assets: A Recipe for Corruption. “The roots of Baltimore’s current corruption scandal lie in the ongoing effort to transform public entities into sources of profit for private interests.” [Audio, about 6 minutes]

42) New York: Niagara’s Associate Director of Waste Collection and Diversion Operations, Allison Tyldesley, has provided an update to the Regional Public Works Committee on the performance of its private waste collection company. “Emterra has not been able to fully complete collection 10 of the last 15 collection days. There are, on average, over 4,000 households being missed every day and being collected on the subsequent day. Emterra has not collected a total of over 40,000 households on the regular collection day in the last three week period.”

43) International: The British anti-privatization campaigning group We Own It has published a comprehensive report showing how to end “the dark days of privatization” of public services. “Public ownership is incredibly popular. A large majority of the UK public believe public services should work for people not profit. But what does public ownership actually look like in practice? What difference would it make to your daily life? How do we make public ownership so wildly successful that it can never be dismantled? And what would make it feel like ‘we own it’? This report will attempt to answer those questions. Looking in particular at public transport, water, energy, Royal Mail: industries where we have to start from scratch and recreate them in publicly owned form.” Among their observations: “In the US, they pay double what we pay for their privatized health system and get worse outcomes.”

44) International: Concern is growing in Britain that Conservative austerity is spurring American private equity firms to move in, gobble up and ruin their National Health Service. “In January 2016 The Priory Group was sold for £1.3 billion by the US Private Equity Firm Advent International to Acadia Healthcare of Tennessee, a substantial increase from its sale value of £289 million in 2002. Last year, Channel 4’s Dispatches programme included a senior figure at Acadia Healthcare who was explicit about some of the business opportunities offered by the NHS’s cutbacks to its mental healthcare facilities: ‘What we would look forward to, or hope does occur, is that the NHS continue to close beds and have a need to outsource those patients to the private providers. We think that or are optimistic, that if the NHS closes more beds and outsources those, we would be the big winner there.’”

OTHER

45) National: William Hartung of the Center for International Policy and Mandy Smithberger of the Project on Government Oversight report that “the Defense Department employs an army of private contractors—more than 600,000 of them—many doing jobs that could be done far more cheaply by civilian government employees. Cutting the private contractor work force by 15% to a mere half-million people would promptly save more than $20 billion per year.”

46) National: Ken Lowery says “an underrated obscenity of the modern era’s privatization of the public good is repackaging potable water—which we spent millennia figuring out how to deliver to everyone, maybe the most significant technological achievement in history—as a luxury good with an absurd markup.”

47) National: A federal judge’s decision criticizing the federal government for outsourcing its investigative functions to private interests continues to reverberate. “Judge McMahon’s takedown of the government’s cozy relationship with Deutsche Bank and Paul Weiss has to be causing a lot of buzz in the Big Apple. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York is where most major Wall Street fraud cases end up and Paul Weiss is a big player in that arena, particularly as defense counsel for the serially charged Citigroup. (See our previous article: Meet the Lawyer Who Gets Citigroup Out of Fraud Charges.)” 

In her decision, McMahon said that “Deutsche Bank and its outside counsel, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison LLP (“Paul Weiss”) were de facto the Government for Garritypurposes; more important, the Government has made an utterly unpersuasive case in rebuttal.” She wrote that “there are profound implications if the Government, as has been suggested elsewhere, is routinely outsourcing its investigations into complex financial matters to the targets of those investigations, who are in a uniquely coercive position vis-a-vispotential targets of criminal activity.” (p. 2)

48) District of Columbia: CityLab’s Kriston Capps says “the arguments in favor of the Apple Carnegie Library don’t justify what should always be an option of last resort—the privatization of public space.”

49) North Carolina: The New Hanover Board of Commissioners has passed a resolution opposing House Bill 971, which would privatize the sale of liquor and abolish the North Carolina ABC system. “The current ABC system is set up so a certain percentage of liquor sales goes back into the local governments. Last year, New Hanover ABC gave back over $5.5 million to New Hanover County. Queen fears that if the bills does get passed, the county will need to get that money from somewhere else, such as residents’ property taxes.” Larry Etheridge, general manager of the Wilson County Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, writes “taking the control away by privatizing liquor sales will do nothing more than increase consumption and decrease profits to our citizens. Greater consumption means more harm and higher costs to society in the form of underage drinking, increased alcohol-related injury crashes, higher levels of alcoholism and violence, increased physical assaults and higher murder rates.” He cites opposition from numerous public health and law enforcement organizations. 

50) Pennsylvania: A proposal to privatize medical transportation throughout the state is getting pushback from county leaders. “County leaders don’t support the Governor’s proposal. Not only do they call it more costly, but add it also strips the county of control of how these services are provided. Giving the state total control of medical transportation doesn’t sit well with Wendell Kay ‘The way we do things in Wayne County along with all other counties is going well and we don’t need any changes.’”