The Walker administration wants the right to sell public assets - - from highways to prisons to university dormitories - - through private, no-bid procedures, reports the Journal Sentinel.
Grover Norquist will be pleased, but taxpayers should balk.
The plan is allegedly to reduce debt somewhere in state finances - - but is actually an end-run to mindless privatization around publicly-interested and honest budgeting.
A prison could be sold off to a for-profit operator (union-free) with some proceeds helping pay a road-building project built on the come.
A highway could be sold to a private company that wanted to turn it into a toll road and collect money from motorists who had paid for the road and its servicing with gas, income or property taxes.
A power plant could be sold to a utility which could then raise the rates to the prison or university complex the power plant now serves.
Talk about back-door policy-making, using public assets to make private, special interests even richer.
To pick winners and losers, to defeat local control, and taxation with representation.
Legislators who are comfortable with giving away taxpayer-paid properties to reward insider influence practically begs for flat-out corruption - - contributions for buyer access, Pay For Play II - - should vote for the plan.
walker and his goons are going to do more to destroy the fabric of Wisconsin in 4 years than it took over 200 years to develop! Wisconsin is now on par with Mississippi and Alabama at the bottom of the heap!
ReplyDeleteAny worse than UW Milwaukee dorms to Chicago contractors with Doyle?
ReplyDeleteShort-term gains and long-term losses; Walker can sell something and make a quick buck to close a budget hole but that sale could cost taxpayers so much in the future (think of a private heating plant charging our Wisc. prisons whatever it wants) that we will wish we had the budget hole back.
ReplyDeleteWalker won't stay in Wisconsin past 2016 if he stays that long. It won't be his problem; it will be ours.
To Anon 12:56 - - Glad you brought that up, since in that case a) there were competitive bids, b) the process was conducted more than once,c) GOP Atty. Gen'l Van Hollen said there was nothing to the complaint:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.twincities.com/wisconsin/ci_11805149
@Anonymous (Right-wing false-equivalence dude @12:56p): Also, we still own the buildings. While I loathe semi-privatization of public functions through subcontracting, there's still a world of difference between contracting services and selling off public property, particularly without any transparency or oversight. Our Republicans tend to be the small-government, anti-corruption type, and they're all betraying their principles when they support the crooked-ass Walker administration, hence all the bad-faith arguments intended to mitigate cognitive dissonance more than convince anyone or make an intelligible point.
ReplyDelete@Anonymous (Right-wing false-equivalence dude @12:56p): Also, we still own the buildings. While I loathe semi-privatization of public functions through subcontracting, there's still a world of difference between contracting services (especially ones for which there is no public-sector entity, like large-scale building construction) and selling off public property, particularly without any transparency or oversight. Our Republicans tend to be the small-government, anti-corruption type, and they're all betraying their principles when they support the crooked-ass Walker administration, hence all the bad-faith arguments intended to mitigate cognitive dissonance more than convince anyone or make an intelligible point. Your pointless tribalism is hurting all of us; wake up.
ReplyDeleteLike Governor Jan Brewer from Arizona sold her state capitol building and other government building to another country and now she cannot get back the capitol. She had no right to do so and the taxpayers are the true owners of the public taxpayer paid for buildings. Same with the prisons they paid for. Jan is selling them for mere pennies and it will now cost taxpayers more money to house these criminals and Jan gets a kickback from every inmate sent to these for profit private prisons. She needs to be thrown out of office and put in prison for the sale of these properties she did not own.Now Walker is taking that same pathway. Once these Tea Party Republicans get done, there will be no publicly paid for and built by US left, but we all will be stuck with higher bills for the same services the government still spend too much on like the daily cost of just 1 inmate. Good bye America we knew you.
ReplyDeleteWallah! The taxpayer's investments looted and sold. The state financially ruined and on the meathooks of pay day lenders like the vampire squid and private equity vultures.
ReplyDeleteMission nearly Accomplished!