US Treasury and Transportation Departments Hold a Privatization Party

Thursday, 16 October 2014 10:05
By Ellen Dannin, Truthout | News Analysis

The infrastructure investment summit held last month by the Departments of the Treasury and Transportation appears likely to provide a boost to the privatization industry, ironically, just as privatized infrastructure is filing for bankruptcy.

Chances are, whatever you were doing on September 9, 2014, (births and deaths excluded) will not affect your life as much as that summit, "Expanding Our Nation's Infrastructure Through Innovative Financing," did.

Living through the era of Jamie Dimon's "creative" financing might rightly make people suspicious of "innovation." Indeed, rational people might want to return to the tried and true processes and relationships that, for decades, have provided our roads, bridges and other transportation infrastructure instead of the "innovations" that now privatize the roads that were the poster children of privatization into bankruptcy, through a process that highway expert Randy Salzman recently exposed. That complex process uses the tax and bankruptcy codes and assumptions that private is always better than public to place as much as 97 percent of the costs on the public.