"Let's do it," says Gail Collins. "Let's privatize." And NJ's Gov. Wide Load is feeling some heat from the halfway-house scandal

Both Gail Collins (who's written a book about the subject) and Paul Krugman wrote NYT columns this week that mentioned NJ's Governor Wide Load as a featured player in the state's privatization scams.

"As more and more government functions get privatized, states become pay-to-play paradises, in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become a quid pro quo for getting government business. Are the corporations capturing the politicians, or the politicians capturing the corporations? Does it matter?"

-- Paul Krugman, in his Friday NYT column,
"Prisons, Privatization, Patronage"

"I recently wrote a book in which I tried to juice up the subject [of privatization] by suggesting that readers might want to Iimagine a privatizer as a cross between a pirate and a sanitizer -- a guy with an eyepatch and a carpet steamer. This was a desperate attempt at, um, humorization. I am so ashamed."

-- Gail Collins, in her Thursday NYT column,
"Political Private Practice"

by Ken

Can NJ's Gov. Chris "Wide Load" Christie, the patronage saint of white-collar crooks, dodge the heat of the state's privatized-halfway-houses scandal?

I always try to be careful in writing about the stupendously popular Governor Wide Load. I never want to characterize him as a tool of the 1%. He's a different kind of Republican slime. Oh, I'm pretty sure he would roll over for a 1%-er in a heartbeat if it was made worth his while. But I always think of Governor Wide Load as the patronage saint, not of the economic elites, but of the humbler white-collar crooks. You know, the guys 'n' gals who toil grifting off their economic betters, quite frequently the government.

That's pretty much how Governor Wide Load ran the U.S. attorney's office when he was one of Karl Rove's foot soldiers in the Bush regime's War Against Justice. You can be sure that Wide Load was never on any stinking list of Bush USAs targeted for removal for the cardinal sin of, you know, occasionally doing their job. Bush regime USAs, after all, were expected to be not just cheerleaders but facilitators for the regime's national crime wave. Somehow, instead of winding up under indictment and heading off to the Big House, Wide Load was rewarded, via illegal collusion from Master Karl, with a clear shot at the NJ governorship.

But his heart is still with the white-collar grifters. And unfortunately some of his boys have been getting their behinds caught.

In recent days both Gail Collins and Paul Krugman have written NYT columns about the gummint privatization scam inspired by their paper's "terrifying reports," as PK put it --

privately run adjuncts to the regular system of prisons. The series is a model of investigative reporting, which everyone should read. But it should also be seen in context. The horrors described are part of a broader pattern in which essential functions of government are being both privatized and degraded.

Gail, who notes that she has in fact written a book on privatization, waits till near the end of her column, "Political Private Practice," to stick the fork in Governor Wide Load, and even reduces him to parentheses.

Republican governors are big privatization fans. (Did I mention that some years before he became governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie was a lobbyist for the company that's the biggest player in that halfway house system? Well, I have now.) Rick Perry tried to build a humongous highway through Texas in a public-private partnership that would have severed the state with a toll road as wide as four football fields. He dropped the idea after his own political base revolted under the theory that the road was going to be part of a "NAFTA superhighway" that would strip the country of its sovereignty and turn us into citizens of the North American Union. Really, it's always something.

As to former Republican governors who would like to be Romney's running mate -- there are no words for the privatization passion. Except those of Tim Pawlenty, who recently said that "if you can find a good or service on the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn't need to be doing it."

Paul, however, got Governor Wide Load into the second paragraph, referencing the New Jersey halfway houses:

In 2010, Chris Christie, the state's governor -- who has close personal ties to Community Education Centers, the largest operator of these facilities, and who once worked as a lobbyist for the firm -- described the company's operations as "representing the very best of the human spirit." But The Times's reports instead portray something closer to hell on earth -- an understaffed, poorly run system, with a demoralized work force, from which the most dangerous individuals often escape to wreak havoc, while relatively mild offenders face terror and abuse at the hands of other inmates.

Paul is shortly led to ask what's behind the nationwide passion for privatizing.

You might be tempted to say that it reflects conservative belief in the magic of the marketplace, in the superiority of free-market competition over government planning. And that’s certainly the way right-wing politicians like to frame the issue.

Gail helpfully tosses in a quote President-in-waiting Willard Inc.

"When you work in the private sector and you have a competitor, you know if I don't treat the customer right, they're going to leave me and go somewhere else, so I'd better treat them right," Romney said in a round-table discussion with veterans in South Carolina. This is the exact road he was going down on the dreaded day when he said he enjoyed firing people.

Now Paul picks up from that way that "right-wing politicians like to frame the issue" of privatization, as a reflection of "conservative belief in the magic of the marketplace, in the superiority of free-market competition over government planning."

But if you think about it even for a minute, you realize that the one thing the companies that make up the prison-industrial complex — companies like Community Education or the private-prison giant Corrections Corporation of America — are definitely not doing is competing in a free market. They are, instead, living off government contracts. There isn’t any market here, and there is, therefore, no reason to expect any magical gains in efficiency.

And, sure enough, despite many promises that prison privatization will lead to big cost savings, such savings — as a comprehensive study by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the U.S. Department of Justice, concluded — “have simply not materialized.” To the extent that private prison operators do manage to save money, they do so through “reductions in staffing patterns, fringe benefits, and other labor-related costs.”

Gail points out that the NJ halfway houses --

costs about half as much per inmate as a regular jail. This may be in part because the prisoners keep escaping. More than 5,000 have run, walked or wandered off since 2005. That placed a sometimes tragic burden on the victims of the crimes the escapees later committed, but it must have definitely reduced upkeep. Perhaps you could call it inmate self-privatization.

Oops!

Paul meanwhile reflects:

Privatized prisons save money by employing fewer guards and other workers, and by paying them badly. And then we get horror stories about how these prisons are run. What a surprise!

And he wonders "what's really behind the drive to privatize prisons, and just about everything else."

One answer is that privatization can serve as a stealth form of government borrowing, in which governments avoid recording upfront expenses (or even raise money by selling existing facilities) while raising their long-run costs in ways taxpayers can’t see. We hear a lot about the hidden debts that states have incurred in the form of pension liabilities; we don’t hear much about the hidden debts now being accumulated in the form of long-term contracts with private companies hired to operate prisons, schools and more.

Another answer is that privatization is a way of getting rid of public employees, who do have a habit of unionizing and tend to lean Democratic in any case.

But the main answer, surely, is to follow the money. Never mind what privatization does or doesn’t do to state budgets; think instead of what it does for both the campaign coffers and the personal finances of politicians and their friends. As more and more government functions get privatized, states become pay-to-play paradises, in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become a quid pro quo for getting government business. Are the corporations capturing the politicians, or the politicians capturing the corporations? Does it matter?

And he points out that the privatization scandals are buried deep enough to require substantial efforts of investigation, as in the case of the NYT series on "New Jersey's halfway-house-hell."

You shouldn’t imagine that what The Times discovered about prison privatization in New Jersey is an isolated instance of bad behavior. It is, instead, almost surely a glimpse of a pervasive and growing reality, of a corrupt nexus of privatization and patronage that is undermining government across much of our nation.

Of course undermining government is the basic business of right-wing government -- that and making a pretty penny off it. Gail honors the election season by regaling us with "some examples of privatization disasters."

Texas tried to turn eligibility screening for social services over to a private company, creating all sorts of messes until it gave up the experiment. The most apocryphal story involved a privately run call center that told applicants to send their documentation to a number that turned out to be the fax at a warehouse in Seattle.

The hottest new wrinkle for private companies eager to tap into public school funding is charter cyberschools. A study at the University of Colorado's National Education Policy Center found that only about a quarter met federal standards for academic progress.

Here in New York, we have been experiencing a long-running privatization adventure in which an attempt to streamline employee timekeeping that was supposed to have cost the city $63 million wound up with a slightly unsleek tab of $700 million.

John Donahue, the faculty chairman of the master's in public policy program at Harvard, says the best candidates for privatization are functions where performance is relatively easy to evaluate, like construction or food services. On the worst-case end, he points to "having mercenaries run your war for you," which we know something about, given the fact that our military effort in Iraq and Afghanistan sometimes involves more people working for private contractors than actual members of the military.

Gail notes that privatization --

has such a long history that it's a wonder we still have any public sector left. The Ancient Greeks did it. The Han dynasty did it. Birds do it. Bees do it. Even Harvard Ph.D.s do it.

Let's do it. Let's privatize.

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