What We Owe
Public Private Partnerships (PPP) are a key weapon in privatization. This is a soft-sounding term for a vicious set of practices. PPPs are often the vehicles that shift public dollars into private hands, turning essential goods and services into profit centers. Healthcare, education, water, energy, public safety, housing, transportation, and even military services are turned into profits at the expense of people. The justification for this is the logic that companies, driven by competition and business imperatives, will provide better, cheaper services.
Globally, people are resisting these efforts. We have experienced the flaw in the logic that confuses private gain with public good. The single-minded focus on growth and bottom-line thinking have brought us greater poverty, income inequality, and ecological disaster. Since 1980, the beginning of the austerity politics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, global GDP has grown 630%. Yet we experience greater inequality in spite of all this growth.
Amina Mohammed, special advisor to the UN says, “Inequality is one of the key challenges of our time.” She explains, “This affects all countries around the world. In developed and developing countries alike, the poorest half of the population often controls less than 10% of its wealth. This is a universal challenge that the whole world must address.”
In a recent article exploring shifting attitudes toward capitalism, Martin Kirk explains, “There’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has as its single goal turning natural and human resources into capital, and does so more and more each year, regardless of the costs to human well-being and to the environment.”
“Because that is what capitalism is all about; that’s the sum total of the plan. We can see it embodied in the imperative to increase GDP, everywhere, at an exponential rate, even though we know that GDP, on its own, does not reduce poverty or make people happier and healthier.”
Bottom-line thinking isn’t thinking at all. It substitutes numbers for values. We in Detroit know this all too well. We have seen our highest-performing schools closed under emergency managers because they were too expensive. We have seen nearly 100,000 people cut off from water, risking the health of our community, and we have seen an entire city poisoned to save a few dollars. This kind of bitter experience is shared with growing numbers of people everywhere. And it is changing how people think about capitalism and corporate power.
A YouGov poll in 2015 “found that 64% of Britons believe that capitalism is unfair, that it makes inequality worse. Even in the US it’s as high as 55%, while in Germany a solid 77% are skeptical of capitalism. Meanwhile, a full three-quarters of people in major capitalist economies believe that big businesses are basically corrupt.”
This is why the emerging movement to (re)municipalize essential services is so important. A new study by the Transnational Institute documents a growing global consensus that corporate power and public responsibility don’t mix. They report, “Evidence is growing that such policies are bad for public budgets in the long term, and lead to poor services and a loss of democratic accountability. As a result, many local authorities are now looking to remunicipalise public services.”
The research “shows there have been at least 835 examples of (re)municipalization of public services worldwide in recent years, involving more than 1,600 cities in 45 countries.”
Local governments are not only taking public services back from private partnerships, but they are beginning to set up new local authorities to provide services essential to protect their people.
One example is that of the Nottingham City Council (population 532,000), which set up its own energy company. They believed too many low-income families were struggling to pay their bills. A public company concerned with protecting the right to energy was the best way to help them. Named Robin Hood Energy, the local government offers a cheaper service and is beginning to drive down energy prices throughout the region.
These efforts provide the opportunity for all of us to rethink what we owe each other. By asking fundamental questions about our responsibilities to one another and the earth that sustains us we have the capacity to create new, imaginative solutions.