Cont,

You say >> “To date, no privatised corporation has been able to provide the same level of service to the public at the same price, not to mention the river of money that now flows out of the country as dividends to overseas owners. These are public profits lost forever. It's just public asset-stripping and selling people what they already own and have paid for over generations.”

What utter rubbish.

Professor Alan Fels of the ACC

“ Privatisation of electricity assets in Victoria and the accompanying structural and regulatory reforms is, by and large, a good example of a success story. The structural changes promote competition in generation. Electricity transmission and distribution services were separated from the contestable electricity generation market in Victoria allowing for new entry and the threat of entry. Then Generators were sold as separate competing entities. This makes for competition between generators. It also allows for inter-state competition.”

For starters Electricity production, distribution in Victoria etc was heavily subsidised by the gov't so even though electricity prices were lower, the consumer was actually paying much higher rates through their taxes to prop up innefficient bsuiness practices and provide poorly targeted social engineering outcomes. There was NO river of profit coming from Victorian electricity. It was a river of loss. That is not an uncommon situation for a state run enterprise.

Secondly it is not asset stripping, it is building competition into sectors which previously had none and therefore had stagnated. Good prices were received for many of the public enterprises which allowed the gov't to pay down debt which was costing far more in servicing than they would ever receive in profit from the assets while they were running them.

cacofonix, you are correct. In these circumstances, people often have an understandable, but ultimately counterproductive, inclination to view the targets of US aggression through rose-tinted glasses. My apologies for carelessly implying that rache had done so.

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Regarding Paul.L's diatribes in defence of privatisation:

It is not surprising that bodies like the World Bank, which was notoriously captured by free market ideologues in the service of globalised corporations some decades ago, have been able to produce reports which 'prove' that privatised enterprises are more efficient than government owned enterprises. What these reports usually do is ignore cost-shifting that is nearly always employed when a utilities are privatised.

An example of cost-shifting is where training programs are scrapped. Prior to corporatisation/privatisation, it was accepted that these publicly owned utilities, should bear the costs of training in the interests of the broader community. Whether the trained people remained with the publicly owned utility, or subsequently was employed by a private company was not a great concern to utilities whose charter was to serve the public, rather than just look after its own bottom line. After privatisation/corporatisation, the business's bottom line could easily be improved by shifting the costs of training onto the broader community. Telstra closed down its world-class training schools in the early 1990's after it became corporatised, and more recently, closed down its linesman's schools. It now uses the skilled immigration program to obtain workers it previously trained itself. Other corporations have similarly closed down their on-the-job training programs.

Since then the community has borne this and many other costs previously borne by the utilities, most spectacularly with the huge skills shortage, suddenly discovered towards the end of John Howard's reign.

However, even with the unfair advantage of cost-shifting, the overwhelming experience of privatisation has been massive increases in the costs of services. That is why there was a social upheaval in the early part of this decade in Bolivia which led to the election of the popular socialist President Evo Morales pleadged to take pack the country's energy and water resources previously stolen under World Bank dictates. (more later)

Dagget,

You seem unable to stick to the point. I pointedly asked you how you could justify your 'privatization equals theft' "theory". This is another example of getting carried away by the hyperbole. Privatisation, is almost universally acknowledged as good policy. The suggestion that it is tantamount to theft is not only intellectually vacuous it is patently incorrect. The dominant school of economic thought of the last 20 years has been economic liberalism and at its centre has been privatization. During that time, those countries which embraced these economic changes have overwhelmingly lifted their GDP.

Your contention that the world bank encouraged the THEFT of Bolivia's utility companies illuminates your continuing insistence to sloganise complex issues. That is typical of the loony-left. For starters the world bank only has influence over those who need money from it in the first place. Secondly, why would the world bank lend money to a country which was not following economic best practice? Of course they would recommend privatisation. But privatisation does not mean selling your SOE's to the local used car dealer for a massive kickback. Thats just called corruption.

Socialism is a FAILED ideology in almost every sense. Get over it.

Cost shifting. Training necessary to business needs will always be taken care of because it is in the company’s interests to do so. When there is a glut of skilled workers on the market the company will undertake very little training, and when there is a shortage of skilled workers the company will undertake a lot of training.

I don't accept that our utility companies have a social obligation to train people they don't need. Running training schools that train people who are unlikely to stay with the company is merely shifting the cost from those who should rightfully bear it. The idea that public owned utilities had a charter to serve the public is archaic nonsense. We elect a gov't to cover that responsibility. Their job is to provide those basic educational opportunities to give everyone a fair start

Paul.L,

As I wrote, by my definition, taking someone's property without their consent is theft. If you take issue with my definition, then I consider that your problem and not mine.

I have heard ad nauseum the argument about 'representative democracy'. Tell me, Paul.L, who do you think Iemma and Costa are 'representing' with their policies to sell NSW's electricity assets? As I have already pointed out, the policy was emphatically rejected by the NSW public at the 1999 elections when the Liberal opposition stood explicitly on a program of full privatisation and the Labor Government stood on a program of retaining public ownership. The latest poll show 79% opposition. A previous poll showed 85% opposition.

Furthermore, every poll taken on every privatisation, the Snowy Hydro, Telstra, Medibank Private, etc, has similarly shown consistent overwhelming opposition to privatisation.

What else would it take to convince you that the NSW public oppose privatisation and that the NSW government has no mandate to sell?

Back to the topic at hand:

Paul Bremer had no mandate to privatise Iraq's publicly owned assets. As he made clear himself in 2001, he understood that privatisation would be opposed by the Iraqi public. Almost certainly that is why he ordered the cancellation of the elections that were underway, and almost certainly that is why Costa and Iemma did not put their plans to privatise NSW's electricty to the NSW public in the 2007 state elections.

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I am not arguing for or against socialism here. I am arguing for democracy and for the right of democratically elected governments to play a role in the economy including the right to own utilities which provide public services. If you choose to label that 'socialism', then I am not going to argue to the death over that definition.

Neverthelesss, it happens that Evo Morales the socialist President of Bolivia has just won a ringing endorsement of the Bolivian people for his policies of renationalising privatised utilities (http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-bolivia11-2008aug11,0,1755836.story) in the face of a concerted and often violent campaign funded in part by the U.S. (http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096417850) to destabilise his government.

Just to deal with a few more of the growing numbers of evasions, self-contradictions and fallacies in Paul.L's posts.

"During that time, those countries which embraced these economic changes have overwhelmingly lifted their GDP."

It is widely understood, not least of all by Simon Kuznets, who devised the GDP measure in (I think) 1933 for U.S. President Roosevelt, that it is not an accurate measure of prosperity. It is not an accurate measure because it counts all economic activity as adding to prosperity. Thus, according to the GDP measure, economic activity dealing with the consequences fires, floods and manmade disasters adds to human prosperity, just as much as building railways houses or growing crops would.

No doubt money spent by the Latin American dictatorships murdering and torturing the opponents of their economic 'reforms' during the 1970's and 1980's would have been shown by the GDP measure as adding to national prosperity.

Another ludicrous aspect of the GDP measure is that it doesn't not take account of activities which do not involve monetary transactions. So much economic activity in third world nations, whereby people grew food and necessities either for themselves or for exchange for other commodities through village barter systems were not measured.

So, when many of these rural non-monetary economic systems were destroyed in the process of neo-liberal globalising 'reforms', neo-liberal economists were able to make claims of significant rises in living standards, when, in fact the reverse had happened. Peasants who were previously independent, self-sufficient and highly skilled custodians of their land were forced off their land in order to work for long hours in low-paid menial unskilled factory occupations, that is, if they could find such work. However, because they were paid wages, whereas before they weren't they could be depicted as being more prosperous. No account was made of the fact that many of what they now had to pay for, including rent, was previously free or cost very little.

For more discussion of the absurdity of the GDP measure, see http://info.interactivist.net/node/4530

There are many villages where “basic needs”
of their residents as they conceive ...

... them are satisfied, but whose collective income is less
than $365 a year per person. Are these villagers extremely
poor and, if so, in what way?

...

After all, what does the “exchange value” measure of extreme
poverty — the quantity $1 a day measure when considered from
the point of view of purchasing power parity (PPP) — come to?
The definition of PPP Sachs and the World Bank use is “the
number of units of a country’s currency needed to buy in the
country the same amount of goods and services as, say, one
US dollar could buy in the U.S.” Consequently, according to
the definition, an extremely poor person is someone who “lives”
on the “goods and services” that one can buy for $1 a day in
the US. ... according to the common understanding of what can
be bought in the US for $1 a day, the people that fall under
this definition ought all to be dead. But they are not.

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Paul.L wrote, "For starters the World Bank only has influence over those who need money from it in the first place. ..."

http://members.pcug.org.au/~wildwood/LHBMozam.htm
...
After independence in 1975, the Mozambican government
established a national primary health care system to
reach its poor rural populations. The system was so
successful that the WHO cited
it as a model for developing countries. A war of
destabilization financed by neighboring South Africa,
initiated in the early 1980s, however, targeted the
health system and its workers. The system continued
to function remarkably well under the extreme
conditions, but Mozambique had to rely increasingly
on external assistance to recover from the economic
catastrophe and destruction caused largely by the war.
As a result, Mozambique turned to the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to gain access
to financing for development projects and to obtain
relief from an enormous international debt burden.

As a condition for funding, the World Bank and IMF
compelled Mozambique to limit total spending in
specific sectors beginning in 1987. They even
restricted how much the government could pay its
health workers. ...