We owe it to Ronald Reagan

In my opinion, one of the worst things that Ronald Reagan did was escalate the privatization of government. It was really very clever of him to tell everyone he hated government because he then shut down or reduced a number of departments and turned the money over to private corporations. Instead of paying bureaucrats $75,000 a year, we now pay companies like Booze Allen Hamilton $400 or $500  an hour (equivalent to $800,000 per year at full time for 50 weeks) for the same job . I've had two close relatives working for these companies that do outsourced work and the pay and benefits are incredible.

And now the states are doing it. Outsourcing education (private and charter schools), prisons, and I'm sure a lot more that I'm not even aware of. So now, instead of paying state employees  a reasonable wage and decent benefits, we're paying private companies to do the work and they are cheaping out on us so that they can earn high profits.

No wonder our country is falling into the crapper.

From Mother Jones
(Click on the link for more)

Lawsuit Against Mississippi Prison Is the Stuff of Nightmares

In the solitary confinement unit of East Mississippi Correctional Facility, it's common for inmates to set some clothing or an old milk carton on fire to get an officer's attention when they are in desperate need of a doctor-or if, say, their cell has been flooded by a broken pipe. Otherwise, it might be days before anyone took notice, according to a class-action lawsuit filed last week by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The fires sometimes got the guards' attention, but not always in the way the inmates were hoping: At least one inmate, the suit claims, was maced by a corrections officer through his feeding slot. EMCF is a private, for-profit prison that houses seriously mentally ill patients, and the ACLU's lawsuit reads like a catalog of horrors.

Privatizing Our Government

Ronald Reagan was the primary mover and shaker behind the outsourcing of our government. I am sure there was some before him and there have been definitely several after him who reduced the size of the bureaucracy, but it was his claim to fame. We still see the impact of it today.

Ronald Reagan broke the back of the Air Traffic Controllers Union when they went on strike for higher wages and more controllers. Today, there are far too controllers (wages are too low and stress too high) resulting in a much higher rate of near misses in our skies.

Ronald Reagan escalated the use of private business to do the job of the government while downsizing the government itself. As I've noted in this blog before, it means that instead of hiring government employees at $50,000 to $100,000 per year, we now pay private contractors to do the work for $400 per hour and up. BUT - the money goes into the pockets of big business and their friends.

As an example, one need only look at Blackwater, KBR and Halliburton as huge corporations making a fortune from no-bid contracts to do jobs that used to be done by the military and the grunts working for the government.

Following is a video pointing to some of the cronyism and crookedness that rewards the fat cats in just one department - DHS.