Privatisation for breakfast, lunch and dinner

Are there limits to privatisation or should we just consider asking multinationals to sell babies to the highest bidder?

A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system.

Now the company, Library Systems & Services, has been hired for the first time to run a system in a relatively healthy city, setting off an intense and often acrimonious debate about the role of outsourcing in a ravaged economy.

A $4 million deal to run the three libraries here is a chance for the company to demonstrate that a dose of private management can be good for communities, whatever their financial situation. But in an era when outsourcing is most often an act of budget desperation — with janitors, police forces and even entire city halls farmed out in one town or another — the contract in Santa Clarita has touched a deep nerve and begun a round of second-guessing.

Can a municipal service like a library hold so central a place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort — and maybe not even then?

After all, in the US countless politicians are bankrolled by the arms industry, proving that privatisation of death and the myriad of ways to achieve it is no block to assuming public office and then spreading the glorious ideology to other areas of life.

Text and images ©2024 Antony Loewenstein. All rights reserved.

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