The Perils of Privatization

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These massive conglomerates have set their sights on the corners of our economy that used to be the sphere of the public sector - health care and education, Social Security and prisons, water and sewer, even the unpleasant job of making war. Fortified by an ideological article of faith that the private sector can usually do it better, "the corporate privatizers," as Kahn and Minnich call them, have found an ally in the Bush Administration, and the results at times are quite clearly disastrous. In Iraq, for example, in the city of Mosul, insurgents blew up a mess hall for United States troops, killing 22 people. One military analyst expressed his astonishment that in contrast to long established practice, masses of soldiers were being fed at one time. That, he said, was something never done in a combat zone, precisely because a single bomb or mortar shell could kill so many people at once. But the job of feeding the soldiers in Mosul had been outsourced to a private company more interested in efficiency and profits than it was in the safety of the soldiers.

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