Progressive Ponderings—Local Privatization

09/14/2005

Joe Mayer
Sept. 14, 2005

My current residence is in Rochester, MN.  At a City Council meeting on Monday, Sept.12, 2005, the Local Chamber of Commerce proposed that the city of Rochester sell its city-owned power generating facility and its city auditorium complex to private enterprise.  A proposal such as this infers that citizen-owned and -operated facilities have been and are now incompetently managed.  In the case of our city, this incompetence has been going on for 110 years and our electrical utility pays into the city coffers $8 million in lieu of taxes.

We citizens are incorporated and own these facilities; we elect our fellow citizens who then select other members of our community to build and manage these facilities in our name and for our benefit.  This utility is of such size that its purchase would have to be a corporate form of ownership and most likely by absentee stockholders.  Chamber wisdom asks us to believe that absentee stockholders, investing for profit only, would be more responsible for our electrical powers needs than our current local fellow citizens.

Such “wisdom” has dominated conservative thought since Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.  Its basic premise is that government is always less competent than private enterprise, i.e. “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” serves the people less effectively than private enterprise, i.e. “of the corporation, by the corporation, for the profit.  This same “wisdom” also dominates a foreign policy which advocates trade agreements and international organizations such as the World Bank and the IMF, which are completely controlled by corporate interests, while at the same time castigating the United Nations which operates within at least some degree of democratic structure.

Conservatives have been able to sell this myth that business is always more competent than government to the American public because the so-called opposition Democratic Party has not effectively countered the myth.  Because of this the myth proceeded from the national level to the state level and now has its sites on local communities.

A second factor involved in this proposal to the detriment of local citizens is that privatization of either of these facilities would create a monopoly.  The strong conservative belief in competition as a controlling and motivating factor in the free market is not present.

The proposal’s vision regarding the civic center is extremely myopic.  Our civic center operates at a loss as do most others throughout the nation, so its market value is questionable. The city is willing to take this loss because of the service it provides the community and because of the revenue visitors bring to local businesses who use our hotels and motels, restaurants and bars, and many retailers benefit tremendously from this “loss leader.” The city, state, and federal governments all benefit from this increase in economic activity through increased tax revenue.

We, like most communities, already suffer from two local utility-type monopolies – the local phone and cable companies.  Neither of these two companies lists a local phone number in our telephone directory.  How’s that for local concern?

A third factor in this self-serving proposal involves our fellow citizen employees of these enterprises.  In both targeted facilities employees are represented by unions which have secured a living wage with benefits.  Thus, a hidden target is again the laborer, just as it was at the federal level in creating the Department of Homeland Security.

Progressives throughout the nation must become aware of these wolves in sheep’s clothing who want to prey on the assets of local communities.