July 11, 2013

News

Privatization’s the Name of the Game for Accident-Prone Train Company Behind Lac-Mégantic Oil Disaster. As the head of the company behind the runaway oil train that derailed and caused a fireball explosion in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec faced furious residents on Wednesday, he continued to defend the shoddy safety record of his company hell-bent on privatization…. The Canadian Press, citing information from the U.S. Federal Railroad Administration, reports that the MM&A has had 8 derailments and four collisions since 2010, and it has an average of 34.7 accidents per million miles traveled, well above the national average of 2.3 accidents per million miles.  The Wall Street Journal adds that the company had “23 accidents, injuries or reportable mishaps from 2010 to 2012.”  Common Dreams

Postal Service needs centralized system to manage public-private partnerships. The U.S. Postal Service has been broadening its use of public-private partnerships in recent years. But to fully leverage its relationship with the private sector, the agency could take a page from foreign post offices, according to postal auditors. While the service is making progress on partnering with the private sector, the USPS still lacks a central office to deal with the logistics of sharing lessons learned, said Michael Kubayanda, a public policy specialist at the USPS Office of the Inspector General on In Depth with Francis Rose Monday.  FederalNewsRadio.com

Privatizing Privatization. Smokey Diamond, our intrepid reporter, has had her nose to the grindstone in sniffing out not only today’s news, but tomorrow’s.  She reports that the thought keeping the two major Republican think tanks awake at night is the slow pace of privatization.  Both the ultra-conservative IGM group and the ultra, way past-conservative WGOs group had thought that most government services would have withered away by now, leaving the only government functions the fighting of wars in nations whose names we cannot spell and the occasional photo shoot of an uncomfortable looking John Boehner and a satanic looking Eric Cantor cutting the funds for some program or other that the young or sick depend on.  Not so. Voices of Central Pennsylvania

IL: Has privatizing Chicago public housing done much to desegregate it? The Chicago Reporter found that more than 97 percent of the voucher spending remains in Chicago. We mapped out where those rent dollars were spent between 2006 and 2011 and found that few trickled into the so-called “opportunity areas.” Most went to help house people in highly-segregated parts of the city’s South and West Sides where schools are struggling and jobs are hard to come by. ChicagoNow (blog).

CA: Feds search Oakland charter school in criminal investigation. The FBI and IRS have opened a criminal investigation into a charter school whose former director allegedly funneled $3.8 million from the school to companies he owns for construction and classroom rental spaces. San Jose Mercury News