Quotes & Sayings About Privatization

It is really quite amazing that all of the folks supporting privatization, from the president on down, keep invoking the name of my grandfather, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. — James Roosevelt

A global financial cabal engineered a fraudulent housing and debt bubble [2008], illegally shifted vast amounts of capital out of the US; and used 'privatization' as a form of piracy - a pretext to move government assets to private investors at below-market prices and then shift private liabilities back to government at no cost to the private liability holder Clearly, there was a global financial coup d'etat underway. — Catherine Austin Fitts

Beneath the privatization of worship is the ever-present individualism of our culture. — Robert E. Webber

Much of America is now in need of an equivalent of Mrs. Thatcher's privatization program in 1980s Britain, or post-Soviet Eastern Europe's economic liberalization in the early Nineties. It's hard to close down government bodies, but it should be possible to sell them off. And a side benefit to outsourcing the Bureau of Government Agencies and the Agency of Government Bureaus is that you'd also be privatizing public-sector unions, which are the biggest and most direct assault on freedom, civic integrity, and fiscal solvency. — Mark Steyn

The novel since its origins has been the privatization of history ... the history of private life ... and in that sense every novel is an historical novel ... — Jose Emilio Pacheco

Copyright protects corporate monopoly rights over culture and provides much of the profits to media conglomeratesm encouraging the wholesale privatization of our common culture. — Robert Waterman McChesney

First of all, the Social Security money belongs to Main Street, not to Wall Street. It needs to be said very clearly here that privatization is off the table ... Social Security, as a matter of fact, is a better investment now than the stock market. There's a higher return. There's guaranteed cost-of-living increases. Privatization you have to worry about the value of your account. — Dennis Kucinich

There were times, though, when the women came together on a partisan basis. [When we stopped] the privatization of Social Security during George Bush, we linked arms. — Barbara Mikulski

We are a coalition government, and that limits our options in some ways. Privatization happens to be one such area. — Manmohan Singh

The various Social Security privatization schemes, full and partial, would cost both the 'social' - that is the public, cooperative, societal - element of the program and 'security' - the rock-solid income guarantee afforded by the system. It should be rejected. — Ralph Nader

When historians look back on the past quarter century of international negotiations, two defining processes will stand out. There will be the climate process: struggling, sputtering, failing utterly to achieve its goals. And there will be the corporate globalization process, zooming from victory to victory: from that first free trade deal to the creation of the World Trade Organization to the mass privatization of the former Soviet economies to the transformation of large parts of Asia into sprawling free-trade zones to the "structural adjusting" of Africa. — Naomi Klein

globalization, a grossly misnamed metaphor that disingenuously cloaked government deregulation and the privatization of public goods and services in the wrap of a new global "interconnectivity. — Jeremy Rifkin

People often don't understand the engine that drives corruption. Particularly in India, they assume government equals corruption, private companies equal efficiency. But government officials are not genetically programmed to be corrupt. Corruption is linked to power. If it is the corporations that are powerful, then they will be corrupt. — Arundhati Roy

First, we will focus on the privatization of small and medium sized enterprises, followed by the medium size industry and then we will move on to the heavy industry. — Ibrahim Rugova

And a noble life is one ordered by, and oriented to, a transcendent moral code, not just one's own concept of existence and meaning and truth ... if we want a society that reveres life, that defends the family, and that discourages delinquency and promotes decency, we cannot force a privatization of religion; we must allow the truth-claims of religious faith to be uttered aloud in the public square. — Rick Santorum

Privatization of the state-owned economy is not yet on the agenda. We cannot do it immediately; my colleagues would not agree to it. But we must put all forms of ownership on an equal footing immediately and let different types of ownership compete with the state firms. — Vaclav Klaus

We are ready to build large underground gas storages in Turkey, to participate in the privatization of Turkey's gas-distribution networks, to use the existing and participate in the construction of new pipelines in order to supply our energy resources through Turkey to third countries, including in southern Europe — Vladimir Putin

The conservative goal has been the Third Worldization of the United States: an increasingly underemployed, lower-wage work-force; a small but growing moneyed class that pays almost no taxes; the privatization or elimination of human services; the elimination of public education for low-income people; the easing of restrictions against child labor; the exporting of industries and jobs to low-wage, free-trade countries; the breaking of labor unions; and the elimination of occupational safety and environmental controls and regulations. — Michael Parenti

Golden sees parental uninterest in collective solutions as part of a larger "decline in the social contract" ... "As a scholar, I'm very disturbed that we have more [media] articles about toxins in the home than the fact that we don't have universal prenatal care, she says. "We've moved from collective concern about infant and child welfare into this very privatized focus on "my child" and this intensive child-rearing. — Emily Matchar

It defies reason to believe that Martin Luther King, Jr. would march arm in arm with Wall Street hedge fund managers and members of ALEC to lead a struggle for the privatization of public education, the crippling of unions, and the establishment of for-profit schools. — Diane Ravitch

If you're going to have a public subsidy to education, vouchers are clearly a better way of delivering it. They should result in some loosening up and privatization of the government school system. — Peter Brimelow

That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital. — Noam Chomsky

After the privatization of public education everyone will get to choose a school that reflects only your own social values. No need for the competition of ideas or critical thinking. So the curriculum will be up to the school to determine. I am certain that the growing percentage of us who have McJobs will welcome this opportunity to spend a large portion of our income on education and choose an ideology at the same time. — David Friedrich Strauss

I've never enriched myself via privatization schemes in Eastern Europe. — Joshua Cohen

The Social Security trust fund is in pretty good shape today and we should not embark upon risky, dangerous schemes which will, in fact, undermine Social Security, such as privatization. — Max Baucus

The demands of Sex Privatization contradict the demands of the Beauty Ideal, causing the severe feminine neurosis about personal appearance. — Shulamith Firestone

With the corporatization and privatization of higher education, it is increasingly more difficult for colleges and universities to expand and deepen democratic public life, produce engaged critical citizens, and operate as democratic public spheres. — Henry Giroux

Proponents of privatization argued that cities and states needed private capital to fund all the upgrades that our decaying infrastructure so desperately needed. — Bethany McLean

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge - we'll make it a thing of the past. — Aaron Swartz

Privatization is a bitter pill but it is a pill that will cure. — Frederick Chiluba

Arguably the most substantive domestic issue facing the republic is the fate of Social Security, with privatization the most frequently mentioned option. For the first time in history, a familiarity with the behavior of the financial markets has become a prerequisite for competent citizenship, apart from its obvious pecuniary value. Using — William J. Bernstein

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Republicans has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the rest of us and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them. — Garrison Keillor

Vote to stand tall against terrorists ; receive Social Security privatization . Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes , in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining. — Thomas Frank

Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The 'mental health plague' in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high. The — Mark Fisher

Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age-privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending-are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels. — Naomi Klein

Growing religious fundamentalism is directly linked to globalization and to privatization. The Indian government is talking about selling its entire power sector to foreign multinationals, but when the consequences of that become hard to manage, the government immediately starts saying, "Should we build the Ram temple in Ayodhya?" Everyone goes baying off in that direction. Meanwhile, contracts are signed.
It's like a game. That's something we have to understand. It's like a pincer action. With one hand they're selling the country out to multinationals. With the other they're orchestrating this howling cultural nationalism. On the one hand you're saying that the world is a global village. On the other hand governments spend millions and millions patrolling their borders with nuclear weapons. — Arundhati Roy

The privatization plan weakens Social Security and threatens our economic security by creating trillions of dollars in new debt. — Ruben Hinojosa

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks ... With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge - we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us? — Aaron Swartz

Terrorism, War & Bankruptcy are caused by the privatization of money, issued as a debt and compounded by interest. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Western concepts of ownership and privatization came in and clashed with that. So land began to be exchanged. — Neil Abercrombie

During these two and a half years that have followed the war, the most urgent problem we have encountered was: to activate the public enterprises, to bring them up to the level that international markets demand and we are just now getting them prepared for privatization. — Ibrahim Rugova

In the winter of 1987 India was full of iskeems that had gone awry. Agricultural iskeems, political iskeems, economic iskeems, educational iskeems, stop black money iskeems, attract white tourists iskeems, drinkable water iskeems, animal protection iskeems, women's welfare iskeems, nurture children iskeems, don't scan female foetus iskeems, privatization iskeems, medical iskeems, entertainment iskeems, old India iskeems and new India iskeems.
We had mastered the art of nomenclature from the white man.
Grand labels could disguise unforgivable things. — Tarun J. Tejpal

The President's proposed privatization plan would jeopardize that security by cutting guaranteed benefits for future retirees and endangering the benefits of current retirees, people with disabilities, and children who have lost a parent. — Chaka Fattah

We want to develop innovative ways to promote savings so more Americans can save for their future, but first we need to reject privatization schemes and work together to strengthen Social Security. — Debbie Stabenow

Privatization and deregulation constitute the outsourcing of democratically elected government with a moral mission to corporations that have a profit-making mission. The effect is to turn democracy into corporatocracy. PROFIT — George Lakoff

Chicago's privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration, which ran from 1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace. For Rahm's investment banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For citizens? Not so much. — Rick Perlstein

Thank you to Giulia Fani, Joan Spence and my sister for the rooms and desks they loaned me. — Moez Surani

Privatization of assets that most of us consider public goods - like airports and highways - has a long, often-uncontroversial history. — Bethany McLean

During the 1990s the United States sought to impose the 'Washington Consensus' on Latin American governments. It embodied what Latin Americans call 'neo-liberal' principles: budget cuts, privatization, deregulation of business, and incentives for foreign companies. This campaign sparked bitter resistance and ultimately collapsed. — Stephen Kinzer

The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending. — Naomi Klein

Privatization is a neoliberal and imperialist plan. Health can't be privatized because it is a fundamental human right, nor can education, water, electricity and other public services. They can't be surrendered to private capital that denies the people from their rights. — Hugo Chavez

The big banks advise cities about whether privatization is a wise choice. They also control the ability of states and cities to access the market for their financing needs. — Bethany McLean

The privatization of education means that conservatives can set up their own schools in which their children will not have to learn about anything that might be inconsistent with conservative morality and politics. It would also mean a move away from the integration of schools, which means that the children of conservatives would not have to encounter students from different subcultures with different values. School vouchers would make privatization that much easier. In — George Lakoff

As it happens, Chicago is the nation's leader in municipal privatization efforts. That's right: The city that conservatives portray as the citadel of the power-grabbing, government-growing left has been selling itself off in pieces for years. It signed a 99-year lease for the Chicago Skyway, a toll road in the city's South Side, back in 2005. — Thomas Frank

Women would be disproportionately affected by the privatization of social security. It is one of the most important safety nets for American women in old age, or in times of disability, to insure financial income for their families. — Barbara Mikulski

Privatization, of course, is based on yet another myth: that government-run programs must be inefficient, and privatization accordingly must be better. In fact, as we noted in chapter 6, the transaction costs of Social Security and Medicare are much, much lower than those of private-sector firms providing comparable services. This should not come as a surprise. The objective of the private sector is to make profits - for private companies, transactions costs are a good thing; the difference between what they take in and what they pay out is what they want to maximize.31 — Joseph E. Stiglitz

Privatization came on slowly. When something very big happens, like privatization, historians and economists like to think you must have had very big causes. That is not how it happened. — Kenneth Baker

Socialism is based on the notion that collaboration and sharing are more productive, humane, and moral than competition and privatization. — Eric Michael Moberg

Calling resists privatization by insisting on the totality of faith. Calling resists politicization by demanding a tension with every human allegiance and association. Calling resists polarization by requiring an attitude toward, and action in, society that is inevitably transforming because it is constantly engaged. Grand Christian movements will rise and fall. Grand campaigns will be mounted and grand coalitions assembled. But all together such coordinated efforts will never match the influence of untold numbers of followers of Christ living out their callings faithfully across the vastness and complexity of modern society. — Os Guinness

If I just produce the transparent ideal accepted by the Western experts, a process of privatization which will be very good but never happen, that means nothing. — Anatoly Chubais

When you buy a company at an auction, and you are committing yourself to pay some $300 million to the state because it was a privatization deal, and you don't pay it, is it OK? Isn't it something that deserves court procedures? — Sergei Lavrov

I do not want to return to the Ukraine of the 1990s and the time of privatization. Ninety-eight percent of Ukrainian companies obey the laws. — Viktor Yushchenko

Our inability to share the gifts of nature causes much suffering in the world today... We mistakenly believe that a free market should allow people and corporations to profit from nature, yet we've failed to consider the immense cost to life that occurs whenever people are allowed to reap what they haven't sown at the expense of others. While the privatization of capital can lead to production efficiencies that benefit the entire market, the same can't be said for privatization of nature. Whenever the income stream from nature is privatized, human beings take for themselves the gifts that would better be freely shared with everyone. — Martin Adams

Bingo!! Once again, privatization
*total* privatization
is the best solution. Get government, and government-sanctioned business collectives, out of the health 'care' picture entirely and, just maybe, I can go back to typing the word 'care' (in relation to 'health') without the quotes. — Edward Britton

The privatization law draft was recently released and I believe that very soon we will start applying it, of course taking into consideration the provisions of UNMIK (United Nations Mission in Kosovo). — Ibrahim Rugova

The American people do not like privatization. They are afraid of the debt the president's willing to do. And they don't like benefit cuts. And everyone here should understand all 45 Senate Democrats are united. We are not going to let this happen. — Harry Reid

I agree that we must expand opportunities for retirement saving, but we must not undermine this worthy effort with a flawed privatization scheme that takes the 'security' out of Social Security. — Mary Landrieu

No city embraced privatization more eagerly than Chicago, where I live. — Bethany McLean

The president and Republicans in Congress have repeatedly promised to revisit Social Security privatization after November. But Americans have already said, loud and clear, that they don't want Social Security to be privatized or dismantled. — Jim Clyburn

I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I'm for that. Where the government is necessary, I'm for that. I'm deeply suspicious of somebody who says, 'I'm in favor of privatization,' or, 'I'm deeply in favor of public ownership.' I'm in favor of whatever works in the particular case. — John Kenneth Galbraith

[The] overuse and misuse of standardized tests is only the start of the problems with NCLB. NCLB uses these test scores to impose sanctions that have no record of success as school improvement strategies, and in fact are not really educational strategies at all. They're political strategies designed to promote privatization and market reform in public education. — Stan Karp

Public education is so important - resisting privatization and charterization, high-stakes testing, and defunding. It's important for New York, but it's also important for the country. — Zephyr Teachout

Privatization of the postal system has long been characterized as absurd, but I have always said it is only logical, — Junichiro Koizumi

I am emphatically against the privatization of Social Security. It is going to hurt millions of American women, American families and ultimately the whole country. — Barbara Mikulski

Privatization will always be a timid ideology as long as architects are allowed to unveil their buildings. — Bauvard

So as far as Serbia is concerned, it does not have the right to influence the privatization or to claim any property, because Kosovo is a former member of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. — Ibrahim Rugova

Our government is ready to guarantee their investments for them, and then we will create tax incentives. We are interested in having all these things and with the privatization we also want to create more jobs and better conditions for the workers. — Ibrahim Rugova