The sheer obscenity of this is beyond belief. From The Guardian:

A government efficiency drive aimed at slashing spending in town halls and boosting productivity in the health service is likely to deliver billions of pounds of new business for private companies, the Guardian has learned.

Outsourcing firms are preparing for a bonanza of local authority contracts to provide everything from bin men to back office bureaucrats and have reported a doubling in the number of deals on offer this year. Private health companies are also expecting to earn billions of pounds from the planned overhaul of the NHS in which GPs would take over responsibility for spending £70bn.

Executives at Capita, the UK's largest outsourcing firm, said the number of opportunities for local authority contracts has already doubled this year and they see the healthcare market as "vast and potentially lucrative".

Richard Marchant, head of local government strategic partnerships at Capita, an FTSE-100 company which already works for councils in Harrow, Swindon, Southampton and Sheffield, said: "A major problem for the public sector is, we feel, a significant opportunity for us. Opportunities are at their highest level in two to three years. This year we have probably seen a 100% increase in opportunities [compared with 2009] and I suspect we will see another 50% increase in the following year."

Such an increase could deliver a £60m boost to Capita's revenues while councils are anticipating a 30% budget cut over the next four years. Other firms vying for town hall contracts include Serco and Mouchel.

The private sector boom comes amid the toughest financial climate for public services in a generation, and despite continued assurances from ministers that reforms to public services are aimed at achieving greater value for money and improving efficiency. Councils are braced for the biggest cuts to their budgets since 1945 and the growth in the market for privatised services has provoked anger that private shareholders, rather than taxpayers, are likely to benefit from efficiency savings that come from cuts.

Nor is it just British firms that are hoping to cash in on the chipping away of the British state. American firms want a slice of the NHS pie.

The US health giants Humana, UnitedHealth, Aetna and MCCI are all understood to be interested in healthcare contracts that could flow from a new commissioning system in which GPs may be given the power to buy in services from any health group or hospital that is properly accredited.

Minnesota-based UnitedHealth has already become a key adviser to primary care trusts and is running two GP practices in Derbyshire and three in London.

"There could be a bonanza for private companies if these changes go according to plan," said Jonathan Jackson at the stockbroker Killik & Co.

Privatisation of healthcare is being opposed by the unions.

"Private health already has a small role in the NHS [providing 4% of services], but we don't want it to grow," said Karen Jennings a spokeswoman for Unison, the public services union.

"The danger is that private companies will become so powerful that they will be able to determine what services are provided and how much they charge."

How Nick Clegg sleeps at night is beyond me. "If the coalition succeeds, by 2015 Britain will be a more liberal nation, a nation of stronger citizens living in a fairer society," Deputy Prime Minister Clegg said in a speech on Friday at the Demos think-tank. Clegg went on to say that his party, the Liberal Democrats, was united behind the spending cuts and tax rises in the budget. "This was a coalition budget, not a Conservative budget. The Liberal Democrats stand full-square behind the budget judgement," he said.

Meanwhile, opinion polls show support for Clegg's Lib Dems falling to as low as 15 percent compared with 24 percent in the May 6th election. Just to note that tax rise was an increase in the VAT to 20 percent from 17.5 percent, a rather regressive tax that affects the poor more. Since 1839 the Liberals have been battling Conservatism in Britain but Nick Clegg opts to enable David Cameron's budget that hits the poor hardest and emasculates the state. 

Even The Economist noted that "whatever the coalition’s intentions, the coming years will be painful for the poor." In his budget, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne set out plans to entirely eliminate the UK’s record £155 billion deficit within the five-year lifetime of this parliament. Achieving this target will mean five years of austerity involving cuts in welfare benefits, public services, jobs, pay and pensions. While the VAT increase is expected to raise £13 billion, Osborne also announced a total of £11 billion in cuts to welfare spending.

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David Harvey, the noted critic of neo-liberalism, calls privatization one of the four practices that characterizes the neo-liberal agenda. He terms it "accumulation by dispossession." Since the 1970s, privatization has been a mania, a usurping of the commons for individual gain at public expense. Granted in the US, state-owned enterprises are rare but that didn't stop the neo-liberal set from setting their sights on the acquiring public airports, bridges, roads, schools, hospitals, parks, utilities and even city parking rights. The stated purpose was efficiency but the real aim was simple avarice and greed. Now thankfully, this mania seems to be running out of steam.

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This frightens me. I'm sorry, but I just can't ignore it any longer. I need to ask this question. Is President Obama considering privatizing Social Security and/or Medicare?

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Gordon Smith likes to gamble - with privatizing Social Security and putting our retirement at risk on Wall Street.

Does not sound like a prudent investment to me.

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The LA Times is running a 5 part series titled the "Big Burn" about the growth and cost of wildfires.

Today's installment, Air tanker drops in wildfires are often just for show details much of the politics behind firefighting and the use of aircraft in what fire officials call "CNN drops". This article is a must-read if you care about waste, federal contractors, and slimy politicians. It's a really well written and researched piece with many quotes from former firefighting officials.

In particular, the article singles out Rep. Duncan Hunter from San Diego who personally called the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to request aircraft when Forest Service air tankers had already been grounded due to weather. While Hunter insisted that he was doing the job he was elected to:

To professional firefighters, though, it was a prime example of a "political air show," the high-profile use of expensive aircraft to appease elected officials.

(The one bit of happy ending to this story is that Duncan Hunter's house burned to the ground.)

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