{"id":179664,"date":"2017-12-03T21:48:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-04T02:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/12\/03\/running-america-like-a-business-burning-it-down-for-the-insurance-money\/"},"modified":"2017-12-03T21:48:00","modified_gmt":"2017-12-04T02:48:00","slug":"running-america-like-a-business-burning-it-down-for-the-insurance-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/12\/03\/running-america-like-a-business-burning-it-down-for-the-insurance-money\/","title":{"rendered":"Running America Like a Business: Burning It down for the Insurance Money"},"content":{"rendered":"

Case in point, Pittsburgh’s increasingly privatized water system, which is now also increasingly lead tainted<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe government should be run like a great American company,\u201d Jared Kushner, Trump\u2019s son-in-law and senior adviser (who is also an alleged slumlord<\/a> and the future broker of peace in the Middle East) told<\/a> The Washington Post last March. \u201cOur hope is that we can achieves successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens.\u201d President Trump\u2019s administration touts private enterprise as the solution to any and all challenges faced by public projects\u2014from budget waste<\/a> to bureaucratic delays<\/a> to low test scores<\/a>, the market can fix it all. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Yet governments, local and federal, frequently look to the private sector to solve their problems. And it\u2019s no wonder: They need help. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the entire country a D+ on its 2017 infrastructure report card<\/a>. \u201cFrom the crumbling bridges of California to the overflowing sewage drains of Houston and the rusting railroad tracks in the Northeast Corridor,\u201d reads a 2016 piece<\/a> in The New Yorker, \u201cdecaying infrastructure is all around us.\u201d <\/p>\n

Pittsburgh, in an attempt to deal with entrenched infrastructure problems, turned to the private sector in 2012 when it partnered with the French management firm Veolia North America, the same water-management company that would fail to disclose Flint\u2019s lead-contamination problem in 2015. Alongside aging infrastructure that produced frequent water-main breaks<\/a>, flush and boil advisories<\/a>, and wildly incorrect billing statements<\/a>, PWSA was in massive debt<\/a>. Veolia promised to streamline the public utility\u2014in fact, its Peer Performance Solutions model, which embeds private-sector consultants with public-sector employees, won the company an award<\/a> from the National Council for Public-Private Partnerships in 2014, a little more than a year after it began partnering with PWSA. The organization lauded Veolia for identifying $2.3 million in new PWSA revenue and $3 million more in operating savings, a move incentivized by their contract that stipulated the company could keep 40 percent of every dollar it saved the city. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a glowing account<\/a> of PWSA\u2019s partnership with Veolia, despite reports that it laid off 23 employees, many of whom were longtime employees with critical institutional knowledge. The private sector had seemingly done its job, weeding out inefficiencies and saving the authority millions. <\/p>\n

But this August, a consulting group<\/a> hired to assess the organization\u2019s current state announced in a public meeting<\/a> that PWSA was \u201ca failed organization atop a dangerous and crumbling structure\u201d with \u201can aging system in demonstrably worse condition than any water utility of its size in the country.\u201d Not only that, water tests showed that since the partnership began, Pittsburgh\u2019s water had been tainted with dangerously high levels of lead. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

PWSA, like community water systems across the country, had been dealing with the challenges of operating aging infrastructure long before the public-private partnership. And these issues were only complicated further by poor management\u2014the authority was infamous for its high rates and billing mistakes that verged on the absurd<\/a>. But at least the water didn\u2019t boast dangerously high rates of lead. <\/p>\n

In the summer of 2016, when Pittsburgh\u2019s water was tested for the first time since Veolia began instituting changes, the resulting lead levels exceeded<\/a> the federal limit. Before Veolia, the water authority had long supplemented its water with soda ash, a substance very similar to baking soda that lines the inside of pipes to prevent corrosion. But under Veolia\u2019s management, it switched to caustic soda\u2014which, while approved for use, is generally acknowledged as an inferior, cheaper, means of corrosion control. The switch to caustic soda stripped the inside of PWSA\u2019s pipes, removing the layer of minerals previously deposited by soda ash, helping leach lead into the city\u2019s drinking water. <\/p>\n

The mayor and the City of Pittsburgh say they were never notified of the change. The state Department of Environmental Protection demanded immediate testing when notified PWSA had switched back to soda ash<\/a> and chastised PWSA for making unapproved modifications to the water-treatment process. Veolia<\/a> says it had no part in the decision, arguing the PWSA board approved the switch\u2014a board made up of half Veolia executives and half members of PWSA\u2019s Board of Directors. And according to The Guardian, \u201cUnder Veolia\u2019s management, PWSA\u2019s new executive director, James Good<\/a>, a longtime Veolia employee and former private water lobbyist, became the second-highest paid public employee<\/a> in the region. He earned $240,000 a year<\/a> with generous benefits.\u201d <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Public-Private Partnership (PPP) and its British cousin, the QUANGO (Q<\/b><\/u>uasi-A<\/b><\/u>utonomous N<\/b><\/u>on-G<\/b><\/u>overnmental O<\/b><\/u>rganization) have not proved to be successes.<\/p>\n

It’s not surprising.  When you juxtapose taxpayer money with a lack of accountability, incompetence and corruption are what you are paying for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Case in point, Pittsburgh’s increasingly privatized water system, which is now also increasingly lead tainted: \u201cThe government should be run like a great American company,\u201d Jared Kushner, Trump\u2019s son-in-law and senior adviser (who is also an alleged slumlord and the future broker of peace in the Middle East) told The Washington Post last March. \u201cOur …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[368,588,439,412],"class_list":["post-179664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-corruption","tag-fail","tag-government","tag-privatization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179664"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}