Sunday, March 23, 2025

Sh... It Is A Secret! The Selling Of America!

You see there is a simple answer... the billionaires are not rich enough and they want more of our money!

So to satisfy his oligarch masters Trump want to sell off the government services... like the weather bureau... the post office... the prisons... public schools...

This is from Trump's first term, "7 Things Trump Wants to Privatize" by AFGE,
  • Federal jobs. The Trump budget lifts the ban on privatization studies of federal jobs, opening a flood gate of wholesale privatization of public jobs. It’s a well-known fact that contractors are two to three times more expensive than federal civilians. Most of the money goes straight to increase the bottom line or enrich the CEOs and executives while workers see their salaries, benefits, and pensions cut. 
  • Prisons. Federal, state, and local governments have used private prisons for decades, but it was only recently when companies running private prisons drew a public outcry after it was revealed that two thirds of private prisons required that their prisons be 80-90 percent full otherwise the taxpayers would be on the hook for unused beds. The Obama administration decided to phase out private prisons after studies showed they have more safety, sanitary, and security problems than the ones run by the government. Within a month after taking office, however, Trump reversed the Obama-era decision. His budget increases funding for private prisons by $171 million.
  • Veterans Affairs health care. The Trump administration expanded the VA privatization program that sends veterans to for-profit private hospitals, which often are inferior to VA hospitals. The Trump budget also cuts benefits for disabled veterans in order to pay for further privatization of veterans care.
  • Public schools. The Trump budget cuts funding for public schools and transfers the money to for-profit companies. Public schools are designed to serve all students – rich, poor, healthy, disabled, easy to teach, difficult to teach. Private schools are not. Public schools guarantee equal opportunity and are essential to our country’s common good.
  • Air traffic control. The administration has proposed to privatize the country’s air traffic control. This could raise operational costs by 20-29% after 10 years, which means passengers would have to shoulder heftier fees when buying plane tickets. Our current system is the busiest and safest in the world. Privatizing it would create chaos and put our national defense’s surveillance and communications systems at risk. 
  • Roads and bridges. The administration proposed deep cuts to existing infrastructure programs and divert public money to investors who would rake in profits from highways, bridges, rest stops. As a result, the American people will be forced to pay expensive tolls or fees to use facilities that should belong to us all along.
  • Public lands and national monuments. Trump in April signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to review national monuments and “suggest legislative changes or modifications,” laying the groundwork to remove protections on public lands and waters. The order is excellent news for Big Oil and its lobbyists but terrible news for the American public and the environment.
I want you to remember... this is all because they want to cut taxes. These are all government services that should not make a profit... they are services!!!!

Veterans Affairs... Trump want to privatizes it so that the insurance companies can rake in all those health dollars from the disabled veterans who were willing to give their lives for our country, whom Trump called "losers" so his billionaire friends can rake in billions from the most expensive healthcare system in the world.
By Patricia Lopez
March 18, 2025 


Republicans have long thought that what the federal government does can be done better, faster or cheaper by the private sector.

So it shouldn’t shock anyone that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently revealed a larger agenda that sheds light on the Trump administration’s seemingly indiscriminate cuts to federal workers and agencies. President Donald Trump’s overarching goal, Bessent said, is to “reprivatize the economy.”

That casts Elon Musk and his unofficial Department of Government Efficiency in a new light — as the vehicle for slashing agency functions to a skeletal state and outsourcing the rest to what would be a much more lightly regulated private sector. Musk himself at a recent Morgan Stanley conference suggested that the government privatize “as much as possible.”

The DOGE cuts so far are not enough to make a dent in the national debt or offset Trump’s proposed tax cuts for the wealthy. Nor do they make government more efficient, which would require a thoughtful assessment. There is no evidence that the “fraud, waste and abuse” Musk claims to have discovered amount to anything more than spending with which he and Trump disagree.
What gains that they did make are easily offset by Trump junkets to play golf at the Mar-a-Lago golf courses at 8 million dollars at a pop... and it has been every weekend since he took office (8 weekends x 8 million = $64 million dollars to play golf at his private club. But it is not his money but ours.)
But as a means to push the nation closer to mass privatization of services? Now the cuts make sense. There is little need of a robust National Weather Service if forecasting is going to be farmed out to private companies. Ditto for the U.S. Postal Service, which Trump has long wanted to privatize despite the fact that it is protected by the Constitution.
What gets me in the privatize of the USPS, did you know that on Rural Free Delivery (RFD) routes UPS, Fed Ex, and Amazon all hand over their packages to the USPS because they don't want anything to do with rural areas of the country, it is not a profit making business, At my cottage on Cape Cod, Amazon delivers to the local Post offices, I have to got to the PO to get my orders,
The problem with privatization is that it seldom works. Private companies operate under different parameters from the federal government. Their primary goal is to maximize profit.

Consider the post office. Mail must go to every nook and hamlet in the U.S., no matter how remote. Wells Fargo, in a report on privatizing the postal service, recommends eliminating the costly “universal service obligation.” Delivery to “unprofitable” regions such as rural areas could become intermittent or just stop. Trump won 63% of the vote in rural areas and small towns.

In many rural areas, mail carriers remain a lifeline, bringing vital prescriptions to seniors who are either housebound or far from a pharmacy. The Department of Veterans Affairs, for instance, fills 80% of its prescriptions by mail service. Moving to private mail delivery could reduce accessibility and raise prices. About 6 in 10 veterans voted for Trump.
But boosts profits for the billionaires while cutting services. Then we have Social Security...

I am old enough to remember when companies had retirement programs where they guaranteed your pension for the rest of your life... Well that was costing companies money and they begged the Republicans to help them make more money by dropping company retirement plans. Along came IRAs! Where the companies could divest themselves of costly retirement plans to IRAs where their employees can pay the cost of maintaining their retirement plans and the stock brokerage companies could make billions of of our retirement plans! Now we are watching out life saving tanks as Trump crashes the stock market!

So now they want to do that with Social Security! They are doing everything they can to wreck SS! My representative from Connecticut wrote...
President Donald Trump’s efforts to slash federal government spending have ignited a new debate about the future of Social Security.

One idea that has been brought up before — privatizing the now public program — is getting new attention.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said Wednesday he supports more individual ownership in Social Security, though he said he would not necessarily use the term privatizing because it has toxic connotations.

“The problem we have now, we have a plan called Social Security that doesn’t grow with the economy,” said Fink, speaking at the BlackRock retirement summit in Washington, D.C.

Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system — today’s payroll tax contributions generally fund benefits for current retirees and other beneficiaries.

Any leftover money that is not used to either pay benefits or fund the program’s administrative costs is put into the program’s trust funds, according to the Social Security Administration. That money is invested in special Treasury bonds that earn a market rate of interest and are guaranteed by the U.S. government, according to the agency.

Privatizing the program could provide a way to invest money on behalf of individual workers that potentially earns a higher return, according to supporters of the idea.

“If we create a plan that every American can grow with our economy, they’re going to feel more attached to our economy,” Fink said.

[...]

Generally, Social Security reform discussions focus on making changes to improve the current system — raising taxes, cutting benefits or a combination of both.

Larson has a proposal to improve Social Security’s solvency by raising taxes on the wealthy while implementing benefit increases.

Yet whether Republicans, who generally oppose tax increases, and Democrats, who do not want benefit cuts, can reach a bipartisan compromise is an open question.

Starting reform discussions based on the program’s current structure is limiting, Biggs said.

“We really do have a failure of imagination on Social Security reform,” Biggs said. “I think what Larry Fink is saying is, ‘Let’s think big on it.’ I think he’s absolutely correct on that point.”
But sh... the Republicans don't want to you to talk about that... Musk opened his yap!

The Hill wrote...
by Alexander Bolton
March 20, 205


Senate Republicans want Elon Musk to stop talking about Social Security, and the Department of Government Efficiency to leave it alone.

Musk’s statement that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme,” and his plans to cut up to 12 percent of the Social Security Administration’s workforce, are giving GOP lawmakers heartburn.

They warn that Social Security reform is known as the “third rail” of politics for a reason: Any party that touches it is likely to get zapped come Election Day.

And Republicans fear that reductions in staff and field offices will boomerang on them, predicting constituents will grow frustrated if it becomes more difficult and time-consuming to address problems related to benefit claims.

“It doesn’t help the president when you have somebody who clearly is not worried about whether or not Social Security benefits are going to be there for him” leading the effort to shrink the Social Security Administration, said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), referring to Musk, the world’s richest person.
That is how the Republicans are, they swear up and down on a stack of Bible that they are not going to do it! But just look at abortions. During the elections, "Oh we are not going to have a national ban on abortions. Day One of Congress: They introduce a national abortion ban! Now they want us to believe that they are not touching Social Security. Do you believe them?

The Brookings Institution has a good article on what this "downsizing" of government is really leading to, "How federal layoffs set the stage for greater privatization and automation of the US government".
Seven months after his acquisition of Twitter, Elon Musk required an immediate RTO of employees, who were promised flexible work arrangements prior to the sale. Twitter was the first company to mandate such policies, resulting in the attrition of 80% of the workforce mainly through termination. Musk is now leading the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), leading the federal workforce reduction efforts, making the actions of the last few days eerily familiar. In 2023, Meta’s RTO mandate required that employees be in the office at least three days per week and threatened workers with termination if they did not oblige. Around the same time, Meta promoted its augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) technologies, suggesting that hybrid employees could utilize the technology. In January, Amazon also joined its peers in requiring that employees be in the office five days per week, which already is leading to traffic congestion in its Seattle headquarters, lack of office space for returning employees, increased theft in open work environments, among other concerns being shared by employees.
The other day I got the run around by am AI, I was on a company website and I want to know something about the product I wanted to buy from them. I asked their chat line is they made a product like that... the answers: "I don't know" I don't understand" "I don't..." everyway I asked the question it didn't know. I went on the their competitor Chat Room. "Hi this Sarah how can I help you today?" I typed what I was looking for and she answer, "Gee I don't know, give me a second to look it up." About a minute later she came back on again... "Yes we have some like you are looking for" and she told me the model numbers.

This is coming to SS and AI bot to run you around in circles!
Making the government vulnerable to an industry where data is consistently monetized for economic gain is, at best, a dangerous proposition to all consumers of government services where some communities will be harmed by biased training data, online mistakes in eligibility, and in many instances, the lack of basic internet access to benefit from increased amounts of digital services.
As I said I am old enough to remember when electric utilities were deregulated... How's your electric bill? Do you know where the cheapest electrical rates are in Connecticut? Norwich Public Utilities. NPU is a municipal electric company! WFSB reported...
If you live in Norwich, you get electricity from Norwich Public Utilities. It’s one of six local power companies that make up CMEEC, the Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Cooperative.

CMEEC CEO Dave Meisinger explained how the average electric bill within CMEEC compares to an Eversource or UI bill.

“We’re typically in the last 5 to 6 years, we’ve been roughly 20 to 40% less. There’s a lot of reasons for that,” said Meisinger.
Enough said.


Updated @ Noon

I just found an article by AP News about the weather bureau...

 With massive job cuts, the National Weather Service is eliminating or reducing vital weather balloon launches in eight northern locations, which meteorologists and former agency leaders said will degrade the accuracy of forecasts just as severe weather season kicks in.

The normally twice-daily launches of weather balloons in about 100 locations provide information that forecasters and computer models use to figure out what the weather will be and how dangerous it can get, so cutting back is a mistake, said eight different scientists, meteorologists and former top officials at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — the weather service's parent agency.

The balloons soar 100,000 feet in the air with sensors called radiosondes hanging about 20 feet below them that measure temperature, dew point, humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction.

“The thing about weather balloons is that they give you information you can’t get any other way,” said D. James Baker, a former NOAA chief during the Clinton administration. He had to cut spending in the agency during his tenure but he said he refused to cut observations such as weather balloons. “It’s an absolutely essential piece of the forecasting system.”
Say good bye to the free weather forecasts... you'll probably have to pay a month subscription fee to get the forecast when they sell it off! 
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