The rush to privatize.

Before we get to today's main subject, let's take a moment to revisit Gov. Scott Walker and the state of Wisconsin.

If you recall, Walker ran on a platform of "Jobs, jobs, jobs." Once elected, he seemed to forget about jobs and instead decided that his first priority was to take away the collective bargaining rights of most public employees. I say most because he did not find collective bargaining by police and fire unions to be a problem. The fact that police and fire unions supported him in the election probably didn't hurt either.

Wisconsin was no. 11 nationally in job creation when Walker took office. I understand that they are now no. 44 and projected to be no. 49 next year. So much for "Jobs, jobs, jobs." Now for privatization.

People seem to feel that moving government jobs to the private sector will be a more efficient use of resources. They tend to see government employees as the gang that can't shoot straight while private enterprise is a lean, mean fighting machine.

Our embassies used to be guarded by marines. Now they are guarded by "private contractors" who often make three times the pay of a marine. That's more "efficient?"

A huge number of our prisons are now run by private contractors. That's worked so well that 3 states recently cancelled their contracts with one of the giant private prison contractors. Instead of making things more efficient, the contractor apparently made them more profitable by doctoring staffing records to make it seem that the facility was fully staffed when it wasn't. Scandals have occurred in which judges have been bribed to send prisoners to one profit-making facility or another.

And now it seems that the Edward Snowden story has added another layer of privatization. We already knew that Snowden was employed by a private contractor--Booz Allen--instead of being a government employee. Now it turns out that Snowden's top-secret security clearance was issued based on a background check by a private contractor, USIS.

Turns out that USIS is supposed to do two checks. The second makes sure that nothing was missed in the first check. It seems that between 2008 and 2011 USIS claimed to do these second checks but actually did only half of them. This allowed them to clear more people in less time, thus qualifying for incentive awards!

Is it any wonder why the final goal of the school "reform" movement seems to be the privatization of what once was public education?