Smooth Move, Mike

In 1998 the Ontario government of then premier, Mike Harris, sold the 407 highway to for $3.1 billion to a Spanish-led consortium that included - wait for it - SNC-Lavalin. The Ontario government had built the 407 for around $1.5 billion but Mike needed to get the books in order to win his second majority government.

Now SNC Lavalin wants to unload, not its entire 16 per cent minority interest, just 10 per cent, for $3.25 billion.

In 2019 dollars, the original privatization price was about $4.4 billion. The price Lavalin scored suggests the 407 highway is now worth upwards of $30 billion. That's close to 1,000 per cent appreciation.

And then there is the matter of the tolls that 407's owners have reaped over the years. For the year 2017 alone that totalled over $1.25 billion. A billion dollar plus toll revenue per year on an asset that originally cost just over $3-billion atop the killing you've made on ten-fold appreciation.

That's what happens, kids, when rightwingers flog off public assets for low, low prices. Governments and taxpayers get screwed, royally screwed.

Maybe Bill and Justin Should Read This Before They Get Carried Away with Themselves.

The Guardian's  Lefty Luddite, Polly Toynbee, offers an entertainingly morbid look at the devastation privatisation has brought to Britain. Perhaps our prime minister What Me Worry? and his finance minister, Bill Churn Baby, Churn Morneau, or, as I like to call them, the Kids Without a Clue, should have a read.

Toynbee blames much of the toxic pollution that now befouls London as the inevitable side effect of privatization of utilities, transportation and even the mail service.

The second month of the year begins with London having already reached its legal air pollution limit for the whole of 2018. The city’s limit of 18 breaches of air quality regulations was used up in January.

As with most of the gravest problems facing Britain, the solutions are relatively easy to find: the problem, as ever, in this fractured and fractious country, is summoning up the collective political will to take action.

...

Take the explosion of van deliveries as the Amazon I–want-it-now impulse is followed by every company that wants to stay in business. Be it Argos or John Lewis, everyone delivers it to your doorstep fast, multiple vans criss-crossing each other and knocking on the same doors over and over. Van traffic has grown faster than any other vehicle type since 2005.

Why? Royal Mail visits every household once a day, these days delivering mostly junk mail at ever-rising stamp prices for lack of volume business. As predicted, private companies cherrypick easy deliveries, leaving Royal Mail to take single letters to every remote farm.

...

After Carillion and the shock suggestion Capita and others might be wobbling, the reality of the destruction caused by privatisation is beginning to dawn even on true believers, such as the infamous Barnet council. Labour is right to plan taking back control of utilities, mail and transport, though they have yet to make that case sound not just ideological but pressingly practical. They need to spell out the daily reality of the harm privatisation and illusory “choice” has done over the last decades, not least in the poisoned air we breathe.

The True Picture of Critical Health Care

A study of preventable death healthcare in 19-industrial nations shows that France comes out on top and, at the bottom, it's the United States of America. From Agence French Press:

"The study by the Commonwealth Fund and published in the January/February issue of the journal Health Affairs measured developed countries' effectiveness at providing timely and effective healthcare.

The study, entitled "Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis," was written by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It looked at death rates in subjects younger than 75 that could have been prevented by timely and effective medical care.

The researchers found that while most countries surveyed saw preventable deaths decline by an average of 16 percent, the United States saw only a four percent dip.

The non-profit Commonwealth Fund, which financed the study, expressed alarm at the findings.

"It is startling to see the US falling even farther behind on this crucial indicator of health system performance," said Commonwealth Fund Senior Vice President Cathy Schoen, who noted that "other countries are reducing these preventable deaths more rapidly, yet spending far less."

The 19 countries, in order of best to worst, were: France, Japan, Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.

While the United States ranked 15th of 19 between 1997-98, by 2002-03 it had fallen to last place.