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Today's
Stories
November 7, 2003
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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November
7, 2003
A Cautionary Tale
from Britain
When
Public Transit Gets Privatized
By MARIA TOMCHICK
Here in the U.S., we live under the myth that
mass transit should have to pay for itself, that it should exist
without infusions of taxpayer money. The whole notion is absurd.
Freeways and road improvements use up public funds, and the auto
industry thrives on tax breaks and government incentives--the
worst of which are exemptions from basic environmental oversight,
such as limiting greenhouse gas emissions and adhering to reasonable
fuel economy standards. Yet we continue to hold up an unreasonable
standard for mass transit: that user fees and other privatization
scams will bring us light rail, monorail, and heavy rail systems
that don't need governmental oversight or funding.
In privatizing any public infrastructure,
the main focus is shifted away from providing the service itself
to making a profit. That's indisputable. The inarguable goal
behind building and maintaining a mass transit system is to move
people as efficiently and quickly as possible from one place
to another, and to do it safely. Pro-business interests tell
us that those two goals can be reconciled. But is that really
possible?
Let's take a look at the British railway
system. In 1996, under the Conservative government of Prime Minister
John Major, the nation privatized its railways by parceling out
contracts to private companies to operate trains and maintain
the rail lines. The move was supposed to save money, as private
firms would compete to provide the same service that government
agencies had formerly handled, at a lower cost.
However, last month, on October 23, the
British government announced it was suspending all seven contracts
with private rail maintenance companies for financial and safety
reasons--a move that would save 300 million pounds per year.
This is, effectively, the first step towards re-nationalizing
the nation's railways.
By all accounts, the privatization scheme
has been a disaster. Network Rail, the quasi-governmental agency
that oversees the private companies performing railway maintenance,
went from reporting a 295 million pound profit in 2002 to an
almost 300 million pound loss in 2003, while its debts have soared
to more than 9 billion pounds. While Network Rail is not a public
agency in itself, the British government is the guarantor for
its debts, leaving British taxpayers on the hook for its failures.
Most of Network Rail's loss is attributable
to money poured into the maintenance and construction of rail
lines. But the safety of Britain's railways has suffered under
privatization. A series of accidents in the late 1990s, culminating
with the horrible Paddington accident in 1999 that killed 30
people, forced the British government to liquidate the troubled
Railtrack (Network Rail's predecessor) and reconstitute it as
Network Rail, with more emphasis on safety. But the problems
have continued.
In 2000 the Hatfield crash was caused
by a broken rail on a line maintained by private firm Balfour
Beatty. Criminal charges have been brought against a dozen employees
of Balfour Beatty and Network Rail regarding this accident. More
recently, investigations into the Potters Bar derailment in May
2002 (seven people dead and 76 injured) and a recent derailment
at Kings Cross have focused the spotlight on Jarvis, the largest
private maintenance contractor on the British rail system.
The Potters Bar crash was caused by a
faulty set of points that should have been spotted by Jarvis
employees. In November 2002, a coal train derailed in South Yorkshire
when Jarvis engineers diverted the train onto a line that was
missing a large section of track. In September of this year,
a passenger train derailed at Kings Cross because Jarvis employees
had forgotten to realign a set of points--an accident that closely
resembled the Potters Bar crash; fortunately, the Kings Cross
train was moving much more slowly, and no one was killed. Then,
approximately a month later, Network Rail discovered that Jarvis
employees had cleared trains to pass over rails on the line near
Alexandra Palace in north London without having properly reassembled
the rails after maintenance work--another derailment just waiting
to happen.
In an audit of Jarvis' records, Network
Rail discovered falsified maintenance records on 40 miles of
track between Stoke-on-Trent and Macclesfield. Employees took
cost-cutting shortcuts when replacing the rails, including skipping
a necessary step that would prevent the new track from cracking
in cold weather.
After this litany of scandals, Jarvis
attempted to put its rail maintenance branch up for sale. When
British government regulatory agencies prevented that move, Jarvis
withdrew in mid-October from all maintenance work on British
railway lines. A scant two weeks later, Network Rail announced
it would cancel maintenance contracts with all seven private
companies and take the work in-house, effectively ending privatization
of above-ground rail maintenance in Britain.
These problems are consistent with complaints
made by Britain's Rail Maritime and Transport union, the RMT,
which has protested the privatization process from the beginning.
They have charged that private companies hire contractors to
perform maintenance work without the proper training. RMT managers
at Network Rail and the London Underground are appalled by the
quality of the contractors' work. One manager told the Independent
newspaper, "It used to take 18 weeks to train the guys who
do the low-voltage cables. Now we get people from agencies who
can't read a wiring diagram."
The London Underground is in a similar
state of disrepair, exacerbated by the age of its infrastructure--much
of it dating back to Edwardian and Victorian times. But here,
again, the focus is on private maintenance companies; in this
case, the entity involved is a consortium named TubeLines, made
up of four separate companies: Metronet, Bechtel, Amey, and Jarvis.
These companies have a 30-year contract with the London Underground,
and it won't come up for review for another seven years, making
it difficult for the LU to do what Network Rail has done and
re-nationalize the newly privatized underground system.
The LU or "The Tube," as Brits
call it, has had its own series of derailments and accidents.
The most recent scandal involves Metronet, whose employees are
supposed to regularly inspect the rails for wear and tear. A
Tube train derailed on October 17th because a section of track
had not been replaced, even though it had rusted three-quarters
of the way through. Then, 48 hours later, another Tube train
derailed because of a similar problem with the tracks. An RMT
union leader told the BBC that there used to be daily, visual
inspections of Tube tracks, but now Metronet employees only inspect
them once a week.
The government's Health and Safety Executive
undertook a confidential maintenance study just prior to privatization
of The Tube in May of this year. The report, leaked to the BBC,
showed that cost-cutting layoffs by London Underground had led
to deterioration of the rails. The major culprit: a lack of routine,
visual track inspections. In preparation for privatization, the
LU had cut the frequency of inspections from daily down to every-other-day.
With private contractors now inspecting the rails only every
three days or only once a week, the problems will grow more dire,
and accidents will continue.
Britain's failed experiment in railway
privatization serves as an example to us here in the U.S. of
what can go seriously wrong when public infrastructure is turned
over to companies whose main motive is to make a profit. For
advocates of mass transit, it's a cautionary tale. We can't allow
ourselves to give in to local, regional, and national business
interests who argue that mass transit should be able to pay for
itself. Public investment and continual public management
are necessary and far more desirable than the current mess in
Britain.
Maria Tomchick
writes for the great Seattle weekly Eat the State!. She can be
reached at: tomchick@drizzle.com
Sources
"Government takes step toward renationalization
of the railways," Barrie Clement, The Independent, 10/24/03.
"Q&A:
Network Rail in the red," BBC News online, 5/28/03,
"Jarvis
investigated over rail errors," BBC 3/29/03,
"Jarvis's
track record," BBC, 10/10/03,
"Jarvis
investigated over rail work," BBC, 10/27/03,
"Jarvis
quits rail maintenance," BBC, 10/10/03,
"Network
Rail takes repairs in-house," BBC, 10/24/03,
"Analysis:
The future of rail maintenance," BBC, 10/27/03,
"Rail safety move ousts contractors;
Unions hail 'renationalisation' step," Andrew Clark, The
Guardian, 10/24/03
"Crashes and near misses could derail
the privatised Tube," Michael Williams and Christian Wolmar,
The Independent, 10/26/03.
"Checks
'did not find rail problem,'" BBC, 10/18/03,
"Second
Tube train derailed," BBC, 10/19/03,
"Q&A:
Tube derailments," BBC,
"Tube bosses were told to widen
safety checks six months ago," Danielle Demetriou, The Independent,
10/28/03
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce
Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler
/ Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets'
Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
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