Boston Municipal Research Bureau Sees Opportunities for Corporate Gains in Hub Budget Woes

It's always a good idea to keep an eye on what corporate think tanks are up to - especially at the local level - and the Boston Municipal Research Bureau is no exception, backed as it is by the largest corporations and law firms in the region. The best rationale for this opinion being that major corporations are the most powerful institutions in our society. And as fundamentally undemocratic organizations with an overarching mission to make profits for their investors, it is safe to assume that while the public interest and corporate interest certainly overlap on occasion, corporations will generally hew to whatever course will make them the most money. Regardless of the consequences. So when the BMRB released a little report on the state of the City of Boston's finances, I was quite unsurprised by its conclusion that in midst of a recession - primarily triggered by corporate malfeasance - marked by rising unemployment that they are proposing that Boston cut labor costs and privatize core city services.

Privitization, viewers might recall, is the process by which private interests game our (now nominally) democratic polity through deft manipulation of our profoundly corrupt system of funding political campaigns. Once corporate leaders have enough pet politicians on an invisible payroll of cleverly bundled campaign contributions, they run them through their paces - and get public property, goods and services handed over to them in the form of various kinds of term contracts and ownership arrangements. Once public goods are privatized they tend to stay privatized until corporations can't make money from them anymore - at which time they may be handed back, much worse for wear, to the public trust. Or simply be discarded.

A classic example of this kind of bad public policy is when municipalities sign contracts with multinational water corporations - who always claim they will cut costs and improve service - to run their public water systems. The new corporate managers force such municipalities to invest in enough infrastructure improvements (usually in the wealthier neighborhoods of their new domain) at the public expense to make for good PR. Then they bust pesky unions, slash wages and the workforce, and cut all operating and maintenance costs past the bone. This frees up money that they then simply take - in addition to the big money they automatically make from hefty fee hikes they are allowed to gouge from local water users - in the form of profits. Corporate management continues this pattern for as many years as possible. Then once the public till is empty, they get out of their committment as fast as possible. Either by handing off their contract to another company, or simply dropping the now chronically understaffed and much degraded water system back in the public lap.

How nice for their shareholders. And how bad for the public-at-large. But how, might one ask, does this little morality tale relate to the matter at hand?

Well, returning the BMRB report, one finds an explication of Boston's down financial situation aimed at blaming all the city's woes on public sector labor unions followed by a very typical set of corporate policy proposals. So Boston's 2010 operating budget is short $26.3 million dollars because expected state and local tax revenues didn't materialize as the recession deepened - and because those pesky cost-of-living raises and pensions and health care costs are up for those spoiled city workers again. And rather than suggest any reform so pedestrian as instituting progressive taxation systems that would extract more fair amounts from the corporations and wealthy families most able to pay, the classic corporate - and therefore neoliberal - solution to the problem is proffered. Cut costs. Privatize public services.

And "balance the budget."

Yes, the favorite corporate refrain rears its ugly head yet again. Even though governments and corporations have little, if anything, in common - our ever-watchful corporate guardians ... being so careful with their own budgets and all ... leap up at the slightest hint of "overspending" in public budgets, and raise hue and cry for "staying within our means."

Of course to do otherwise might allow an opening for politicians to actually do their job for a change and raise taxes on those self-same corporations. Should that happen, profits would fall. And that cannot be allowed, especially since many corporations have done such an excellent job of running their own finances and the American economy that they (and we) are on the edge of financial ruin. Some have done such a tremendously excellent job with their finances - especially giant financial services corporations - that they've already gone broke and been revived by the federal government. Huge amounts of public money have been poured into the maw of these parasitic behemoths. Making them functionally public-owned entities. And yet they still demand more private control of the public sector.

Now the BMRB proposals are not the worst I have ever seen but if this economic downturn continues - and the BMRB itself says that Boston's budget will continue to tank in 2011 - then they will follow this set with other even more objectionable proposals in the years to come.

Here, then, are the specifics of the current BMRB policy prescriptions for the City of Boston:

1. Require all eligible retirees to enroll in Medicare to transfer a significant portion of health insurance costs to the federal government. The City should adopt Chapter 32, Section 18 to achieve meaningful savings now. Over 1,700 city retirees are eligible to enroll in Medicare but have not.
2. Evaluate the feasibility of reducing fire stations in Boston based on fire incidences and proximity to other nearby stations. Eliminating redundancy in fire stations should be a priority.
3. Discontinue the maintenance of fire boxes and transfer the administration of master fire boxes to private security firms.
4. Implement a competitive service delivery program to require competitive bids for services provided by city employees but also performed by private vendors. This program has been utilized successfully by cities around the country.

So to summarize these items from a working person's perspective, Boston's largest corporations would like to balance the budget without raising taxes by:

1) Passing the buck on some retirement costs to the federal government - though unsurprisingly not calling for a single-payer health care system that would drastically lower such costs nationwide. Which I'm sure has nothing at all to do with the fact that they are backed by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. They also call for implementation of existing state anti-fraud rules for city workers, which seems like a reasonable good government thing.

2) Make Boston less safe by eliminating some fire stations. And cutting into the ranks of good public jobs by laying off some firefighters.

3) Make Boston still less safe by handing the publicly run fire box system over to a corporation. Eliminating more decent public jobs in the bargain. Whether a privatized fire box system would use any of the newly unionized security guard companies is unstated. But even unionized private security guards don't do nearly as well as unionized city employees.

4) Give corporations an entry wedge to gain control over public services. And cut even more good public jobs.

Not too pretty. Now the mere fact the the BMRB made such recommendations doesn't mean they will all be enacted, but the corporations behind the group certainly have the ability to make at last some of them a reality.

Nevertheless, progressive advocates should prepare for a fight on these and similar proposals that are almost certainly emanating from corporate circles as of this writing. Open Media Boston strongly encourages a push-back on any attempts to shrink the public sector, and encourages the otherwise right-thinking local non-profits to refuse to participate with government reform efforts that cause any destabilization or elimination of already weakened public services. There is precedent for such behavior by non-profits during the welfare "reform" period of the mid-to-late 1990s when many area non-profits took government money to attempt to run formerly public services. Not only were they not able to do a credible job in my estimation, but they aided and abetted corporate-bankrolled movements to gut public assistance programs - a terrible move which has directly resulted in rising poverty and immiseration of citizens living in Boston (and Massachusetts) for more than a decade.

In the meantime, we think our viewers would do well to help us watch corporate research outfits like BMRB. This editorial was itself the result of a tip-off by one of our viewers (who in turn pointed to a blurb on the BMRB report by fellow Boston social media maven Adam Gaffin at universalhub.com). The earlier progressive forces get word of problematic corporate policy initiatives, the faster they can respond. And that alone could mean the difference between success and failure for campaigns advocating for the defense of the public sector.

p.s. - For those viewers that might think that this publication somehow supports waste and fraud in city government, think again. We are all too aware of serious problems within city (and state and federal) government, but we do not think that the vast majority of honest hard working city employees should be punished for structural crises in the public sector. And we certainly don't think that privatization has shown itself capable of doing anything but lining the pockets of private sector hucksters. In point of fact, we believe that reform of the public sector can be done within the public sector much more cheaply and effectively than any outside entity could ever manage. One of the first targets of the corporate assault on the public sector over the last 3 decades has been government regulatory and oversight agencies. We need those agencies back, and operating at full capacity, if we're ever going to get the government we need and deserve.

Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston