Wall Street's War Against the Cities

Wall Street's War Against the Cities
Instead, foreclosure time has arrived to provide a new grab bag as cities are forced to do what New York City did to avert bankruptcy in 1974: turn over management to Wall Street nominees. As in Greece and Italy, elected politicians are to be replaced by “technocrats” appointed to do what Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair did to England: sell off what remains of the public sector and turn every social program into a profit center.
The plan is to achieve three main goals. First, give privatizers the right to turn public infrastructure into tollbooth opportunities. The idea is to force cities to balance budgets by leasing or selling off their roads and bus systems, schools and prisons, real estate and other natural monopolies. In the process, this promises to create a new market for banks: lending to vulture investors to buy rights to install tollbooths on the economy’s basic infrastructure.