CT Blue

These people make Walmart look good.

Yesterday the New York Times revealed that the people building NYU's campus in Abu Dhabi were systematically abusing the foreign workers doing the actual work:

Facing criticism for venturing into a country where dissent is not tolerated and labor can resemble indentured servitude, N.Y.U. in 2009 issued a “statement of labor values” that it said would guarantee fair treatment of workers. But interviews by The New York Times with dozens of workers who built N.Y.U.’s recently completed campus found that conditions on the project were often starkly different from the ideal.

Virtually every one said he had to pay recruitment fees of up to a year’s wages to get his job and had never been reimbursed. N.Y.U.’s list of labor values said that contractors are supposed to pay back all such fees. Most of the men described having to work 11 or 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, just to earn close to what they had originally been promised, despite a provision in the labor statement that overtime should be voluntary.

The men said they were not allowed to hold onto their passports, in spite of promises to the contrary. And the experiences of the BK Gulf strikers, a half dozen of whom were reached by The Times in their home countries, stand in contrast to the standard that all workers should have the right to redress labor disputes without “harassment, intimidation, or retaliation.”

The article goes on to detail that the workers were systematically deprived of their rights, not to mention their pay.

But NYU has made it all okay:

New York University issued an apology on Monday to any workers on its newly completed Abu Dhabi campus who were “not treated in line with the standards we set,” after The New York Times reported widespread abuses among a labor force that numbered about 6,000 at its peak.

The article described workers being arrested, beaten and deported to their home countries after striking over pay. Recruitment fees, of approximately a year’s wages, were all but required, and laborers had to work overtime, sometimes seven days a week, to earn the base pay they were promised. Not one of the dozens of workers interviewed had his own passport. Some were living in filthy, crowded apartments.

…

In 2009, after announcing the project, N.Y.U. had issued a “statement of labor values” saying those building N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi would be treated better.

In a statement to the N.Y.U. community, its president, John Sexton, called the workers’ treatment, “if true as reported, troubling and unacceptable.”

“They are out of line with the labor standards,” he continued, “we deliberately set for those constructing the ‘turnkey’ campus being built for us on Saadiyat Island and inconsistent with what we understood to be happening on the ground for those workers.”

In a separate statement, to the website NYU Local, a spokesman, John Beckman, wrote “To any worker who was not treated in line with the standards we set and whose circumstances went undetected and unremedied, we offer our apologies.”

So, that's alright then. I'm sure the workers are gratified. They won't be getting their money or their rights back, but they do have an apology. After all, who could have predicted that such things could happen in a country like Abu Dhabi? Other than, umm…, just about everyone.

Little Timmy Geithner is on a book tour, launched (at least so far as I was aware) in yesterday's New York Times Magazine puff piece by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Today I ran across this quote, which sort of follows up on Little Timmy's remark that the purpose of the homeowner relief program was to “foam the runway” for the banks. In other words, it was a sham that enabled them to stretch out the foreclosure process, allowing the banks to make their books look better, while doling out false hope to millions of ordinary people. Little Timmy uses another plane analogy for not prosecuting the banksters:

In this fascinating interview today with Susan Page at USA Today, Geithner actually uses the plane analogy, but his image of himself is something like that of Indiana Jones, hero to the rescue, defying all odds:

“It’s like you’re in the cockpit and the plane’s on fire and smoke is filling the cabin. And you’ve got a bunch of people on the plane — you’ve got some terrorists, or you’ve got some people who built the plane or didn’t design the fire system right — and people want you to come out of the cockpit and put them in handcuffs or beat them up. And it’s understandable, but you’ve got to land the plane safely if you want to protect people from the risk of catastrophe.”

via Wall Street on Parade

Now, I'm no expert in criminal law, but I imagine if that scenario were to play out in real life, those terrorists and designers would have been arrested once the plane was safely landed. I'm fairly sure that the pilot would not, as Geithner, did, hand them multi-million dollar bonuses. This is only surmise, of course, but I'm fairly sure I'm right. 

Apparently there is yet another showdown looming. The Highway Trust Fund is scheduled to run out of money in the summer. If nothing is done (and nothing ever is ) ongoing highway projects will be shut down. Yves Smith has some interesting observations at Naked Capitalism. She suspects that this will give Obama another chance to work with Republicans toward forming more “Public/Private partnerships”, which is another term for handing taxpayer money over to rich people, by giving them monopolies on what were previously publicly funded and operated services. In this case, Smith suspects a push to hand our highway system, or chunks of it, over to the rent seekers. I suspect it won't happen, because although the Republicans normally are quite anxious to serve the interest of the rent-seekers, it's a different story if Obama wants to do it too. Visceral Obama hatred has served us surprisingly well in the last few years; it may have saved Social Security as we know it. This trust fund issue may be a recurring topic over the next few months, but this post will veer in a slightly different direction.

It occurred to me that the experience of some states in privatizing infrastructure may hold some lessons for those like our own Dannel Malloy for the likely outcome of his efforts to hand our schools over to corporations. It turns out that, once they get the ability to do so, these rent-seekers start to demand terms that turn the situation into a heads they win, tails we lose situation (okay, that’s the norm, but this is particularly outrageous). If things go bad, the state steps in to help, and in some situations, the states involved have agreed to let purely public infrastructure deteriorate in order to benefit the rent seekers.

Infrastructure privatization contracts are full of “gotcha” terms that require state or local governments to pay the private contractors. For example, now when Chicago does street repairs or closes streets for a festival, it must pay the private parking meter contractor for lost meter fares. Those payments put the contractors in a much better position than the government. It gets payments, even though Chicago did not get fares when it had to close streets…..

Highway privatization contracts also often include terms that forbid building “competing” roads or mass transit. Some even require making an existing “competing” road worse. For example, the contract for SR-91 in Southern California prohibited the state from repairing an adjacent public road, creating conditions that put drivers’ safety at risk. A proposed private highway around the northwest part of Denver required that local governments reduce speeds and install speed humps and barriers and narrow lanes on “competing” roads to force drivers to use the privatized road….

Virginia decided to promote carpooling to cut down on pollution, slow highway deterioration and lessen highway and urban congestion. As a result, Virginia must reimburse the private contractor for lost revenues from carpoolers, even though not all of the people in a car would otherwise have driven individually….

via Truthout via Naked Capitalism

It is entirely foreseeable that once the school privatization train gets rolling, the rent seekers in that area will also demand protections for their profits and, indirectly but surely, deterioration of the remaining public schools. They are actually already achieving the latter by avoiding or discouraging children with special needs, who are then disproportionately the responsibility of the public schools. They are already exempt from some legal requirements that are imposed on public schools in many states, including, apparently, here in Connecticut. As they gain more influence by buying more legislators (given that they already own the governor here in Connecticut) they will be given ever greater leeway to allow education quality to deteriorate. After all, a guaranteed profit comes first.

I got a bit of a laugh when I read this in the Times yesterday:

The Federal Communications Commission’s chairman delivered a tough message to cable and broadband executives Wednesday, saying a lack of competition in their industry has hurt consumers.

The chairman, Tom Wheeler, said that the F.C.C. intended to address the problem by writing tough new rules to enforce so-called net neutrality, preventing big broadband and cable companies from blocking access to innovative new technologies and start-ups that might emerge as competitors.

via The New York Times: Stern Talk from Chief of FCC on Open Net

I imagine that the assembled executives did their best to appear frightfully concerned at the prospects of Wheeler taking “stern” action against them, but it is all really kabuki. They all know he's on their side.

Consider this:

Here's the dirty truth behind proposed rules gutting net neutrality the Federal Communications Commission will be considering next month: The FCC is “stocked with staffers” who just went through the revolving door from the internet service providers who would most benefit by the new rule. Lee Fang reports:

Take Daniel Alvarez, an attorney who has long represented Comcast through the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP. In 2010, Alvarez wrote a letter to the FCC on behalf of Comcast protesting net neutrality rules, arguing that regulators failed to appreciate “socially beneficial discrimination.”

… Alvarez is now on the other side, working among a small group of legal advisors hired directly under Tom Wheeler, the new FCC Commissioner who began his job in November.

As soon as Wheeler came into office, he also announced the hiring of former Ambassador Philip Verveer as his senior counselor. A records request reveals that Verveer also worked for Comcast in the last year. In addition, he was retained by two industry groups that have worked to block net neutrality, the Wireless Association (CTIA) and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.

Then there's Matthew DelNero, who was hired to work specifically on net neutrality. He used to work for an ISAP called TDS Telecom which has, of course, lobbied against net neutrality. One new advisor to FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, (who used to be associate general counsel at Verizon and has called net neutrality a “problem in search of a solution” ) is Brendan Carr. Carr has worked for AT&T, CenturyLink, Verizon and the U.S. Telecom Association, “a trade group that has waged war in Washington against net neutrality since 2006.”

Chairman Wheeler, of course, came directly from lobbying for the telecommunications industry. There's obviously a high degree of expertise on telecommunications issues among all these people who seem to flow seamlessly between roles in industry and regulating that industry. But they aren't the only experts. There are dozens of people working in public interest groups who know these issues just as well who could be staffing the commission.

via Daily Kos

Amazingly, the article in the Times proves it's all a charade, though perhaps the reporter was unaware of that fact:

People who have been briefed on the chairman’s proposal say that while he opposes the blocking of content by an Internet service provider, his new outline would allow broadband companies to offer some content providers a faster lane through which they can transmit video and services, as long as they do not slow down other content to do so.

Some might say that there if you build a road and only let some people on the fast lane then you are not being neutral so far as users are concerned. It doesn't change the situation if instead of building a new road you turn a one lane road into two lanes, but charge a toll to anyone wanting to use the passing lane.

Anyway, here's how it will work. The present quite slow state of affairs in American internet service will become the ghetto for the content providers who can't afford to pay to go on the “fast lane”. But who says there can only be one fast lane? Why not multiple fast lanes at different speeds and different prices, always, of course, leaving that one slow, overcrowded, lane for the unwashed. Over at Daily Kos, they suspect that monopolists like Comcast will slow down the slow lane to force content providers onto the fast lane:

There's absolutely no question that Internet service providers will happily take the power to sell fast-lane delivery to the highest bidder Wheeler is proposing. There's no reason to believe that they won't use that power—just like Comcast did with Netflix—to slow down networks to try to force content providers to pay up.

But really, that won't be necessary, at least not directly. All they have to do is keep the speed limit on the slow lane right where it is, and, as potholes develop, be quite slow about fixing them.

So yes, I'm sure those executives were absolutely terrified as they listened to Tom Wheeler's threaten to make them even richer.