That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. But this quote from a couple of weeks ago, when Koppel appeared on NPR, is making the rounds:

We are privatizing ourselves into one disaster after another. We’ve privatized a lot of what our military is doing. We’ve privatized a lot of what our intelligence agencies are doing. We’ve privatized our very prison system in many parts of the country. We’re privatizing the health system within those prisons. And it’s not working well.

He’s right, of course—the funny thing is, we’re on the tail end of a two-term Obama administration, an administration that Republicans and Teabaggers promised would result in a socialist hell. In fact, we are now staring down the barrel of a privatized hell:

In Chicago, a Morgan Stanley-backed consortium took control of 36,000 public parking meters in a 75-year lease. Taxpayers must reimburse the private company when spaces are closed for street fairs or emergency weather conditions. The contract also prohibits the city from operating or permitting operation of a competing public parking facility. Even more outrageous, the city cannot make improvements to streets that contain parking meters, such as adding bicycle lanes or expanding the sidewalk.

In Denver, the private, foreign consortium that operates the Northwest Parkway can prevent any public road improvements near their toll road because they “might hurt the parkway financially” by providing an alternative route for drivers. Taxpayers are stuck with that contract for 99 years.

In 2012, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the country, sent a letter to 48 states offering to buy public prisons in exchange for a promise to keep the prisons 90 percent filled for 20 years. While the letter was a public relations fiasco for CCA, it turns out that many existing private prison contracts actually include “occupancy guarantees” of 90 percent and even 100 percent. Governments must keep prison beds filled or taxpayers have to pay the prison company for empty beds.

Speaking of perverse incentives and prison—how’s that California prison strike going? (We’re on day 12.) Looks like the prison guards are getting orders to break it:

Prison guards are trying to break a hunger strike involving thousands of prisoners in California by blasting cells with cold air, confiscating legal documents and, in one case, banning lawyers, according to legal representatives and relatives.

Authorities have taken the action, it is alleged, in retaliation for a strike which entered its 12th day on Friday, piling pressure on the state’s troubled penal system. Lawyers say the health of the men is being put at risk.

An estimated 30,000 inmates in 33 jails launched the hunger strike on 8 June, the biggest in the state’s history, to protest against solitary confinement and other conditions they said amounted to torture.

At any one time, California holds about 12,000 inmates in extreme isolation, including some who have been in windowless boxes known as security housing units (SHUs) for decades. Guards say it is a vital tool to tame gang violence.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) said on Thursday the number of strikers had fallen to 1,457 inmates in 15 jails. Inmates’ lawyers and relatives said more than 2,000 were still refusing food. Hundreds are also boycotting work and classes.

“As you know, this started with 30,000 people not eating,” says prisoner-rights activist Ed Mead. “The administration is saying it’s down to around 2,000, but what they’re doing is going into cells and if they find any kind of container, they mark that person as off the hunger strike.” The California prison system, he says, has a rule that prisoners on hunger strike are not allowed to have anything edible in their cells—even an old container that might have once contained food is counted as food. “If something is passed from cell to cell,” he says, “regardless of what it is—a magazine, whatever—that person is marked as being off hunger strike. What they’re trying to do is lower the numbers.”

He adds that the number of prisoners who are refusing to work has also fallen, which is too bad: “That’s where the real power is, if only the prisoners realized it. As you know, prisons cannot run for long without the free labor of prisoners. If this strike is to be won, it will be by prisoners who withhold their labor. People are getting written up, getting 155s [infractions that can work against you in a parole or review situation], for participating in a ‘group disturbance.’ Of course, not eating is not a disturbance of any kind.”

Meanwhile, British comedian Frankie Boyle has begun a hunger strike in solidarity with hunger-strikers at Guantanamo Bay.

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....