Posts Tagged ‘privatization’
Time for a Pentagon yard sale?
Some say that the United States is incurring too much debt, more than $1 trillion in the past fiscal year. Others say that the worst recession since World War II is no time to cut spending or raise taxes. They’re both right.
Happily, there is a third way to slow the growth of debt without curtailing federal economic stimulus: sell assets…
There’s the Tennessee Valley Authority, for example: Created during the Depression to help develop the impoverished Southeast, TVA today owns and operates 29 hydroelectric dams and six nuclear reactors, along with coal plants, wind farms and other power sources. In fiscal year 2009, the authority reported operating revenues of $11.3 billion and operating expenses of $9.3 billion…
And there are assets easier to quantify…
– More than a quarter trillion in gold.
– A quarter trillion in TARP assets.
– $35 billion of oil in the strategic petroleum reserve…
No longer stricken by malaria, no longer impoverished, the people in the TVA region can afford to pay the full cost of their power just as much as Con Edison ratepayers…
No one likes Wall Street these days. But it’s time to get some investment bankers on the phone and ask them how to get the best possible price for what the United States has to sell.
Frum is a conservative ideologue. He’s in favor of privatization at any cost. But, he does have a point about TVA.
And the Pentagon could have a helluva yard sale. We have a bad habit of passing along military hardware that’s four minutes over the sell-by date to our buddies. We not only do it for free. We throw in free training and supplies for a decade or so.
Sometimes long enough to see it fired back at us.
Let’s sell off some of that crap to the guys who are supposed to be on our side.
CFO of France Telecom blames email for staff stress, suicides
A top executive at France’s biggest telecommunications company, which is dealing with a spate of suicides, warned that the barrage of emails from smartphones and personal computers was stressing out employees…
“Today for people working in business, whatever the level, whether they are CEO or even first- or second-rank level employees, they are always connected,” he told Reuters in an interview.
France Telecom, which operates under the Orange brand, has come under public scrutiny after 22 workers committed suicide and another 13 attempted to kill themselves since the start of 2008.
Gervais Pellissier said some employees were clearly feeling a lot of pressure due to the privatization of France Telecom, but he added that this was compounded by new technologies that cause work to encroach increasingly on personal lives.
“When you were an average employee in a big corporation 15 years ago, you had no mobile phone or no PC at home. When you were back home, work was out,” he said…
As a result a fragile employee with difficulties would probably have more confusion with “more mixture between personal life and professional life than in the past…”
France Telecom Chief Executive Didier Lombard said earlier this month the company was adding surveillance and counseling services as the pace of suicides among employees had picked up. One man had stabbed himself in the stomach during a staff meeting while a woman threw herself out a window.
Har! Does this dimwit even download his own email?
