My modest proposal: Failing water companies should go bankrupt, their investors lose everything, their boards and C-suites be fired, and the gov should buy them for £1 and run them as national utilities. Ditto the railways and privatised energy orgs that price-gouged us last 2 winters. Then every statue of Thatcher & her ideological allies should be melted down and turned into commemorative medals to celebrate the day we free ourselves of the stupidity that saw the nations' utilities and housing stock sold to profiteering wideboys.
@brucelawson This reminds me of this thing here in Singapore a few years ago, when Hyflux - a water desalination company - went belly-up. The Singapore government, via the Public Utilities Board (PUB), the statutory board that oversees basic utilities here, served notice on them of their intention to take over their desalination plant, effectively nationalising it.
Hyflux tried to delay it by saying that someone was going to bail them out, but when that failed…
@brucelawson And for some additional context: there was a time in the 1990’s, and extending into the 2000’s, when neo-liberal fever gripped Singapore.
A lot of previously-nationalised companies were privatised, and where companies were already technically privatised, their primary industries were liberalised. Telecommunications, public transit, national TV, print media - you name it, they privatised and/or liberalised it.
@brucelawson For some industries tho it soon became clear that privatisation and liberalisation was not the right way. National TV broadcasting, for example, was quite quickly reverted from two companies competing - in a very toxic manner, I might add - in a liberalised market, back to having just a single state-owned company having a monopoly again.
@brucelawson Others took a bit longer tho - it took until 2011 when the government realised that the privatised and “liberalised” (but still very tightly-regulated) public transit industry should not have gone down that route after all.
The trigger? Two extremely major metro breakdowns over a span of three days, that triggered a government committee of inquiry, which in turn exposed just how profit-driven and neglectful of basic maintenance the metro operator, SMRT, has become.
@brucelawson SMRT was - and still is - one of the two metro operators here, and one of then-two (now four) transit bus operators. When now-former CEO Saw Phaik Hwa took over that company in 2002, she undertook every measure to squeeze every drop of profit possible from the company and its hapless commuters, while allowing the metro system and transit buses under her company to essentially (and this is a technical term) go to absolute utter fucking shit.
@brucelawson This ultimately culminated in that aforementioned 2011 metro breakdowns, which finally drove that witch (again, technical term 😉) from SMRT, and finally convinced the government that private companies shouldn’t be both owning and operating public transit infrastructure.
Over the next few years, the government shifted the public transit industry to a semi-nationalised concession-based operating model, where transit infrastructure would be basically nationalised.
@brucelawson Private companies would be relegated to just operators; fares collected by the operators would either all go to, or be shared with the government; in the former case the government would then pay the private companies a fee to operate the transit services.
Of course many other things here in Singapore are still privatised and liberalised - power and telecommunications are still under the control of private companies here.
@brucelawson However, I must add that both are under pretty tight regulation. While power generation is privatised and liberalised, the power grid itself is still a nationalised, state-owned asset. As for telecommunications, the market is pretty much regulated with an iron fist that tends to favour the consumer.
Still, I am of the opinion that such services should either be nationalised, or have a subsidised municipal option available alongside offerings from private companies.
Especially looking at you, Malaysia and Indonesia. Keep subsidising those fossil fuel companies. This is what you deservedly earned for all of that shit.
And don’t think I’m not onto you too, Singapore. Keep inviting Big Oil to set up shop here, and see how this will fucking turn out for you.
Maybe I should be more like Alastor for real.
Since everyone thinks of me and treats me like a monster, I will become the monster in their mind to them.
And I saw, from eyes that were not mine.
And I felt, with a fear I could not reason.
They watch us, they invade us.
And keep us happy, committing treason.
To a King we didn't deserve.
To a Son who waits weeping.
That I knew, from knowledge gained while sleeping.
@djlink By imposing high switching costs on their users making it impossible for most users to jump ship ( @pluralistic wrote about this countless times as part of what he terms enshittification).
And maybe also being in cahoots with the US government helps too.
Absolutely, absolutely disgusting. They obviously only care for their own profits and money at the expense of this very planet we live on.
Fuck these oil barons to beyond the deepest pits of the deepest levels of hell.
This should make it clear to the governments of the world that Big Oil needs to be reined in, hard. And for the masses to finally rise up in unison and kick their cronies in government to the curb, by hook or by crook.
