Joel Bleifuss has written a great piece for In These Times, which documents and I quote:
To Romney and others in his party, all public assets look ripe for privatization
Romney for instance, endorses the privatization of 30 million acre federal land in Utah
This March, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R) signed a bill demanding that 30 million acres of federal land in Utah be turned over to state control by 2014. Herbert wants to privatize this public property: “There's a lot of land that could in fact be privatized and help reduce the deficit.”
For his part, Mitt Romney is on board, sort of. “Unless there's a valid, and legitimate, and compelling governmental purpose, I don't know why the government owns so much of this land,” he said while campaigning in Nevada earlier this year.
But that is not all Romney wants to be privatized
Romney also wants to privatize Social Security–at least, that was his position when he last ran for president. At a town hall meeting in October 2007, Romney said that rather than paying into Social Security, people should be required to invest their money in the stock market. When someone in the audience told Romney it sounded like “privatization,” the perennial presidential hopeful replied: “You call it privatization. I call it a private account.”
Though he has backed away from that scheme, Romney now advocates selling Amtrak, claiming such a sale will save the country $1.6 billion a year. Amtrak, or more specifically its highly profitable Northeast corridor, was the target last year of an unsuccessful privatization attempt by Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
Now one might ask, what is wrong with privatization of public assets? The People for the American Way, have the answer:
Privatization is a wonky term that can obscure the real mechanism and process at work. Through privatization schemes to outsource traditional governmental functions, taxpayer dollars are diverted from the building of public assets and institutions to create long-term revenue streams and profit for corporations. The privatization of governmental functions has resulted in the loss of public sector jobs that have been crucial to the growth of the middle class in favor of lower-wage jobs for workers and new profit centers for CEOs and investors. The cycle of privatization weakens the institutions whose funding is robbed to enrich the private sector. And, at the same time, it generates taxpayer-funded revenue that gets invested in lobbying and political investments seeking ever-more taxpayer dollars.
Through privatization schemes that directly sell off assets that belong to the public, legislators enrich corporate interests at the expense of the long-term interests of the American people in assets their taxes have helped build. The privatization of the people’s assets is essentially permanent. Once buildings and lands are sold off to the private sector by a temporary legislative majority, those assets that may have taken years to build or maintain are lost forever to private, nondemocratic control.
http://www.pfaw.org/...
This was an agenda that ALEC held for some time and it was exposed (again for PFAW):
The agenda of privatization schemers was manifest at last August’s American Legislative Exchange Council meeting in New Orleans where ALEC members urged that the government, meaning the people, should not own buildings but should sell them to the private sector, which could then lease the space back to the government at a profit. Their aim is to make the private sector the landlords of our public spaces to accrue more profit for the few while rendering “we the people” the tenants of corporations in the halls of our democracy. In 2009, the state of Arizona even mortgaged its own capitol complex to investors and turned the legislature itself into a tenant.
A vote for Romney will further lead to the disintegration of the American worker’s job and wages, and inevitably enhance corporate greed.