Public Private Partnerships

Joan Veon is a business woman who attended many meetings of the United Nations and has written about sustainability and public/private partnerships. She first made the connection between public/private partnerships and the United Nations Agenda 21 at a meeting in Istanbul in 1996.

"Very simply," a public-private partnership is a new entity which allows corporations to take control of government assets. "It was a concept plastered throughout the various United Nations` conferences and their documents and it was a concept that was also talked about very openly after 1996." She sums it up by saying: "It was, if you will, the solution for government that is broke."

"You can call it global corporate fascism; you can call it transfer of wealth; you can say that it uses deception and distortion; you can call it the fleecing of the American taxpayer... "

More than that, Veon discovered at a meeting with Al Gore in attendance speaking about reinventing government that at the centre of reinventing government were public-private partnerships. Democracy would disappear into these PPP arrangements. When thinking about global governance, this is the form that it is going to take.

The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)

This year a large UNECE international PPP Forum took place between 30 March - 1 April 2016:

"PPP practitioners, well versed in the traditional PPP model, gathered from all over the world, and were asked to show how their projects were fulfilling the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of ‘People’, ‘Planet’ and ‘Prosperity’. In response to this challenge, many examples were given of how the PPP model can transform and improve the quality of life of socially and economically vulnerable people."

That`s the deception.

http://www.unece.org/index.php?id=42015#/

Scotland

"Scotland wasn’t just the testing ground for this disaster it has a far higher proportion than anywhere else. As Gerry Hassan points out: `Scotland has 40% of PPP/PFI schools with 8.5% of the population. That’s an even bigger scandal than the seventeen Edinburgh schools.`"

http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2016/04/11/pfi-scotland-2/

With school walls collapsing, the situation has only marginally improved:

"Scotland has been at the forefront of the PPP market since the concept was introduced in the 1990s. PPP policy and guidance is determined by the Scottish Government in Scotland... More recently, Scotland has pursued a non-profit distributing (NPD) PPP structure, which was established to deliver a `regulated` return to the private sector and better value for money for taxpayers...NPD is not a `not for profit` model."

An (NPD) PPP is still a public-private partnership.

http://www.eib.org/epec/resources/publications/epec_uk_scotland_public_en.pdf
Opening up Great Learning: learning for sustainability

 As part of their education, schoolchildren get the sanitised version of the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs).

It is ironic that Number 4 of the recommendations produced by the One Planet Schools Working Group is:

"All school buildings, grounds and policies should support learning for sustainability."

http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/Images/OUGLLfS_tcm4-853883.pdf