"Licensed larceny: Infrastructure, financial extraction and the global South", June 2016

The provision of public services is one area which is increasingly being reconfigured to extract wealth upward to the 1%, notably through so-called Public Private Partnerships (PPPs).  The push for PPPs is not about building infrastructure for the benefit of society but about constructing new subsidies that benefit the already wealthy... Understanding and exposing these processes is essential if inequality is to be challenged... 

Licensed Larceny contends that no struggle for social justice is ever likely to make more than a marginal dent in the status quo without a grounded understanding of how wealth is accumulated within society and by whom.  The book explores how roads, bridges, hospitals, ports and railways are being eyed up by finance and transformed into an asset class through which private investors are guaranteed income streams at the public’s expense.

[Chapter 1 summarises 'the injustices of wealth', inequality and wealth extraction.

The case study in Chapter 2 traces the flows of money into and out of a PPP project in one of the world's poorest countries, Lesotho's national referral hospital, highlighting who benefits from them...

Chapter 3 describes the ways in which 'finance' views infrastructure: a road, hospital or oil pipeline is not 'infrastructure' unless it provides a stable, contracted cash flow for the long-term.

For investors, 'infrastructure' has become an 'asset class', as Chapter 4 explores further. What started off with investments in economic infrastructure (utilities, roads, ports, airports) now include investments in resource/commodity infrastructure (oil and gas facilities, mining, forests), social infrastructure (hospitals, public housing, schools, prisons, law courts, military bases), information infrastructure (big data harvesting) and, still in its infancy, natural infrastructure (payments for so-called environmental services)... 

Chapter 5 takes a global tour of massive infrastructure corridors planned to enable further economies of scale in the extraction, transportation and production of resources and consumer goods by compressing space by time.

Chapter 6 raises questions about how resistance might more effectively challenge the trajectory of contemporary infrastructure finance – and the inequalities and injustices to which it gives rise. It is likely to be more fruitful when part of wider efforts to foster and support commons-focused resistance to accumulation.]