Project finance techniques have enabled projects to be built in markets using private capital. These private finance techniques are a key element in scaling back government financing, a central pillar of the current ideological agenda whose goals are well articulated by Grover Norquist, a US Republican ideologue and lobbyist, who says I don t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. On the basis of such ideological agendas and lobbyists machinations are the macroeconomic policies, upon which project finance feeds, made, thus transferring the control of public services from the electorate to private, unaccountable and uncoordinated interests.

Such agendas make project financing a key method of using private capital to achieve private ownership of public services such as energy, transportation and other infrastructure development initiatives. The goal ultimately is to make government irrelevant and achieve a two-tier society where government panders to the marginalized and infrastructure development and exploitation are handed over to private capital, free from the encumbrances of electoral mandates. Some of these sectors include:

• Energy Project finance is used to build energy infrastructure in industrialized countries as well as in emerging markets.

• Oil Development of new pipelines and refineries are also successful uses of project finance. Large natural gas pipelines and oil refineries have been financed with this model. Before the use of project finance, such facilities were financed either by the...