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4.0
The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back
ByPublisher Description
America's leading defender of the public interest and a bestselling historian show us how to prevent the private takeover of our cherished public resourcesAmerica's leading defender of the public interest and a bestselling historian show us how to prevent the private takeover of our cherished public resources
As people reach for social justice and better lives, they create public goods--free education, public health, open parks, clean water, and many others--that must be kept out of the market. When private interests take over, they strip public goods of their power to lift people up, creating instead a tool to diminish democracy, further inequality, and separate us from each other.
The Privatization of EverythingThe Privatization of Everything, by the founder of In the Public Interest, an organization dedicated to shared prosperity and the common good, chronicles the efforts to turn our public goods into private profit centers. Ever since Ronald Reagan labeled government a dangerous threat, privatization has touched every aspect of our lives, from water and trash collection to the justice system and the military.
However, citizens can, and are, wresting back what is ours. A Montana city took back its water infrastructure after finding that they could do it better and cheaper. Colorado towns fought back well-funded campaigns to preserve telecom monopolies and hamstring public broadband. A motivated lawyer fought all the way to the Supreme Court after the State of Georgia erected privatized paywalls around its legal code.
The Privatization of EverythingThe Privatization of Everything connects the dots across a broad spectrum of issues and raises larger questions about who controls the public things we all rely on, exposing the hidden crisis of privatization that has been slowly unfolding over the last fifty years and giving us a road map for taking our country back.
As people reach for social justice and better lives, they create public goods--free education, public health, open parks, clean water, and many others--that must be kept out of the market. When private interests take over, they strip public goods of their power to lift people up, creating instead a tool to diminish democracy, further inequality, and separate us from each other.
The Privatization of EverythingThe Privatization of Everything, by the founder of In the Public Interest, an organization dedicated to shared prosperity and the common good, chronicles the efforts to turn our public goods into private profit centers. Ever since Ronald Reagan labeled government a dangerous threat, privatization has touched every aspect of our lives, from water and trash collection to the justice system and the military.
However, citizens can, and are, wresting back what is ours. A Montana city took back its water infrastructure after finding that they could do it better and cheaper. Colorado towns fought back well-funded campaigns to preserve telecom monopolies and hamstring public broadband. A motivated lawyer fought all the way to the Supreme Court after the State of Georgia erected privatized paywalls around its legal code.
The Privatization of EverythingThe Privatization of Everything connects the dots across a broad spectrum of issues and raises larger questions about who controls the public things we all rely on, exposing the hidden crisis of privatization that has been slowly unfolding over the last fifty years and giving us a road map for taking our country back.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back Reviews
4.0
“So very interesting. And depressing.
While I am very interested in learning how we got here as a country, books like this make me so sad. The level of self-protection many of the folks involved in these private deals is infuriating. People should be vocal when they fall for these scams in the effort to prevent others from falling victim.
The information about Obama’s new foundation and library was especially disheartening given the parking meter fiasco described earlier in the book.
We are all so overwhelmed and overstimulated lately, I fear more and more will be missed in the goal of easy fixes.”
“Both discouraging and inspiring in regard to government. A great primer on lots of sectors of society and why they seem to be functioning so poorly now (it’s because we sold it to private companies that prioritize profit).
Some of the core views the authors have that felt like mini epiphanies for me:
“These companies and their political allies have convinced us that we should evaluate each public policy decision more as consumers than as citizens.”
“When we privatize public goods we create destructive mechanisms that no amount of individual responsibility can overcome.”
“Without such public things (parks,infrastructure,etc), democracy is reduced to procedures, polling, and policing””
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