America's leading defender of the public interest and a
bestselling historian show us how to prevent the private takeover of
our cherished public resources
"An
essential read for those who want to fight the assault on public
goods and the commons." --Naomi Klein
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 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 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.