The Privatization of Everything

How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back

By: Donald Cohen, Allen Mikaelian

Narrated by: Brian P. Craig

As people reach for social justice and better lives, they create public goods 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, 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.

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. 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.

©2021 Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian (P)2022 Tantor

Accurate Description of Our Time

I am certain that this should be taught in all of our schools throughout the United States.

A brilliant analysis

This is an exceptional well researched expose of the corporate take over of our public goods.

MUST READ- for young and old

The topics and case studies reviewed in this book are so crucial for the everyday American. We could all benefit from the lessons here.

Consider me recruited!

This is perhaps the most important book I've personally listened to (audiobook) to understand the U.S. free-market economy and public goods. I've always had a hard time grasping how our institutions function, but I don't blame myself for not understanding such a complex subject. Our public system has had centuries to mutate into the heartless, for-profit, transactional state that we find ourselves in today.

This book is a call to action, to get radicalized, and to see the vultures who prey on our tax money for their own profit for what they really are. It calls into question whether we still stand for the values that our nation was founded upon and still claim to represent. Are we just going to be door mats and let the rich, the greedy, the ruthless walk all over us? We are not just consumers and sources of labor. We are human beings and it is our right to decide how we want our society to look like.

That means holding decision-makers accountable, and not being beholden to corporate contracts when it was public money that funded them to begin with. At the end of the day, we are for the people, by the people.

Important and timely

For those of us who have grown both skeptical and often cynical about the so-called benefits of tue privatization of public good this book is a revelation. Well researched, well argued with many valuable insights.