
The Privatization of Everything
How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back
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Narrated by:
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Brian P. Craig
About this listen
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 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Since the financial crash of 2008, the cooperative movement has been coming back with renewed vigor. Everything for Everyone chronicles this economic and social revolution. Cooperative enterprise is poised to help us reclaim faith in our capacity for creative, powerful democracy.
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A clear eyed assessment of the co-op movement.
- By Bill Eldridge on 07-05-22
By: Nathan Schneider
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Dark Money
- The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
- By: Jane Mayer
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 16 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers? The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against "big government" led to the rise of a broad-based conservative movement.
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"I just want my fair share--which is all of it."
- By Darwin8u on 11-28-16
By: Jane Mayer
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Millionaire Mission
- A 9-Step System to Level Up Your Finances and Build Wealth
- By: Brian Preston
- Narrated by: Brian Preston
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Brian Preston, host of The Money Guy Show podcast and co-founder of Abound Wealth Management, lays out a nine-step system for building wealth with the money you already have. Millionaire Mission helps you account for your financial blind spots, overcome the fear of making wrong decisions, and take the guesswork out of what to do with your next dollar.
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Great book.
- By Nathan Blowers on 05-31-24
By: Brian Preston
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Winner-Take-All Politics
- How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
- By: Jacob S. Hacker, Paul Pierson
- Narrated by: John Allen Nelson
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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We all know that the very rich have gotten a lot richer these past few decades while most Americans haven't. In fact, the exorbitantly paid have continued to thrive during the current economic crisis, even as the rest of Americans have fallen behind. Why do the "have-it-alls" have so much more? Lots of so-called experts claim to have solved this great mystery, but no one has really gotten to the bottom of it---until now.
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VERY INSIGHTFUL
- By Ray on 04-10-15
By: Jacob S. Hacker, and others
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The Private Equity Playbook
- Management's Guide to Working with Private Equity
- By: Adam Coffey
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 3 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Private equity firms are on the rise and rapidly changing the game. Today, more than 5,500 PE firms own tens of thousands of companies, so it is essential for CEOs and senior management executives to understand exactly how private equity firms operate. This invaluable resource can help you devise a winning PE game plan for your own company that offers you greater freedom and financial success.
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Beyond basic
- By M on 05-15-20
By: Adam Coffey
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What Went Wrong with Capitalism
- By: Ruchir Sharma
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Capitalism didn’t fail, it was ruined. What went wrong with capitalism? Ruchir Sharma’s account is not like any you will have heard before. He says progressives are right, in part, when they mock modern capitalism as “socialism for the rich.” For a century, governments have expanded in just about every measurable dimension, from spending to regulation and the scale of financial rescues when the economy wobbles. The result is expensive state guarantees for everyone—bailouts for the rich, entitlements for the middle class, welfare for the poor.
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Good points from the economic history of USA
- By Amazon Customer on 03-03-25
By: Ruchir Sharma
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There Are No Accidents
- The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster - Who Profits and Who Pays the Price
- By: Jessie Singer
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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We hear it all the time: “Sorry, it was just an accident.” And we’ve been deeply conditioned to just accept that explanation and move on. But as Jessie Singer argues convincingly: There are no such things as accidents. The vast majority of mishaps are not random but predictable and preventable. Singer uncovers just how the term accident itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators. to account.
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do you like being preached to?
- By Tim M. on 09-08-24
By: Jessie Singer
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Doppelganger
- A Trip into the Mirror World
- By: Naomi Klein
- Narrated by: Naomi Klein
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who.
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Elite Psychobabble
- By A Reviewer on 09-30-23
By: Naomi Klein
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The System
- Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
- By: Robert B. Reich
- Narrated by: Robert B. Reich
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Millions of Americans have lost confidence in our political and economic system. After years of stagnant wages, volatile job markets, and an unwillingness by those in power to deal with profound threats such as climate change, there is a mounting sense that the system is fixed, serving only those select few with enough money to secure a controlling stake. With the characteristic clarity and passion that has made him a central civil voice, Robert B. Reich shows how wealth and power have interacted to install an elite oligarchy, eviscerate the middle class, and undermine democracy.
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Turn Off Your TV. Wake Up and Listen Now!
- By Benchmark on 03-25-20
By: Robert B. Reich
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The Shock Doctrine
- The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
- By: Naomi Klein
- Narrated by: Jennifer Wiltsie
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Abridged
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In her groundbreaking reporting, Naomi Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment," losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution.
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If It's Bad for Humanity, It's Good for Business
- By Nelson Alexander on 09-29-07
By: Naomi Klein
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The WEIRDest People in the World
- How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
- By: Joseph Henrich
- Narrated by: Korey Jackson
- Length: 19 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church.
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Lots of mispronounced words
- By Phil F on 10-24-20
By: Joseph Henrich
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Why Nations Fail
- The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
- By: Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 17 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine?
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Pros and Cons of "Why Nations Fail"
- By Joshua Kim on 05-01-12
By: Daron Acemoglu, and others
What listeners say about The Privatization of Everything
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Brad
- 01-01-23
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.
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- Brian Burke
- 01-27-23
A brilliant analysis
This is an exceptional well researched expose of the corporate take over of our public goods.
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