Privatization Is War on Our Freedom w/ Donald Cohen
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 มิ.ย. 2024
- We're joined by the executive director of In The Public Interest, Donald Cohen, to discuss his new book The Privatization of Everything, which looks at how the privatization of public goods has undermined democracy.
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The necessity of some things is irrevocable. The right and access to necessary things should be irrevocable. Instead, needed things are given the same propriety as the most trivial want.
A key strategy for reclaiming public goods and advancing trustworthy government (not blind trust in government) came from the Brazilian Workers Party’s in the late 1980 with the end of authoritarian rule, when they developed participatory budgeting at the local and regional scales of government. PB redistributed some public decision making power- within parameters- to ordinary people and directly engaged them in the provision of public goods & services. In the process, it bolstered the efficacy of government, expanded public investments in poor and working class communities, & increased the willingness of the public to pay taxes and invest in public solutions. PB should be a key strategy against (and antidote to) privatization in the US, one that authentically increases transparency and accountability, roots out corruption, and democratizes the provision of public goods & services.
Good interview; this society has been crumbling for decades as the interests and methods of obtaining them have been consolidated into fewer and fewer wealthy hands and the divisions they've both used and caused are intensifying.
It is helpful to look at mutual aid networking for immediate needs while mainting as much control over government as possible so it's resources and power don't totally fall to the fascist right wing to everyone's detriment in a neo feudalist state.
Excellent views expressed.😊
I've got a great idea to save the world, Jen & Donald: an Economics that everyone can understand, not just the 5 percent. 🤔
(from GREEN FIRE, UK) 🌈🦉
Yes, good government is more important to Democracy than private enterprise although the latter can help. (Co-operation, not corporatisation.)
Good talk
This is so true. Capitalism depends on exploitation.
Who should get to decide if a job offer is exploitative or not?
A job candidate, worker, or customer has that choice, naturally, in any market system, since we are free to refuse. The taxpayer, unfortunately, has no such recourse. But there is more complexity to consider since bigger corporations control governments. They write the bills, pick candidates on both so-called sides, plus they filter the media. They have a monopoly on money, on force, and infirmation. The majority is in a delusion of democracy that us really sn oligarchy. Neither side has any situational awareness. They wouldn't even notice that a billionaire globalist sat in to produce the cartoons they watched 30 years ago. All these political hacks study some little corner of poli sci and feel like they know what's going on, but that's like a two dimensional being trying to see the third dimension, or the sixth.
@@-taz-when 99% of options are precluded, calling the remaining 1% "choice" is meaningless. Workers who need to feed their family have no choice but to accept whatever job is accessible to them even under the worst conditions.
@@aliceinwonder8978 I mean the worker gets to decide whether it's exploitative or not.
What Donald said about rebranding the efficacy of govt services is crucial. Everyone remembers the problems with the rollout of Obamacare, and that's Exhibit A in the case against govt programs. We need to tell stories of the everyday govt services that people use and that work just fine 99% of the time. But of course,, they're not perfect, and people's brains are velcro for negative experiences, teflon for positive so it's a big cognitive distortion to overcome.
29:15 yes, yes you would…
#MMT!!!!!!!
Privatization is a phenomena where someone elected to look after a public asset sells it to a corporation....
AMAZING😅
The punchline is after they sell off all your tax-funded assets they still demand you pay taxes😅😃
10:11
You defined 'public good' clearly to start which was useful but then made the jump from 'needs' to 'rights' without really exploring that transition and, it seems, just making some assumptions. That discussion would have been useful too if we are trying to understand fundamental ideas.
Donald sounds good, Jen has lousy acoustics (room reverb) / tinny, thin audio (:-(
Sounded fine to me, small amount of reverb - and there's nothing lousy about Jen
Privatization IS freedom. If you let workers keep what they earn, then you necessarily have to believe that money is PRIVATE.
You weren't listening. Privatization is the transfer of control over public goods to private hands.
"Many define privatization as simply the outsourcing of a good or a service to a private company, but it is much more than that. Privatization has broad effects and needs a broad definition. Privatization is the transfer of control over public goods to private hands. Sometimes this happens during procurement-the outsourcing of public services to a private contractor. In other cases it’s due to austerity- reducing public funding of a vital public good and letting private options take over. Or it can happen through deregulation-when we eliminate or fail to enforce public control through important regulatory safeguards for consumers, workers, or the environment. In all these ways, privatization is a transfer of power over our own destiny, as individuals and as a nation, to unelected, unaccountable, and inscrutable corporations and their executives."
Read the book, and realise your enemy is not the government, because if you rely on job to live, your destiny is bound to the private sector, and they don't care about you. They are happy to cut your wages, and acquire every low risk asset - including the ones you need to stay alive like housing, healthcare, and water - and bleed you dry to pay them for access to them. So, unless you grasp that privatization not only bleeds your wallet dry, but also your childrens', and your grandchildrens' wallets dry as well, you haven't being paying attention. Until you ask why middle class incomes and assets are shrinking over time, despite the tax burden being much lower than it was 40 to 30 years ago, you haven't noticed what's really been going on, or appreciate the public goods being hoovered up by wealthy people. And be almost sure, you're not going to be wealthy anytime soon. Just ask yourself, if government was so bad, why don't corporations set up set up paralell structures and actually be more efficient? They're not efficient at providing public services, only at gathering profits. And services are suffering.
@@BigHenFor then why do places with more privatization do better economically than places with less?
@@garyandsandrahamlin872 I'd like to learn more about this--can you point me toward some examples of places that are heavily privatized and doing better economically? And can you share a little more about how you're measuring economic health? Thanks.
@@EricaEteson sure, western capitalist countries have always done better economically than socialist countries. Cuba, Soviet Union, North Korea, Venezuela, east Germany, etc. economic health would mean gdp per capita, personal amenities, lifestyle, home size, etc.
@@EricaEteson 1800’s United States was heavily privatized and free market, and we saw all economic indicators increasing faster than anything we’ve ever seen. It was also a deflationary decade, something that modern central banks and governments have warned was evil and horrific.