Jacobin Show: Privatization of Everything w/ Donald Cohen
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 7 October 2022
⏱️ 77 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We're joined by Donald Cohen, executive director of the policy organization In The Public Interest, to discuss his new book The Privatization of Everything, which looks at how the privatization of public goods has undermined democracy. We're also joined by Jacobin staff writer Luke Savage to discuss his new book The Dead Center—and whether the left can (or should) save liberalism from liberals. Jen Pan covers the latest dumb workplace trend, the so-called "flexetariat," and explains why there's really no there there. Finally, Jen is joined by producer Cale to share some initial reactions to Lula's first round presidential victory and what that portends for class de-alignment and left populism.
Donald Cohen's book: https://thenewpress.com/books/privatization-of-everything
Luke Savage's book: https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/the-dead-center/
The Jacobin Show is a weekly YouTube show offering socialist perspectives on class and capitalism in the twenty-first century, the failures of liberalism, and the prospects of rebuilding a left labor movement in the US. Music by Zonkey. This is the podcast version of the episode from October 5, 2022.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Music |
| 0:29.0 | Hello and welcome back to the Jacobin Show. I'm your host Jen Pan. Before we start really quickly, |
| 0:35.5 | just want to mention that today I will be talking to Donald Cohen. He is the founder and executive |
| 0:41.8 | director of the group in the public interest. I'm going to be talking to him about the widespread |
| 0:47.0 | problem of privatization. We'll also be talking to our good friend Luke Savage, who also has a new |
| 0:54.1 | book out. His book is The Dead Center. As usual, Luke has a lot of great comments about |
| 1:00.1 | centrism and liberalism, so stay tuned for that. I will be making my own very brief comments about |
| 1:08.2 | sort of a new classification of worker that I recently stumbled across. Bloomberg is trying |
| 1:14.7 | to make the term flexitarian happen, so I'll give some thoughts on that. But before all of that, |
| 1:21.8 | of course, I have to bring on none other than Kale Brooks. Kale, what's on your mind this week? |
| 1:29.8 | Yo. Hey, what's up, Jen? Hi. Well, I think what's on my mind is really what's on all of your |
| 1:36.3 | minds, just a guess. But I've been thinking a lot about the Brazilian election. Yeah, that happened. |
| 1:43.8 | That was important. And there's actually, we're going to be doing a lot of coverage. Jacobin has |
| 1:49.2 | already done a good amount of coverage in the run-up. We're going to be doing a lot more over the |
| 1:54.1 | next month, two months. Obviously, the results last night of the first round, they have a two-round |
| 2:00.1 | election system. So in the first round, Lula came out on top, but not enough to just kind of call |
| 2:07.8 | it there. There will be a second round. So he ended up getting a little over 48% of the vote. |
| 2:14.2 | Bolsonaro got a little over 43%. So almost a six million vote difference, |
| 2:20.6 | which in most countries and most people's conceptions of a democracy would say, clear cut, |
| 2:27.9 | Lula one. And he did, but there is going to be another round. And there is a lot still kind of |
| 2:34.6 | up in the air right now with that situation. And so even us recording this technically before, |
| 2:42.1 | it's going to come out. Who knows? Maybe it's going to be something. Hopefully nothing terrible |
... |
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