Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor in chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by Donald Cohen. He is founder and executive director of In the Public

Interest. He is also the co-author of the book, The Privatization of Everything, how the plunder of Public

Goods transformed America and how we had fight back. Donald Cohen, thank you so much for

joining us on current affairs today. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Now, it really is

the privatization of everything. That is one of the key

takeaways that I had from your book after going through it. I mean, you document case after case after

case. I mean, people might hear about prominent cases of privatization, school privatization and so on,

but you show it's the privatization of everything. And there was a lot

left on the cutting room floor. I bet. You know, we didn't, you know, right now that's a big issue

about Medicare, Medicare Advantage and direct contracting Medicare. We didn't cover that at all,

but it's now, you know, now in the news, you know, I don't remember exactly, but there are

definitely things that we didn't get to. Yeah, did you cover the war and the military? I don't know.

Not really. No, that's another big one we left out. Another huge one. Yeah, exactly.

But not to say that this book is skimpy, because you do go through many, many, many case studies. And there's a book out now by Mariana Mazzucato

about the consulting industry, which we don't talk about as well, which is basically the brain,

outsourcing the government's brains to huge consulting firms. So there's other things to explore.

So what are some of the cases that people of privatization that people might not know or think

about or realize that there have been efforts successful or not to privatize?

I would venture to say most, but I will give a few cases.

Let me say how we define privatization. My definition is it's about

private control over public goods and public goods in my definition is the things that we all need

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