Hey, everybody. Thank you for being with me. I have a special guest today. His name

is Donald Cohen, and he wrote a very interesting book called The Privatization of Everything,

how the plunder of public goods transformed America and how we can fight back. Donald

is a founding board member of the Power Switch Action Formula the Partnership for Working

Families. He's the former political director of the San Diego Imperial Counties Labor

Council and founder and executive director of the Center on Policy Initiatives, a San

Diego-based think tank and policy organization. He is currently the executive director of

an organization called In the Public Interest. He's currently on the board of the Ballot

Initiative Strategy Center, and his opinion pieces and articles have appeared in The New

York Times, Reuters, The Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union Tribune, The New York

Daily News, The New Republic, and other online and print outlets. Donald, thank you so much

for being with me. I appreciate it. Well, thanks so much for having me. I'm a fan

and a follower. Well, thank you so much. So, you know, I have this kind of romantic

view of American democracy, and I'm very clear about how things are supposed to be.

And one of the things that's supposed to be a basic core first value is that we have

a balance and that the government monitors the balance between individual liberty and

a concern for the common good. And part of that individual liberty is, of course, meant

to be economic liberty, but economic liberty should never trample upon the common good.

So that's the ideal. And I actually grew up thinking that, you know, that tussle and

that struggle was pretty healthy in America and that the free market was honored, but

we would push back against it if it ever trampled on the rights of children or trampled

on the rights of workers or trampled on the rights of the earth. And there were regulations

...