Donald Cohen is coauthor of The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back. Cohen is the executive director of In the Public Interest (ITPI), a national nonprofit research and policy organization that studies public goods and services.
Our society values health care and education in theory, but it constantly undermines them in practice. Public sector workers feel that discrepancy most acutely. They’re striking to force our society to put its money where its mouth is.
The obsession with privatization isn’t just about turning public goods into profit generators for a small handful of wealthy people. It’s also about trampling on democracy.