The Privatization Of Everything | how America sold itself out

Money. I could send my kid to private school if I wanted to. So, who cares if they're public schools? Uh, so we should privatize schools to eliminate the conception that we should care if some other kid goes to school, which everybody has. You got to drive it out of their heads. I want a dynamic country where the private enterprise carries the day, not the government. People will find out where the money came from. You need to grow up. This is America. People don't care where your fortune came from. And in two election cycles, it'll be just some some myth, some gossip.

Breathe in now. Exhale. Congratulations. You've just experienced one of the last free things left in America for now. Write that down. Write that down. Hey, once upon a time, things were just public. And what do I mean when I say public? Well, by public, my friend, I mean open to everyone. Think things that are meant for you and every other citizen. Things like public schools, libraries, roads, clean air, infrastructure, transit, national parks. These are usually funded by you and maintained by the government.

But over the last few decades, you have definitely felt a change. Maybe you've called it inflation or the rising cost of living. And of course, those things, yes, but let's be clear, things are expensive because everything, and I mean everything, is being sold to you. And you know, since life in America has become a product, you're just going to have to pay to play. It's not that things have just gotten more expensive since your parents raised you, it's that you now have to pay for more things while having fewer public goods and communal resources than they did. And if you can't afford it, well, that's just too bad. You can't dig it. Your right to exist in this country has become just another revenue stream for the ultra rich.

But of course, as tragic optimists, we're not here to just complain. We will instead name the beast, privatization, going private, private equity, etc. Show you how it operates and wake you up to why everything has gotten more expensive, help you spot privatization efforts in your own city, and actually see what it might look like to wage resistance against this. Americans have been convinced that everything, everything requires efficiency, convenience, and capitalizing, including just existing, just being here. Somebody needs to make money off of you. And like the good little consumers that we are, we believe it rather than exercising our rights as citizens. I've just reread this book, The Privatization of Everything. And now y'all get to overthink with me while I share with you why we need to change the way that we talk about public goods. Not for aesthetic reasons, but for actual survival.

So, grab some tea. We're going to rock with some black tea. It's called Paris. Get cozy. You know, if you got laundry to fold or some chores to do, grab your stuff, anything that you need to saddle up and lock in. And then throughout this, I want you to keep in mind this question. Is America truly first or is profit first?

Part one, what is a public good? What does it even mean when we say private or public? Here's a quick refresher for my visual peeps. Public goods are basic rights. Exist to serve society, funded by tax dollars, everyone has access. Privatized services exist to serve profit. You pay to access, again, limited to who can afford it.

If you have a pulse in America, chances are you have definitely heard the dog whistles and marketing phrases that signal and sell you on making as many things as possible private instead of public. "My fellow Americans, blah blah blah blah blah blah. School choice gives parents more options." We're defunding public education and we're funneling your tax dollars into private schools that get to make their own rules and exclude whoever they want. IEPs need not apply. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. "The free market is more efficient." Corporations profit while services declined under the guise of efficiency. No public accountability means that we can and will maximize and prioritize profits at all costs. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. "Government overspending is out of control." We're going to deliberately break things. In fact, we're going to break public services so much that they barely even function. Now we can claim they don't work to justify privatization. [Music] "Wasteful spending. Outrageous government waste, wasteful spending to one of the most wasteful agencies in government. Waste, fraud, and abuse rampant in our federal government." We like to use the words waste and abuse because they make they sort of sound good.

Gentlemen, I'd like to welcome you to privatization 101. Today, we're going to be teaching you how to turn boring, inefficient public goods into thriving, profit-driven markets. Step one, we need to manufacture a crisis. You will convince the public that government-run services are slow, broken, and inefficient. Schools, healthcare, post office, it doesn't matter. You name it. All you have to do is highlight a few bad examples and then you just call the whole system broken. Step two, we're going to starve the public. We're going to starve the public system of funding. We're going to defund schools. We're going to cut social programs. We're going to let infrastructure crumble. That part's important. Once everything is running on fumes, people will be begging for private investment. And finally, step three, profit. We're going to sell off that broken system to private corporations. We'll slap a nice market solution label on it and boom, you've turned basic human needs into a multi-billion dollar industry. Congratulations, you've just learned the secret to modern governance. Why fix something when you can sell it? Step one, we starve the public, create problems. Step two, sell the solution. Step three, collect attendees. Step four, repeat. We just witnessed a classic bait and shift. Privatization is when public services or assets that were originally owned, operated, and funded by the government through tax dollars are transferred to private companies or corporations to run for profit. What's the prize? And if the prize is your tax dollars, you have a right to know exactly how that money is being used and who benefits.

We interrupt this program to bring you... If I've done this right, we're about 5 to 7 minutes into this video. And if you are still here, there are two things that I would like to say to you. First, thank you for being here. And two, you are who we need. I understand the appeal of quick dopamine hit short-form viral media, but the fight that needs to be put up will not be waged by the members of our society who cannot maintain sustained attention. It will not be waged by the members of our society who do not have it within them to do the tedious necessary work that is required to be a citizen. You are who we need, someone with a bias for action and a sustained attention span.

When President Trump tosses around the scrap ideas of throwing out imaginary $5,000 checks to people as a result of their waste findings and instead of being incensed, people are frothing at the mouth, overlooking all of the corruption that is actively happening in front of us, know that the billionaire class has fully broken us down and turned us into consumers. And not only has that happened, but they know it. A consumer would be glad for hush money they weren't expecting. A consumer doesn't demand transparency. They buy what they are told to buy and they see only what they are told to see. Be more than a consumer.

I think I've got it. Eureka, I think I've got it. Okay. All right. Hear me out. Hear me out. Basic air free but unfiltered. You want clean air. That's going to be our fresh breeze plan. $29.99 a month. Now for $49.99, we can add the oxygen plus package. That's going to be perfect for your seniors, your athletes, you know, anyone interesting or anyone interested in just breathing better than the peasants. I can see it now. Wait, wait. A family plan. $89.99 for up to four lungs. Each additional dependent though, you know, that's going to cost you a little bit extra. But I think we're on to something.

Part two, a very brief history. The birth of privatization in America. When we talk about the birth of large-scale privatization in the United States, we need to look at the influencers that made it happen. And we do this by looking at the think tanks and the political architects who laid the groundwork. They built the narrative that is weaved into how we view public services and reshaped the national conversation. So key think tanks like Heritage, Cato, Reason, they're all funded by billionaire donors and they spent decades preaching free market superiority and painting public services as inefficient. So, we talked a little bit more about this in the video on Agenda 47 and Project 2025 and billionaire worship. So, if you feel like you're out of the loop, go check these out. But for the most part, in the '70s, financial emergencies in major cities gave conservatives an opening to push privatization under the guise of cost cutting. And so, when Reagan came along, these ideas moved from theory to practice. We're going to slash public funding. We're going to call services inefficient, and then we're going to offer private solutions. This step-by-step dismantling let voters keep schools and roads, but under private contracts for profit.

Conservative leaders could easily justify slashing funding for public services by feeding talking points about the government's inherent wastefulness. "Uh, the government is not efficient. Um, and there's a lot of a lot of waste and fraud. So we feel confident that a 15% reduction can, uh, can be done without affecting any of, of the critical government services." They recognize that although a lot of Americans might grumble about big government, they also really liked and relied upon services that the government provided. Things like food stamps, agricultural subsidies, schools, libraries, water treatment, roads. So rather than getting rid of these programs outright, they just slowly shifted them into private hands under the banner of market efficiency.

Okay, so during the Reagan era, they basically started pitching that, hey, you know, libraries and parks aren't true public goods because only some people use them. This reframing turned citizens into taxpayers. It turned government workers into bureaucrats. It turned services into handouts. And it just paved the way for privatization. All of this was just covered up by virtue signaling about freedom and efficiency. But in reality, it meant taking services that people had voted for and transforming them into private commodities. Needless to say, the marketing game was strong.

One of the most impactful changes that came in with this marketing push was the shift in how we as Americans thought about our role in society. So instead of viewing ourselves as citizens who collectively decide how to use shared resources and to protect the common good, people were now being encouraged to see themselves as not a part of a community but instead as individual consumers. The difference is citizens recognize that public services like libraries, parks, public transport, they benefit everyone even if they don't use them personally. Consumers focus on direct personal benefit and cost, often missing the broader societal advantages. I hate pushing the idea that all bad roads lead to Reagan, but man, his, his administration makes it real difficult not to do that.

Okay, so I'd like to preface this next part by sharing with y'all that I have hella smoke for Bill Clinton. Like, in my honest opinion, he's completely underhated as a president. And one day I will make a video explaining my Bill Clinton beef, but alas, it is not this day. Moving on, and we're going to skip on over to the '90s. And during this time, the Democrats in Congress, they went to town blocking Reagan's privatization efforts most of the time. But these ideas were actually really easy to adapt. So Bill Clinton started rebranding himself to look like a centrist or a third-wave leader, kind of like what Gavin Newsom is trying to do right now. So rather than being on the left, he decided to heavily embrace privatization and that included rapidly growing the private prison industry. This is where we start to see neoliberalism. So let me know if you guys want to ever like break down the political spectrum cuz I know a lot of times we throw out these words, neoliberalism, neoconservative. You're like, "What the hell does that even mean? It sounds bad." But if you want to get down with it, we can get down with it. This is where we start to see the rise of neoliberalism, the New Democrat. So, moving a little bit further away from the left and honestly more toward the center and, you know, dipping into the right. If y'all want to, we can also dive deep into why this strategy is happening. You know, why aren't candidates who are running on liberal or left ideals not moving further left and why they are moving right and or to the center? So, y'all let me know.

Anyways, he wanted to rebrand as a third-wave New Democrat. And pushing this agenda allowed him to please conservatives by shrinking the government on paper while funneling public money to corporations. In fact, Bill Clinton did such a good job at this that Reagan's privatization chief called Clinton's proposals the boldest privatization agenda put forth by any American president until now. Of course. Well, I want a dynamic country where the private enterprise carries the day, not the government.

Part three, the consumer mindset emerges. Turning citizens into customers. Okay, so "Make America Great Again" sells us a fantasy and it's one where life was easier simply because, you know, because boomers had it easier and because life was less expensive. And yes, prices were lower, but that's only one part of the picture. And what really made life more accessible for past generations wasn't just affordability, it was policy. The post-war era was built on high marginal tax rates for the wealthy, strong labor protections, and a well-built out public sector that was specifically designed to serve the common good. Huge projects that were spanning years solely for the purpose of serving the common good. But I will let you do the math on what happened in the 1960s that triggered a push to strip away public goods and replace them with private alternatives. I'm talking private libraries, private pools, private water fountains. You see where I'm going with this? This wasn't just about money. It was an ideological shift that shared resources could and should be turned into exclusive commodities.

People were being coached into seeing themselves as consumers who have personal entitlements rather than citizens with collective responsibilities. So in this new mindset, if you're excluded, it's your fault. It's because you're not working hard enough to afford what used to be public and free. If public goods vanish, it's because you failed to pay for the private version. And probably the most dangerous, cooperation isn't valued because as a consumer, you're told that the customer is always right and you owe nothing to anyone else. And it captures this push towards rugged individualism and the myth that everyone should be entirely self-sufficient while ignoring the large-scale solutions that most of the time they require community effort. That's the reality of the situation. Ideally, everyone would be self-sufficient and be an individual, but it's just not realistic in a society. And what makes matters worse is as the lines start to blur between private and public, politicians are now able to dodge blame by saying, "Well, it's not our job to provide these services." They shift the costs and the risk to individuals, leaving people to pay for things that were once considered basic rights or once considered shared resources. The idea is to instill in people the idea that all you care about is yourself. This undermines the idea that working together benefits us all, and it leaves a lot of people without necessary services unless you can fit the bill.

The WPA created more than 8 million jobs from 1935 to 1943 for a great many unskilled workers and professionals. The WPA constructed 850 airports, built or repaired 650,000 miles of America's roads, sewed more than 300 million articles of clothing for the needy, and erected 110,000 libraries, schools, and hospitals.

All right, team. Our focus this quarter is turning citizens into consumers because let's be real, voting is outdated. So what if democracy was a subscription service? Yes, exactly. Introducing Government Plus. This is going to be the nation's first tiered access citizenship model. The basic plan lets you vote in local elections, but only for pre-approved candidates. The platinum plan gets you access to state elections and priority DMV service. But for the most dedicated Americans, we have the gold patriot package. That's going to include federal voting rights, TSA Pre-Check, and one free Supreme Court appeal. With this, we have the immigration problem solved because this golden visa will provide a pathway to citizenship and residency to those potential citizens most able to afford the toll. I mean, those most deserving. Most deserving, excuse me. For $5 million, you can get unrestricted access, voting, lobbying capabilities, asset protection, political leverage, and legal immunity. Yes, you. You in the back. Isn't that just buying democracy? Aren't we monetizing citizenship? Exactly. The market decides who should have rights, not some outdated constitutionally. Now, who wants to run the A/B tests on paywalled healthcare? Freedom now with in-app purchases.

Now, when someone says, "Why is everything so expensive?" Know that it's because America is being run like a business and it has been run since, you know, virtually its inception. It's just now affecting a wider group of Americans in really undeniable ways. Now, what we have right now is the result of America being run like a business. And we also just elected the richest man in the world in the literal wet dream of the slimiest corporations. And this has given birth to the most pro-business and pro-private administration that we've ever had. That's where we are. Take over, Elijah. Take over.

Part four, public goods for sale. How privatization is robbing you. If you've been in America for a while now, you've definitely heard the private investor sales pitches through politician mouthpieces. And usually politicians will promise something like, "Now, I know that a lot of you were concerned about this, but I want you to sleep comfortably knowing that there will be no new taxes for this infrastructure project. We will pay for the infrastructure. We will cover the costs, and we're going to get our money back through our increased efficiency." Taxpayers won't feel a thing. But what they don't tell you is once a private company foots the bill, it wants to protect that investment. It uses the project's operations and maintenance as leverage, often demanding major influence or just straight up control over how a publicly owned asset is run. And what happens in the end is the city is left handling the unexpected costs and responsibilities that the private investor did not take care of, even though the private investor claimed that taxpayers would barely pay anything. Understanding privatization means you understand that one way or another, we always pay.

She's talking about what happened at her hospital after purchased by a private equity firm. Cerberus Stuart didn't have any bereavement boxes. They didn't pay the vendor. So there weren't any. So nurses were having to put baby's remains in banker boxes and cardboard shipping boxes. It only happened once or twice and then nurses went out and bought the baby food boxes themselves.

Now that we know what it is, how it's sold to us, how exactly does going private play out in your everyday life? Our wages. Majority of Americans rely on their jobs for essentials. So, think health insurance, pensions, benefits. If you lose that job, that safety net often disappears right after that job loss. As millions of people learned in 2020, public sector roles, so think government, used to offer a more stable version of that safety net, attracting qualified workers and strengthening the middle class. But when services go private, good pay and benefits often disappear, too. The book gives us the example of Carol Sanders, who worked in a New Orleans public school cafeteria for 28 years at $15 an hour. When a private company, Aramark, took over, her wage fell to $9. Her hours were cut in half and her benefits disappeared. She ended up on food stamps while Aramark CEO made $18 million the following year. Studies show that when privatization shows up, wage slashing is common. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, nursing assistants saw pay drop from $15 to $20 an hour to $8.50 an hour, while the contractor billed the state at $14.99 per hour. Ultimately, the taxpayers had to cover the difference.

Our water. This shouldn't be a hot take, but water is a fundamental human right. If you have beef with water being a fundamental human right, just let me know why, okay? Let me know. I personally believe that it's a fundamental human right. Yet, governments and corporations treat it like a commodity. And this changes what is easily our most essential resource into a luxury item. So Flint, Michigan is a really strong example of what happens when officials treat water as a profit-driven commodity instead of a public good. While they were trying to cut costs, they switched water sources and then neglected infrastructure upgrades, exposing thousands to lead-contaminated water. This wasn't a random accident. It was the direct result of a privatization mindset, something that prioritized savings over people. So, while this wasn't put in the hands of a private corporation, this is what happens when a basic need is treated like a profit-driven expense instead of a public good. That crisis left children at risk while politicians and corporations pointed fingers at each other.

So, wildfires in California are growing more frequent and more severe. And as they do, underfunded public firefighting services struggle to protect entire communities. Meanwhile, wealthy homeowners hire private firefighting crews to defend their properties first. And this creates a two-tier system. If you can afford to pay, you get priority protection. If not, you're left hoping overextended, underfunded public services can reach you in time. I really want people to understand, or I mean, maybe this is just a reminder that when you have essential services becoming monetized, wealth becomes a gatekeeper to survival.

What messages are we sending? Very few examples illustrate privatization more clearly than Nestle's large-scale extraction of groundwater. They pay pennies per gallon and then they sell it back at insane markups. Even in regions where there's droughts or residents lack safe tap water. In a township in Michigan, Nestle pumped hundreds of thousands of gallons each day for just $200 a year. Even while their neighbors in Flint, just hours away, struggled to access clean water and were forced to buy bottled water. And there was a similar outcry in California, drought-stricken California, where Nestle's had a decades-long extraction that continued under an expired permit until public pressure forced regulators to step in. When private companies control access to water, basic survival is monetized.

For all the talk of America being the greatest in the world, millions of people, millions of its citizens, still struggle to find safe, affordable water. On top of corporate profiteering, the US loses 6 billion gallons of treated water every day to leaky and outdated pipes. This wastes billions of dollars each year and jeopardizes reliable access to clean water. Fixing this problem though, it requires serious public investment and the EPA estimates that it would cost over $625 billion over the next 20 years in order to, you know, get it to where it should be. And, you know, a funny story about that, I have yet to see President Trump mention anything about that actual verifiable waste just yet. Like that's waste that's on the books. You would think that that might be top priority, but you know what? I digress. Meanwhile, we are literally watching money and water drain away. Also, private companies can keep turning our most vital resources into profit centers. And the bottom line is if we don't invest in water as a public trust, we're going to pay for it anyway. We're going to pay for it in higher costs. We're going to pay for it in environmental damage. We're going to pay for it in catastrophic public health failures. And corporations will keep finding ways to profit from a resource that should be guaranteed for all.

Our healthcare. You don't have to do a lot of work to realize that healthcare in the United States is not about care. It's about profit. And politicians and corporations do this thing where they claim that universal healthcare is too expensive. Yet, they're leaving out that the system is purposely built to maximize returns for private insurers, for pharmaceutical giants, for hospital networks. And they do this by denying the very care that people need. #Luigi. The act of denying care is not a flaw. It's not a blind spot of privatized healthcare. It's the business model. Private equity is at a complete opposite of the delivery of healthcare. Medicaid was meant to help at-risk Americans get healthcare quickly, but a lot of states ended up handing over control to something called managed care organizations or MCOs. They're private insurers and they profit by denying treatments, not by providing them. A 2023 report showed that these insurers deny over 1 in 8 medically necessary requests, medically necessary requests, even when the doctors say it's essential. And the result is patients end up facing mountains of paperwork. They have to do endless appeals. They have long waits just to see a doctor or to fill a prescription. And at the same time, hospitals and doctors are dealing with delayed payments. They're dealing with lower reimbursements. All of these things make care harder to deliver. And it's not even cheaper. Studies find that costs actually go up when Medicaid is privatized, leading to worse outcomes for patients.

In 2016, Iowa promised better care at lower costs. Okay, remember, listen for those key words. They promised this by privatizing healthcare. And instead, they had critical treatments being denied. Out of the way. Rural hospitals had to close from delayed payments and then state spending increased, busting the savings myth entirely. On average across the country, private equity acquisitions of hospitals have led to a roughly 25% increase in patient adverse events. After years of outcry, a major insurer quit and that forced the state to intervene, which is just proof that privatization wasn't the fix that we thought it was going to be. Tennessee's TennCare tried a similar approach in the '90s. MCOs restricted or denied care to cut costs. And then over 170,000 people, a lot of these people who had disabilities lost coverage by 2005. You had entire hospitals shutting down due to late reimbursements. And what I don't think a lot of people realize is these things create care deserts in the South where now you have to drive, you know, hundreds of miles just to receive care. And so rather than boosting efficiency, TennCare's privatization drove up costs, left clinics underfunded, caused widespread disenrollment, and, you know, kind of left its vulnerable citizens out in the cold. So from Iowa to Tennessee, the story is the same. Once private corporations control public healthcare, profit margins replace patient needs. Privatized Medicaid does not improve costs. It does not improve care. It adds barriers. It creates chaos and it leaves people behind. When healthcare becomes a business rather than a public good, it's the people who are most vulnerable who cannot afford it. They suffer the most. Private equity financing can turn around a struggling healthcare provider. To date, on average, that is an exception rather than the rule.

Speaking of suffering, you know how you have no idea who you really are until you face a crisis or something that kind of puts you to the test and then you really find out what you're made of. It's the exact same for privatization. It's really easy to spin the selling points of privatizing something when things are going well. But it's the disasters and emergencies that tend to show you what the priorities truly are. Instead of responding with urgency and compassion, corporations tend to seize the moment to extract as much profit as possible. This, my friends, is so affectionately known as disaster capitalism. And that's the practice of exploiting emergencies for financial gain. When disaster happens, the public suffers while private companies and investors make billions. The Axelrod may have made much of his considerable fortune by preying on aviation, hotel, and shipping companies when they were most vulnerable, shorting their stock during those early moments after the September 11th terrorist attacks.

In 2021, a winter storm shut Texas down. But the Texas grid failure wasn't just an energy crisis. It was a privatization disaster in real time. So context, Texas runs its own power grid through ERCOT, a system intentionally cut off from the national grid to avoid federal regulation. That means that when disaster hits, Texas doesn't have the ability to pull power from neighboring states. So when disaster did hit in the form of a brutal storm that left millions of people freezing in their homes, hospitals evacuating patients, and people literally dying because the state refused to invest in winterizing the grid. And why didn't they? Because there was no money in it. After a similar storm had happened in 2011, federal regulators recommended weatherproofing the power plants, but the private companies chose not to do it. Because in Texas's deregulated profit-driven system, spending money on resilience hurts the bottom line. Natural gas plants, which provide over half of Texas's electricity, failed the most. But instead of preparing for emergencies, energy companies gambled on market spikes. So when the grid collapsed, Texans were left in the dark, literally. While gas companies like Comstock Resources bragged about hitting the jackpot by selling gas at 400 times the normal price. So, I want you to think like surge pricing when everyone needs an Uber at the same time after the ball has dropped on New Year's and everyone wants to go home. People froze to death while billionaires raked in more billions. And when it was all over, Texas bailed out the energy companies with public money, but kept the system privatized, meaning it can and probably will happen again. This was not an unavoidable disaster. It was the direct result of policy choices. I need y'all to understand this point. Most of all, these are policy choices. This is a policy decision by the American government. Texas leaders prioritized corporate profits over public safety by keeping the energy grid privatized and unregulated. That's privatization in action. The public takes all of the risk while corporations collect all of the rewards.

A chat about privatization would not be possible without discussing the pandemic. COVID didn't just expose the cracks in the American healthcare system. It ripped them wide open. And it showed us how corporations and politicians let people die while chasing profits. From the very start, Trump and Jared Kushner assured us that the free market would handle everything. As if capitalism has ever prioritized human life over the bottom line. Instead of mobilizing the government for a real public health response, they left it up to corporations to figure out. And what did we get? We got ambulance rides costing over $3,000. Private ambulance companies cashed in on increased demand, price gouging people who were already in medical distress. We got hospitals that charged tens of thousands for ICU stays, even for insured patients. We got pharma execs making billions off of vaccines that were developed with taxpayer money. But instead of making them widely available, companies like Pfizer and Moderna locked down and squeezed every last dollar out of the governments around the world. And that's not even touching the absolute clown show of companies that were jumping in to make a quick buck. You had liquor companies that were pivoting to making hand sanitizer, but a lot of it was useless or it was unsafe because there were zero regulations. You had other companies making cheap, ineffective masks just to sell something. We all saw this. Do not live in a revisionist history. Okay, we were there while Amazon was flooded with price-gouged essentials. We saw it. We saw the gold rush of grifters popping up to sell bogus COVID tests, faith treatments, scam relief programs. Meanwhile, actual COVID tests, while other countries gave them out for free, US hospitals and labs charged up to $3,000 for a single PCR test. And because testing was so heavily privatized, a lot of valuable public health data was lost. You had private labs not reporting results to public health agencies. And then at-home tests were rarely tracked anyway. So we started creating these little privatized silos which made it impossible to get an accurate picture of how the virus was spreading in the first place. Without a system and comprehensive data, the government was constantly playing catch-up while private companies raked in profits. And throughout it all, Kushner's team of inexperienced MBA bros tried to disrupt the supply chain, like this was some kind of startup challenge, completely botching the federal response. There were other nations who treated healthcare like a public good, providing free tests, treatment, vaccines. It was America that turned a pandemic into a business opportunity. And millions of people paid the price trying to navigate the complex, overpriced, broken system during the worst global health crisis in over a hundred years. Many of the nursing homes are privately run and when COVID hit, there were no caregivers. They couldn't get access to the equipment that they needed. The nurses weren't in the hospitals they were trying to be. It was a horrific nightmare and people died. Died.

What would you say to someone who says the private sector can do it better? We don't need to invest in the public. We don't need to worry about, I don't know how they're going to do it. How are you going to make sure that long-term care is provided for? Children's care, too, by the way. It's so expensive. Yeah. Lo and behold, in the end, the free market didn't save us. It just let countless Americans suffer while CEOs and shareholders raked in record gains.

Our transportation. America's roads were built with public money for public benefit. But over the years, we've sold them off to the highest bidder. Did you know that roads could be sold? They can. Foreign companies now own a lot of US toll roads, and they're able to profit from rising tolls while the infrastructure crumbles. The Indiana Toll Road is a perfect example of this. So, it's a vital link between Ohio and Illinois. But instead of keeping it in public hands, Governor Mitch Daniels leased it out for 75 years. 75 years. That's an entire lifetime. And Daniels pushed this deal as part of his "Major Moves" infrastructure plan, selling it as a no-tax solution. And what he didn't mention was that Goldman Sachs advised him to do the deal while secretly investing in the winning bidder, which was a private international linkup between two other foreign companies. The state was told that the road would only generate $1.92 billion over 75 years of public control. But the private investors knew better. They expected to make their $3.85 billion bid back in just 15 years. And then every toll collected after that was going to be pure profit. Okay, I need you to pause for a second to think about that. The state figured that they would only make a little over $1 billion for this road. And so they sold it to this company who did their own assessment and were like, "Hey, we're going to bid $3 billion for this, but we're going to get it back in 15 years." So everything else for the next 60 years is profit. Every toll collected after that 15 years, profit. So you have companies who aren't even in the country making money off the American citizen through their roads. Why would someone in an office in Spain care about the needs of citizens in Indiana? Spoiler alert, they don't.

So this obviously wasn't a good deal, but who paid for this mistake? If you guess the public, you were right. Tolls immediately spiked. The foreign company increased the tolls 76% in just seven years, which led to truckers and commuters avoiding the road altogether. They would take other roads, ended up clogging up the smaller highways, increasing accidents, driving up the road maintenance costs for those roads. This deal also locked Indiana into a 75-year non-compete clause, meaning that the state literally cannot build any competing roads without paying penalties to the private owners of the road. They can't even make your area better unless you pay the owners of that road because making it better would be competing with them for 75 years. Does that blow anyone else's mind? Cuz that blows my mind. Like you're locked in. You can't improve unless I pay you. I can't make anything better for my citizens unless I pay you, private owner somewhere in Spain. Disaster struck. A major flood in 2008. The state had to pay the private company $447,000 just to waive evacuation tolls. The privatized toll road wasn't just a bad deal. It was a complete loss of public control. They had to pay the private company money to waive the toll so that they could evacuate people. Eight years in and the owners went bankrupt due to reckless speculation, aka gambling, which gave Indiana a chance to take the road back. Okay. But instead, Governor Mike Pence doubled down, selling it off again. This time to Australia's IFM Investors for $5.72 billion. Not a dime went back into the public. It just covered all of the existing debt. And while everyday Americans watched the tolls jump another 126% after Daniels' initial subsidy expired, executives from the bankrupt company walked away with $2.45 million in bonuses.

This isn't just Indiana, though. Public-private partnerships have been used across the country to shift control of infrastructure from citizens to corporations. Look at Chicago's parking meters. The city leased them to a private firm backed by Morgan Stanley in a 75-year deal. They just love that 75 number. And it's already cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue. The company hiked the parking rates immediately and now they collect every single dime that used to fund public services. But it doesn't just stop there. Because the city has to compensate the private owner every time the metered spaces are removed. Efforts to expand public transit have been shut down. Plans for bus transit lines, protected bike lanes. These things are stalled because moving any parking spaces would trigger financial penalties under the privatization contract. This means that Chicago's ability to improve its own transit, its cycling, its pedestrian safety is handcuffed by a deal that prioritized immediate cash and long-term private profit over sustainable urban planning for, you know, at least 75 years. They're locked in.

In the context of transportation, it doesn't stop at roads. Air traffic control has been a privatization target for decades. Since the 1970s, Big Airline has spent millions lobbying to take air traffic control out of the public's hands and turn it into a private nonprofit that's going to be controlled by a board dominated by major airlines. This board would set the fees, they would own the property, and then they would operate with zero congressional oversight. And they claimed that this would make air travel more efficient, but in reality, it's a power grab. And mark my words, the next big push to privatize the FAA will come from President Musk and the Trump administration, because of course it will.

Almost every major metro city would benefit from public transit. It reduces congestion. It cuts down pollution. It strengthens local economies, but we've been conditioned to see it as a consumer product instead of a public good. And billionaires like the Koch brothers want to keep it that way. They have this group called Americans for Prosperity that leads hella coordinated attacks on public transit, blocking expansion projects, pushing really extreme anti-rail initiatives in cities like Nashville, Phoenix, Detroit. In Phoenix, they poured in outside money to kill a light rail expansion, pushing a ballot measure that would abandon all future rail projects. Voters ultimately shot it down, but the message should be pretty clear. Corporate-backed interests will fight to keep you stuck in a car-centric city and a long commute, and they will keep public transit inaccessible and underfunded. And by allowing this, we are also committing a theft that not enough people talk about when they're signing these 75-year leases. I'll go back to that Indiana Toll Road example. It's the current generation that has the access to this road right now, but future generations are going to have to shoulder the burden through the ever-increasing tolls. When the future Indiana citizens need to improve or repair that infrastructure, they're not going to have access to the ITR toll revenue as a funding source because it belongs to a private entity. What that means in the simplest way that I can put it is we enjoy the benefits today while our children foot the bill. This is intergenerational theft. And at this rate, the kids don't even stand a chance.

I was really fortunate that I had a great public school education. I went to school all over San Bernardino and LA County and California. But it wasn't until I grew up that I realized that not everyone had that same experience. And I realized that now was because my school was properly funded. Even as a low-income student, especially from Head Start to 8th grade, my public school had regular field trips. We went to theaters. We had workshops. My fifth grade year, we spent a week away from home at science camp as a class. We held student council elections. We had after-school programs. It was just a really well-rounded experience. And I'm very grateful for how my public school laid the foundation for the love of learning that I have today. But I'm learning that that is not the experience that Americans are having now.

Now, instead of adequately funding all public schools, we're told to rely on charter schools or private schools and vouchers as the solution to government school failures. And what people are failing to realize is that the privatization of education is not about improving schools. It's, say it with me now, okay? It's about creating a business opportunity. And this opportunity is coming from the use of school vouchers and charter programs. School vouchers sound good on paper until you realize that they're just another way to drain schools and public tax dollars into private hands. So, for those who don't know, the idea is simple. Instead of funding public schools directly, the government gives parents a voucher. Essentially, a check worth a certain amount per child and then parents can then choose to use that voucher to pay for private school tuition instead. It sounds like freedom, right? Who could be upset at that, right? Well, here's what actually happens. Public schools lose funding while private schools rake in that government money without the accountability. So every time a student leaves a public school using a voucher, that public school loses a chunk of its budget. But the costs of running that school, paying the teachers, keeping the lights on, maintaining classrooms, those costs don't go away. That means you have fewer resources for the kids that are left behind. And then who gets hurt the most? The low-income families, students with disabilities. Because the voucher programs don't require private schools to accept every student. They ban or reject students with learning disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, or students that they just don't feel like taking. They can make up their own rules, like pulling kids into the principal's office and forcing them to take off their clothes when their rash looks a little bit too much like a hickey. Yes, this happened. And here's what's even wilder. The vouchers don't actually cover the full cost of tuition at most private schools. So, if you're already wealthy, a voucher is really just a discount on something you could have already afforded. But if you're working class, that voucher won't even get you into the door of a top-tier private school. Instead, you're left with underfunded public schools and a growing number of low-quality fly-by-night private schools that pop up just to cash in on the voucher money. Charter schools and voucher programs siphon public money away from public schools, contributing to them being underfunded, while corporations and the billionaires who own these facilities cash in. This idea didn't just come from nowhere. Economist Milton Friedman planted the seed in the 1950s when he argued that public education should be replaced with a free market system. His so-called school choice model framed education as a consumer product instead of a public right. And then decades later, Donald Trump put Betsy DeVos in charge of the Department of Education, a billionaire who has made an entire career around dismantling public schools in favor of privatized alternatives. School choice also has ugly roots in segregation. Oh my god, bro. Can you just drop the identity politics? We were talking about stuff going private. How did we get on segregation? Okay, hear me out. Hear me out. I've got three reasons why this matters. One, reality. The reality of the situation is we live in a capitalist nation and one of the ways that capital is accrued is by identifying the needs and the desire of an audience and providing a solution for that specific need and desire. We're not even talking about the ethical issue of creating a problem and then providing a solution for the problem that you created. That's neither here nor there. That's not this conversation. So just stay with me. Don't go down that pipeline. But a key component of marketing and therefore capitalism is identifying the demographics of the audience that you are aiming at. Their race, their age, their gender, their beliefs, how they spend their time, what their frustrations are, all of it. You are mapped so that you can be sold to. So, as long as you live in a place that designs its entire foundation around profit and selling something to you, marketing will exist and as a result, identity politics will exist. Okay? So, let's just get that out the way. Identity politics is a tool that is used throughout the entire political spectrum and then some. And so if you are someone who thinks that it only exists on one side, please know that even just that belief alone means that you were effectively marketed to. Two, I'm going to put this as simply as I can, context matters. And three, as much as I know that my identity as a Black woman has shaped my experience in this world, and that might upset a few people.

People, but we are truly at a time where I don't care what you are in your current meat flesh suit. I'm not worried about any of that because in case you didn't notice, the house is on fire. Okay? The house is on fire. So my culture is water. Water and escape. Resistance or escape. That's it. The people who understand the importance of our culture being water right now are who I am looking for. That's where I'm at. Okay.

As the great Fred Hampton once said, "We don't need no culture." Except revolutionary culture. Full stop.

Now, back to context. The reality is that when courts ordered schools to integrate, some communities shut down public schools entirely. That's the reality of the situation. And instead, they chose to start issuing vouchers for white students to attend private whites only. They framed it as school choice, but what it really was was just a way to avoid integration and keep black students out. Out of nowhere, by 1969, over 200 segregationmies had popped up across the South, and seven states had voucher programs specifically designed to get around integration laws. This tradition continues today. Backed by the billionaires like the Cox, like Betsy Devos, they seek to reshape public education into a for-profit enterprise, leaving working-class kids behind, selling the same segregation era idea under a new brand. The marketing is incredible if it wasn't so scary. Their goal by gutting public education and turning learning into a profit-making scheme and leaving working-class kids behind. They ensure that we never question authority and we do what we're told. That we work but we rarely make enough to thrive. That we destroy our bodies. You make babies. You replace the slave labor force. Repeat.

Privatization doesn't just stop at K through 12. Your boy Reagan cut public funding for universities, forcing students into loans. By 2020, student debt had ballooned to over $1.6 $6 trillion. And over time, Wall Street capitalized on these loans, lobbying to weaken bankruptcy protections and lock students into high-interest debt. Universities, meanwhile, signed shady deals with lenders like Sally May, profiting off of kickbacks while students bore the costs of creating an entire generation shackled to debt. When Bill Clinton did try to phase out private lenders in the 90s, Republicans blocked him, forcing a compromise that let Sally May keep making private loans, charging massive fees, and profiting off of students, all while still being backed by the government. By the early 2000s, investment groups like JP Morgan, Cityroup, and Bane Capital had fully infiltrated the student loan market. They lobbyed to gut protections for borrowers and even got Congress to ban the Department of Education from marketing its own cheaper government-backed loan program. Sally May, meanwhile, paid off universities to push their predatory loans onto students. Schools got kickbacks, students got debt, banks got rich.

And I wish that the privatization of education stopped at loans, but it does not. Testing companies, private contractors, and data firms have turned K through 12 education into another profit center. Maximus, Inc., Pearson, and for-profit charter school networks now oversee everything from standardized testing to special education services. The worse the public schools perform, the more money private companies make. So, there's no real incentive to fix the system. Just an endless cycle of failing schools, expensive testing, and privatization. At this point, education in America isn't a right. It's a financial pipeline. and a way to control people. It starts with standardized testing, which determines the school's funding. It continues with private charter schools and voucher programs, draining public resources. And then for those who do make it to college, you have tuition hikes, privatized student loans, all already there to ensure that young people graduate into debt bondage. Education is not being treated like a public good anymore. It's an industry.

If you think that this is just about money, look at the history and look at what's happening right now. The fight over education has always been about power and control. In the 1800s, anti-literacy laws made it illegal to teach enslaved people to read and write. illegal because literacy was seen as a threat to the system. The North Carolina General Assembly enacted a law and that law specifically stated, "Teaching slaves to read and write tends to excite dissatisfaction in their minds and produce insurrection and rebellion." When you think about the anti-intellectualism that is happening in America today, it's really not hard to draw the conclusion that an educated public is a public that can fight back. The corporate takeover of education is not just about extracting wealth. It's about keeping working people from gaining the knowledge, from gaining the tools and the power to challenge the system that's keeping them in debt. The reality of the situation is you are not just being robbed. You are being enslaved.

Are you tired of so-called government schools forcing your kids to learn alongside just anybody? Well, families, worry no more. Introducing the Heritage Academy for the Pure and Proper, where your child's education is as exclusive as your country club. We believe in traditional values, patriotic curriculum, and most importantly, handpicking our students. Unlike those nasty public schools, we have the right to reject students we feel just don't fit our culture. Thanks to modern school vouchers, you can now use your tax dollars to send your child to a real school, just like our grandparents did before those pesky integration laws.

Private prisons profit from incarceration, not rehabilitation. and a lot of them sign contracts that guarantee 80 to 100% occupancy. Meaning that states have to pay for empty beds even if there's no one to fill them. Now, in a healthy society, crime going down should be a good thing. But in states like Arizona, law enforcement is basically pressured to find more people to fill those beds. This turns justice into a for-profit numbers game. That's not a justice system. That's a business model built on human suffering. And it's not just prisons. Private probation turns this what's supposed to be considered a second chance into another form of a trap. In Greenwood, Mississippi, which is a town that has an average income of $14,000, a private probation company took over and suddenly in less than 6 months, 10% of the population was on probation for minor infractions like traffic violations or unpaid parking tickets. At this point, you have the company Judicial Correction Services was making around $48,000 a month. That's money that should have been put towards groceries, towards rent, towards child care. But instead, it was flowing backward into corporate pockets. And like clockwork, those fees piled up. People who couldn't pay those fees face jail time. These companies function like payday lenders. They'll pile on drug tests, even if the original charge didn't involve drugs. Background checks, community service fees, none of which actually improve public safety. Judges, whose job it is to uphold justice, often have financial ties to these private firms, making it profitable to keep these people in the system.

Ankle monitors are pushed as an alternative to prison, but they also extract profit. You have these private companies that manufacture the equipment, and then they charge the offenders hundreds per month to wear it, plus any extra fees for any violations. "This is your ankle monitor. This particular model has caused some electrocution issues, but it's only for a minority of our customers." "I'm sorry, did you say electrocution?" "You say customers." The goal is not rehabilitation. The goal is to keep the cycle going. And the corruption doesn't just stop with companies. It seeps into the courts. Judges who are supposed to uphold justice now have a financial stake in keeping people on probation because private probation companies fund their operations. Some judges even admitted that they would hesitate to wave the supervision fees because it would hurt the private companies that run their probation systems. That's how far this has gone. Judges making a decision not based on justice but on keeping a for-profit system afloat or worse receiving kickbacks. In Missouri and Tennessee, courts regularly called private probation officers to testify in hearings about whether or not someone should remain on probation. Think about that. The people who profit from keeping you on probation get a say in whether you get off probation.

In 2016, the Justice Department tried to phase out private prison systems only for Donald Trump to reverse the course, calling them better, conveniently after private prisons donated lavishly to his campaign. And after that, their stock soared. Studies by the National Institute of Justice and others also show private prisons cost as much or more than public ones. They have higher rates of violence, higher rates of recidivism, which basically just means more repeat customers for profit. When crime drops, it's equivalent to business slowing down, which means that these corporations seek out new revenue, immigration detention. Laws like Arizona's SB1070 were pushed by the Corrections Corporation of America and ALEC to boost detention numbers, ensuring that policies like mandatory detention quotas stayed in place. By 2017, 75% of immigrant detainees were held in private facilities, and today over 90% are, with guaranteed bed quotas funded by taxpayers. Private prisons trace directly back to convict leasing after the Civil War when black codes were able to provide a steady supply of unpaid labor to replace slavery. More than a century later, we're still monetizing incarceration.

So, Penny for your thoughts, friends. Can a country that profits from incarceration headcounts ever truly believe in rehabilitation? When states have to guarantee that there's a minimum number of prisoners at all time, when judges work hand in hand with for-profit probation companies, when every person caught in the system represents another monthly payment to a private corporation. And as long as incarceration remains a business, there will always be an incentive to keep prisons full, to keep fees high, and to keep justice for sale. Real rehabilitation takes a backseat to maximizing returns, and we all pay more in the long run. Citizens are punished when they do commit crimes. The state governments are punished if they don't, but the private prison makes its money either way.

Part five, the slow coup. How privatization undermines democracy. Private control equals no public accountability. Once a public service is privatized, the public loses any say in how it's run. A perfect example of this is Maximus, Inc. Yes, that same Maximus that's deep in the school game. They actually got into welfare case management in the 1990s when they got a taxpayer funded $15 million contract to run a Connecticut healthcare call center. A local radio station called to ask them how many calls they were handling and what taxpayers were getting for their money. Maximus refused to answer because they claimed that the details were a trade secret. Think about that. You have a company paid with public money that can now hide basic information from the public. In fact, when the public asked for information on what they were funding, this is what they provided. That's how privatization works. The second a corporation takes over a public service, the public loses access to information about it. They use loopholes to suck up public money while dodging public oversight. Transparency not required.

Part six, how to fight back. Reclaiming public power. Privatization is not inevitable. It is a policy choice. And if we know the playbook and we know how it works, we can stop it before it happens.

Step one, recognize the playbook. If politicians start talking about efficiency or choice, it's time to ask who profits. These words are usually code for privatization and the goal is to make the public think that they're getting something better while quietly selling off public services to private companies. And please don't think this is some far-off idea. President Musk is already putting feelers out. He's testing the waters for the next big privatization pushes. And if they succeed, private companies, not the public, will dictate how air travel and I can't even tell you how many other areas will operate.

Step two, pressure local officials. Privatization rarely begins in DC. It starts in city halls and state legislatures, which means that the real fight is local. It's in your backyard. A lot of the time, these deals are happening without public input or they play dirty political games. And in New Orleans, a company called Energy even hired fake protesters to drown out real voices in city council meetings. This ended up swaying the votes in favor of a gas power plant. So, the solution to this is to show up anyway, demand transparency, and expose corporate deals. More often than we realize, once people start seeing and understanding what's happening, they fight back.

Step three, support public options. The best way to beat privatization is invest in public options. Free public transit versus toll roads and ride shares, universal health care versus for-profit insurance. The more we invest in public options, the harder it is for corporations to push privatization. Just start small with those three steps to get you clued into what's happening around you and what you have a right to know about as a citizen.

But honestly, nothing will happen without a complete mindset shift. The mental shift needed to reclaim the public. If you watched my tragic optimist guide on surviving capitalistic nihilism, you were already pretty well aware that we have been sold a lie. Okay, that's the reality of the situation. It was good marketing. Dare I say it, one of the best marketing campaigns ever ran. And hey, don't be angry at yourself. It got the best of us. But privatization also gets a huge boost from consumerism. The market is great at delivering the goods we don't need. New phones, fast food, instant gratification. But we made the mistake of thinking that it could do the same things for the things that we absolutely need. We started treating health care and education and housing like products instead of rights. I hear so much about inflation when it comes to housing. I don't think people realize that because of scarcity, people were able to price their houses crazily during the pandemic. And you're not going to be able to tell people to price their houses accordingly now or to come down. and so rents are higher or you have these private corporations who are buying up all of the single family homes and then renting them out at a jacked up price. This is what happens when we prioritize profit over everything else or we prioritize consumerism over everything else.

There's a lot of boycotts happening right now and I'm seeing people say things like boycotting doesn't matter. And what I don't think a lot of people realize is getting people to get their toes wet into collective action is good no matter what. It is a fantastic way to get people thinking differently. If people are subconsciously just buying things and there's a day where we have a boycott and then they don't granted a pause to actually think about, well, you know, I was going to make that purchase, but I don't actually need that item. The pause we should be seeking out these pauses that cause people to think differently instead of allowing ourselves to be pushed into the idea that everything is a product. So much so that we ignore what's a right instead of a product. And you know, politicians encouraged this. Bill Clinton literally rebranded government services as customer service, as if our relationship to public goods should be the same as our relationship to Walmart or Amazon. This shift from citizen to consumer is one of the biggest wins of privatization. Because if we're all just customers, then the government owes us nothing. No accountability, no transparency, no guarantees.

Somewhere along the line, the American dream went from a stable job, a modest house with a white fence, and 2.5 kids to, "Man, it might not be so bad if I got hit by a bus today so I can afford to live because we know public systems won't protect us." That's not just broken by accident. That's by design.

Public goods equals real freedom. They claim privatization is about freedom. The freedom to choose your school, choose your healthcare, choose your toll road. But what kind of freedom is that when every choice comes with a price tag? What kind of freedom is it when you're one medical bill or one car repair away from bankruptcy? Or when your kid's school is underfunded because your tax dollars are getting funneled into an already well-funded private school. We're told to shop around for schools, for healthcare, for transportation. But public goods aren't products. You can't shop your way into clean water. You can't choose your way out of a crumbling highway system or or crumbling infrastructure. That's not how public works. Infrastructure is not just roads and bridges. It's power. And whoever controls the infrastructure controls the future. The market doesn't care about fairness. It doesn't care about access the second we let corporations control public services. They start dividing them up and actively blocking progress because corporate profits come first. It has to do with what happens to the money. Whether it goes to an account in the Cayman's or it goes into Ralphie Delator's pocket. It doesn't matter. The money that should be there to take care of these patients is not.

Education, charter schools, and school vouchers create a two-tiered system. Great for those who can afford it, devastating for those who are left behind. Health care. Private hospitals decide who gets care versus who gets billed into bankruptcy. Big pharma lobbyed for decades to prevent Medicare from being able to negotiate lower drug prices. Public spaces, parks, highways, even sidewalks get pay walls. "I'm not allowed to access the only green space near my house that's any sort of grassy open and walkable. It is a country club." General versus premium access. On the topic of climate change, fossil fuel companies spend billions of dollars actively fighting against climate legislation so they could keep raking in money. Internet access. Telecom giants fought to ban public broadband, keeping millions of Americans locked into overpriced, slow internet. And the result is stagnation. You have inflated costs and unnecessary suffering. Also, a handful of corporations can maintain dominance. At what point do we admit that the market isn't free? At what point do we admit that it's rigged? When corporations control your water, your transit, your justice system, who really runs your city?

Real freedom means not having to make a life or death decision based on your bank account. Real freedom means knowing that public goods, water, education, healthcare are there when you need them because they belong to all of us. The reality is is that the free market is always going to create exclusion. And that's why we can't think like customers. If we want public goods, we have to start thinking like citizens again.

Inequality isn't an accident. It's a policy. There's this idea that's pushed by people at the top and you know, some people at the bottom that inequality is just a natural part of the market that some people just get rich and some don't. That some people pull themselves up and then some don't. It's just the cost of freedom, right? The reality is no. Inequality isn't just some side effect of the economy. It's engineered through deliberate policy decisions. Decisions that take money, take wealth from the poorest and hand it to the richest. Trust me when I say when I first learned about bop bop marketing, bottom of the pyramid marketing, my mind was blown. At every single level, there is a system in place to extract wealth from the lowest levels of the economy to the top. That's the reality of the situation. Policy choices funnel wealth from the bottom to the top.

Private prison stocks soared after Trump's election because they knew that more arrests would mean more profit. This isn't an industry that just benefits from injustice and blocks progress. It lobbies for it. It networks for injustice because it's literally invested in mass incarceration, harsher sentencing laws, and the criminalization of poverty. These industries don't just benefit from injustice, they create it. The people at the top aren't just protecting their wealth. They're rigging the system to make sure that we can never take it back.

Then when people say to me that they trust and believe in President Trilon because they don't take a salary, it immediately tells me a number of things about that person. One, it tells me that this person is monetarily driven and that they see money as the highest value and the only form of currency. That is their ultimate. Or, you know, maybe they just completely ignore the fact that power and control are just as much, if not more of a salary than any of the financial instruments on the market right now. After a certain amount, money isn't the most important thing. Power and influence is. and quietly just do whatever we want.

Changing the conversation. What do we value? We have been trained to see inequality as a personal failing, not as a system designed to keep certain people on top. We do that with a lot of things. We look at the less fortunate and we think work harder or you know, you made bad choices instead of seeing how public policy pushes them down. They slap fees on EBT cards. They sue people for unpaid ambulance rides. They privatize student loans and trap entire generations in debt. They hire private investigators to kick people off of their VA benefits. And then they turn around and tell us that it's your fault for not working hard enough. We have to change the conversation. We have to shift how we see public goods. They're not a charity. They're a right because everyone pays into it. Everyone. We're not divided into the makers and the takers. Right now, we attack the individual instead of the wider system. But the reality is a functioning society requires public investment.

Okay, I'm struggling. I'm finding the urge not to doom scroll and just I'm overwhelmed at the idea of even dealing with any of this. Do I can I have some good news? Do we have any good news? You know what? That's understandable. Good news is that there are people who are already winning this fight. People are doing it, living it out right now. Chattanooga, Tennessee fought back against telecommunication giants and built its own public broadband network and now it's one of the fastest in the country and it's locally controlled. Felt in California kicked out a private water company and took control of their own water system, lowering prices and improving the service. Atlanta, Georgia stopped the privatization of public transit by organizing a coalition of riders, workers, and community leaders. And it's not just local fights. Big shifts happened, too. Medicaid expansion in conservative states. That happened because voters fought back against privatized healthcare and demanded it. Student debt relief, the result of years of organizing against a system that profits off of people just trying to get an education. These aren't top-down government mandates just given to us out of the kindness of some politician's heart. They are citizens demanding control over their public goods. And we need more of that. These conversations can't just happen inside of corporate boardrooms or backroom political deals. The public needs to be in the room. The tedious fights matter not just because they stop privatization in its tracks, but because they force us to rethink what we value. What do you value in your community? What do you want in your community? And when we actually start to think about what we value and what's important to us, the question we should be asking isn't how do we afford it? It's why are we letting billionaires hoard wealth while we pretend that we're broke.

Reclaiming the public is entirely possible. Why? Because privatization relies on our complacency. Why else? Because when people see the public option working, they fight to protect it. These companies aren't invincible. They depend on people not paying attention. Also, once the public actually sees a successful alternative like Chattanooga's broadband, they fight to keep it. As a resident of Chattanooga, I can tell you, I promise you that if you ask 10 people what they would miss most about Chattanooga, if they had to leave, seven out of 10 people would give you the same answer and they would say EPB. It's that good. But it demands that we stop thinking like consumers and we start thinking like citizens.

In the privatization of everything, the author sheds some light on the ways that we can become more civic-minded. And one of the ways that we do that is we understand that the biggest lie of privatization is that we can have nice things without paying for them. That if we just hand over control to corporations that they'll handle it efficiently. But the public always pays somehow either in tolls in debts in corporate bailouts underfunding public goods cost us more in the long run. Cutting our education budget that's not a smart choice. That will not help us compete with China. We have failing roads. We have skyrocketing health bills. That so-called efficiency of privatization that money doesn't just disappear. It gets rerouted into CEO salaries, into executive bonuses, into stock buybacks. And when those companies fail, they make sure that the public picks up the bill. We always pay. We always pay. If we invest in public goods now, we save money later. Invest in education now, we spend less on prisons later. If we prepare for a pandemic now with a few billion, we don't lose trillions shutting down the economy. That's common sense. Privatization can be reversed, but it's only if we see ourselves as citizens with the right to shape our public future.

We've seen how privatization often means corporate greed and public selloffs. In many cases, it's a Trojan horse for wealth extraction. But does every public private partnership lead to disaster? Or can private funding genuinely support public goods without corrupting them? While researching for this video, I was actually really really happy to find an example of what citizen-minded public private relationships could look like right in my own backyard and discovered the Chattanooga 2.0 and the Chattanooga Future Fund that might be able to offer us an answer. Launched in 2015, Chattanooga 2.0 is a cradle to career initiative that unites public agencies, private businesses, and early childhood education. One of its key efforts is the Chattanooga Future Fund, which lets local businesses and individuals put money directly into education savings accounts for students, giving them a head start on college and career training. Still, there are important questions to ask. Does Chattanooga 2.0 fill gaps caused by chronic underfunding? Does it risk masking systemic flaws that need public investment? I reached out to the co-director of the Chattanooga Future Fund to get some more information on the program.

"Luckily, Haley was glad to sit down and chat with me a little bit. Chattanooga 2.0 is a small nonprofit. Um, we're actually housed under the Chamber of Commerce currently. So, we work across sectors from early childhood education working on kind of literacy there, kindergarten readiness. We have our viable pathways program that works on providing our 18 to 24 year olds with workforce development and opportunities for a thriving career. So we work with an program called Build Within that provides paid apprenticeships. So from there the future fund comes in because it's an actual resource that's tangible to to um support our kids. We say from cradle to career. We have these programs that are exposing them to opportunities, but the future fund allows them to actually have resources to pursue those. So it's not a barrier. So, the future fund is a college and career savings account for currently students in kindergarten, 6th, 7th, and eighth grade in Hamilton County public schools. So, we're starting with a 5-year pilot and from there assessing the impact and we want to open it up to everyone. We know right now a lot of our students, especially in our lower income schools, they're lacking the resources to pursue education after school. So, we want to make sure that we're providing an additional resource. Our community is able to come alongside our kids and provide that. So yeah, it can be used for career education, for career prep, for um college. So want to make sure it's a broad range of how they can use it. So we always say to people are like, 'So where does this come in with the vouchers and whatnot?' So that's not at all connected. This is meant to use for post-secondary needs. So after they graduate and parents always ask like, 'What's the catch?' Like, you know, it's you're just offering us money, like free money to put towards my child. Like there's no catch except for them using it after they graduate high school for whatever is going to continue their career. Our focus is our Hamilton County Public School student. It's kind of like a seed of hope for our kids. Having people investing in you and just from kindergarten telling you, oh, we really believe that you want to accomplish this dream of being a fill in the blank so much that we're putting money towards this. And so, it's more of our community and our city coming alongside our students who we know will largely be creating our making up our workforce in some years. So, it's all these organizations saying this is our this is our city, but these are our kids. We're really investing in these guys."

A lot of public private investments or partnerships have been criticized for allowing private interests to dictate public priorities. What role do businesses play in this partnership beyond financial support? Do they influence policy, curriculum or strategic decisions? "That's what's pretty exciting about this program too is so it's housing 2.0, but it's our program and we've invited people to invest through maybe it's financial literacy classes are providing our kids or just through financial giving piece. So there's not a whole lot of leeway for there to be a lot of our CEO Carrie Randolph will often say like adult foolishness. She calls it adult foolishness. Yeah. So there's not a whole lot of leeway for that to happen here. It's direct investment to our kids and we're trying to make sure that the focus stays on that. Kind of cool to see the the partners we have because it's a mix of all these public and private and they can discuss how they want to give. But yeah, there's just kind of two options there." It seems like it's in the true essence of collaboration with people who are actually on the front lines and know what the community needs versus just, you know, telling the community what they need. "Yeah. And we try to make sure we're still taking that community input. So, we have several different groups that we meet with that are speaking to different areas. So, we have like our certain middle school principles that we meet with and hear their thoughts. We have our parent group, you know, we have our our donor group that we hear thoughts. We're like, 'Hey, just so you know, this is for us to build off of what you're sharing and support in that way.'" Parents go in, take three minutes to just activate the students account. All they need is their birthday, home zip code, and student ID. So, we can get that started. After activating the account, we ask a parent if they can to open and connect the Tennessee Stars 529. So, the 529 is the state's career and college savings account, state of Tennessee, and that stays with the child no matter where they go. So, that's their personal way of giving. So, if a a family is like, we want to put in $5 a month, they can put in. And we partner with the Department of Treasury. So once they activate their account on our end, they're able to see their money from Chat Future Fund and Tennessee Stars in one place. So underneath that is the tips program. That's another part of the Tennessee Stars 529 where if there's a family who hits the eligible income, the state will match what they put in 4 to 1. Student puts in $4, the state matches 20 to 1500. From there, families put in $5, then we match it again 25. So they just from the bat just get $150 in their account just from opening it, connecting it to stars and then putting $5 in themselves.

As a person who does not have kids myself, I value education. Is there a way that I would be able to invest in the future fund? "Yeah. So we on our site have just a future fund giving. Oh, cool. Yeah. And that goes to the pot. And so this is also a good segue because we want to make sure we're being transparent and thoughtful of, you know, like so no one feels like it's a gotcha. So, one of our pieces for making sure families open up their Tennessee Stars, their personal account attached to them is that any money they put in there is theirs forever. Now, let's say a family moves to Arizona, the money in the Chattanooga Future Fund that businesses have been giving goes back to the pot to be redistributed among Hamilton County students because it's community giving for our Hamilton County students, but the money in their stars stays with them. We don't touch that. We're making sure to serve every student. And so if there's a family who can't sign up for the Tennessee Stars for whatever reason, we're working with Pinnacle Bank to offer an additional option for their personal career and college savings. So families like, I don't feel good about the Tennessee Stars, we can talk and open a Pinnacle account instead where they can use that. If they have any questions, reach out to us and want this to be a transparent process and families to feel good about where their money is going. Like we're an open book. We just want to support these kids and love our community."

So by shining a light on Chattanooga 2.0, Oh, we're able to see that not all PPPs are inherently harmful, but as citizens, we should be asking every single time who benefits and whether a partnership strengthens or erodes public control over essential services. The authors argue that we should not be letting the free market limit freedom. Corporations block progress if it hurts their profits. Public goods only stay public when we make sure they're protected from corruption, corporate takeover, and political sabotage. And yeah, that takes work.

Public decisions need to stay public. That means number one, no profit over people. Private prisons shouldn't make money by filling cells. Any public contract has to put the public good first. Two, big picture thinking. Every policy should ask, does this reduce inequality or does it worsen it? Are people of color in the decision-making process or just dealing with the fallout? When we completely ignore things like price gouging, we misplace blame because we're trying to find simplistic answers to complex issues. And number three, full transparency. If corporations receive public funding, they have to open their books. No more hiding behind trade secrets. If the public is paying for it, we get to see where the money goes. And I'm not talking about some random tweets or some made-up Excel docs or whatever the hell President Trilon is trying to convince us that they're doing. True transparency starts from start to finish.

Make the government visible again. Most people don't realize how much government does for them. And that's not an accident. The less we see or feel public services, the easier it is for politicians and corporations to say government is the problem. If we never notice the roads we drive on, or the clean air we breathe, or the research that fuels our technology, we assume that the government isn't doing anything. So we don't fight to protect it. Journalist Michael Tamoski says that liberals don't defend the government enough. And when the only voices that are talking about the government label it inefficient, the public starts believing it. In reality, public investment is everywhere. Rely on every single day. Research and tech. The government funded R&D that led to the internet and many other life-saving medications, clean water and air. Regulations keep pollution in check until corporations lobby to weaken them. The reality is the public invests in things that private corporations would not touch because they cannot eke a profit out of them. And so if we surface the state and show people exactly how public services improve their lives, then the narrative changes. It's not about big government versus small government. It's about are we prioritizing people or corporations. It's about who holds the power of people or corporations. When we demand high public standards, when we invest in infrastructure, when we keep essential services in public hands, we turn a vicious cycle of privatization and decline into a virtuous cycle of solidarity, investment, and shared prosperity. And honestly, that's like the bare minimum we should be fighting for.

Alrighty, friends. It's closing time. I've got one last call. If this video has spoken to you in any way, and you can only read one book this year, make it the privatization of everything. It's truly eye-opening. Honestly, it completely rewired how I think about citizenship and public goods. And I'd be so curious to know what your thoughts are if we all just kind of dived into these ideas together. Actually, I'm thinking of starting a book club around it. So, in 2 weeks, so from the day this video goes up, you have 2 weeks to grab this book, rent it, buy it, trade it, link with friends who own it, and start listening and reading it. And then we'll have a discussion. We'll have a live session or sessions. But I need your input of which format you would be most interested in. Would you rather finish the entire book and then do a single deep dive discussion or would you prefer weekly check-ins? We read two to three chapters at a time so that we can just tackle it more gradually. Let me know what your preference is in the comments. Majority rules and I'll post the updates and the schedule in the community section. But honestly, I can't wait to hear y'all's takes on privatization and your prediction of what's coming next based on everything we have discussed today. Hopefully, I was able to help you understand what privatization is and how it's hollowed out the core of the country and how it's taken our third spaces. It's shoved them behind pay walls. It's robbing future generations while sticking a price tag on the future ruins and what it actually looks like at the everyday local level. And so I guess like the next big question is where do we go from here? For too long we've been taught to think like consumers instead of citizens. So what happens, you know, when we stop selling out for convenience? We do the labor of creating the inconvenient communities and we come back to each other. What happens when we start thinking like citizens again? Friendly reminder that the culture war games are manufactured and the only war is the class war, baby. I will see y'all in the next one.