https://vimeo.com/430866178 All around the world cities are taking back ownership of privatized utilities, as public ownership proves to be more effective than private. It's also time for public control of finance. Thomas Hanna joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast. Transcript Paul Jay Welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. I'm Paul Jay. In the new book, The Future Is Public: Towards democratic Ownership of Public Services. The editors write in the introduction, the COVID-19 crisis clearly demonstrates the disastrous effects of years of austerity, Social Security cuts, and public service privatization. The most glaring effect is on health care systems. In developed countries, these have undergone optimization and new public management reforms, as well as public staff hiring and investment freezes, often pushed through post-2008 crisis fiscal consolidation measures. As consequences, both public and privatized healthcare services are now primarily run to minimize cost and generate profits. In developing countries, donor conditionalities have imposed sharp reductions in public spending, going as far as targeting public health workers’ wages. The net result unveiled by the COVID-19 pandemic is the inability of health care systems run this way to deal with a health crisis where the severe shortages of medical equipment and staff have visibly translated into many more dead, especially among the most vulnerable and among health personnel. The privatization of public services now stands more discredited than ever before. The book describes how in cities across the world, including the United States, there's a movement to re-municipalize services of all types, including water, energy and more. Now joining us is one of the contributors to the book, Thomas Hannah. He's the research director of the Democracy Collaborative and co-director of the organization's Theory, Policy and Research Division. Thanks for joining us, Thomas. Thomas Hanna Thanks for having me. Paul Jay First of all, give us a picture of why there are hundreds of cases, apparently, where cities have taken back control of various public services. And how is it worked out? Thomas Hanna Yes, so in that book, which is the culmination of years of research, the Transnational Institute, which is based in Amsterdam, documented, I think, around two thousand four hundred municipalizations and re municipalizations across 60 or so countries between years 2000 and now 2020. And that's really, I think, the tip of the iceberg, given that they could not survey all of the countries in the world. It's only a small snapshot of the countries. And I think what this shows us is that there is a definite movement and definite energy to sort of reverse the era of privatization, the era of neoliberalism. All across the world and communities all across the world, people are reacting against the deficiencies of privatization and austerity and neoliberalism and trying to take back control of different parts of their economy in different parts of their economic and different economic sectors. And the United States is no different, you know. The United States is often considered to be the sort of beating heart of free-market capitalism, but you actually have quite a large and robust sector of public ownership and municipal ownership, especially at the local government level. And so while we didn't go full on for privatization, as did many parts of the rest of the world, we are actually still experiencing this as pushback against privatization and austerity. Some interesting examples are in the water sector in re...
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