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privatization
To Ease 'Rapidly Expanding' Water Affordability Crisis, Report Calls for Ban on Privatization
"Rampant corporate control of our water systems and federal disinvestment in aging infrastructure are driving up bills, forcing households to pick up the tab."
Oct 06, 2026
A report published Tuesday by a leading environmental group shows that household drinking water bills in the United States have surged faster than inflation over the past decade, with privatized systems charging significantly more than public ones.
The new research, conducted by Food & Water Watch (FWW), shows that for-profit water corporations charged typical US households 67% more on average than publicly owned water systems, prompting the group to urge state and local governments to ban water privatization and roll back all pro-privatization bills.
“Rampant corporate control of our water systems and federal disinvestment in aging infrastructure are driving up bills, forcing households to pick up the tab," said Mary Grant, FWW's water policy director. "Policymakers must rein in corporate abuses, hold polluters accountable, and provide dedicated funding for water systems. Everyone should have access to safe and affordable water."
The report shows that, overall, household drinking water bills surged by an average of 62% for typical American households over the past decade—increasing twice as much as grocery prices and 19% faster than median household incomes on average.
"A water affordability crisis is rapidly expanding throughout America," said Grant. "While struggling to pay for other essentials like food and energy, many households are grappling with water costs that are rising even faster."
More than half of the 25 most expensive water systems in the US were located in California. The most expensive water bills in the country between 2015 and 2025 were issued by San Jose Water Company, a private utility.
"In the list of the top 10 most expensive water systems in the study, California and Pennsylvania stood out with numerous appearances," FWW said. "However, in Louisiana, Maryland, New Hampshire, and West Virginia, water bills grew about twice as fast as their corresponding statewide median household incomes. West Virginia, a state with one of the lowest average household incomes in the country, had the highest average water cost, at $1,383/year."
"Overall," the group added, "water bills were unaffordable for low-income households in nearly all (93%) of the surveyed water systems."
In addition to calling on state and local governments to ban water privatization and support local control of water systems, FWW urged the US Congress and federal government to:
- Hold polluters accountable for drinking water contamination and prevent new contamination from large corporations, including factory farms, fossil fuel corporations, hyperscale data centers, and the chemicals and plastics industries;
- Reject cuts to safe and clean water and restore federal funding to address the nation’s water affordability crisis; and
- Fully fund safe and clean water in every community. Legislation like the WATER Act would create a trust fund to provide federal support at the level necessary to comply with federal drinking water quality laws.
"Water bills will continue to increase faster than households can keep up with," FWW warned, "unless all levels of government take action to stop corporate abuses and support water affordability."
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Trump: An Instrument of the Age
He is the personification of a time when the evolution of capitalism institutionalizes class divisions, universally degrades morality, and threatens global extinction.
Sep 14, 2026
Donald Trump is an instrument of this age, a force propelling capitalism and the global economy into a critical stage of their historical development. Since the beginning of village life some 10,000 years ago, commerce among villages and rural economies intensified as cities emerged and over centuries forged trade networks across regions into a global system of commerce. At the same time, from the beginning of markets, traders, merchants, industries, and governments engaged in the struggle for control of local, regional, and inter-regional markets.
Today this struggle continues, but now with devastating consequences: the concentration of wealth on a global scale; the vast productive power and technological innovation; the multiplying flow of market-related information, and the explosive potential of artificial intelligence. Each of these factors is channeling private and public resources to elites, and spurring worldwide trade wars, technological dependency, and military confrontations that threaten humanity's survival.
No longer is it an intra-regional conflict between Greeks and Trojans over control of the grains produced in the basin of the Black Sea. Now it is a global conflict over control of international markets and supply chains, driven by the competition between transnational corporations and national governments over geopolitical objectives, a competition that is apocalyptically violent. And, at the head of the largest economic and military power is a pathological, impulsive, and phenomenally wealthy businessperson.
The emergence of Donald Trump is not wholly surprising in a global economy teetering on the edge of military annihilation and worldwide environmental collapse. He is the personification of a time when the evolution of capitalism institutionalizes class divisions, universally degrades morality, and threatens global extinction.
If citizens fail to contain the juggernaut of corporate-authoritarian forces unleashed in recent decades, our children will likely live in a wholly dystopian world.
Clearly, the global economy has reached a critical stage in the accumulation of wealth and its social impacts. Today transnational corporations have achieved historic levels of economic power and political influence throughout the world. But governments, with their enormous borrowing capacities and acquisition of capital through taxation, are a chief target for privatization of public wealth. They are the last bastion of enormous resources that concentrated private commercial interests need to overcome, to disarticulate the state in order to access the vast capital reserves that governments represent. Thus the virtually ineluctable privatization of government services from social programs to space exploration and military production proceeds unabated by social controls. Of course corporations and an elite class must retain tax revenues collected by governments while private corporations siphon off these resources through government contracts. As part of this privatization project, regulation of private entities and activities must be undermined. From the Department of Government Efficiency led by the world's richest individual to the edicts expunging from records the words and documents indicating that the direction of national priorities is misdirected and dangerous, the Trump administration is aggressively, relentlessly attacking any obstacle to privatization of public resources.
On one level none of this is new. The British East India Company in the 18th century controlled 80% of the trade from Asia to Europe and governed India with its private court system and army of 250,000. It used a portion of its wealth to buy parliamentarians responsible for its regulation. Today, however, the aggregate wealth and power of tech giants dwarfs that of the East India Company. According to Oxfam America, Elon Musk has more wealth than 46% (3.8 billion) of the world's population. He spent nearly $300 million to help Trump win the 2024 presidential election. Musk and other Big Tech companies—key tech, social media, and AI entities—spent $41.8 million in the second quarter of 2026 lobbying the government. Big Tech receives in excess of $45 billion in government contracts. The combined capitalization of the top five US tech companies is greater than the annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 193 countries, trailing only the economic output of the United States and China.
The impact of such outrageous distortions in the global economy is wide-ranging. The convergence of private business interests and money with public policy and governance breeds corruption. Trump reported $2 billion in income in the first year of his second term, tripling the income he reported in the previous year. Much of Trump's new wealth comes from cryptocurrency, a business field in which Trump's family is deeply invested, taking in $1.4 billion through its cryptocurrency ventures in just one year. At the same time, Trump is engaged in the wholesale deregulation of digital assets like cryptocurrency. He disbanded the Biden-era National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, directing the Justice Department to end its enforcement of regulatory violations and to close all ongoing investigations. He directed Attorney General Todd Blanche to refrain from charging violations of the Bank Secrecy Act and to end charging violations of the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and the Commodity Exchange Act.
According to the American Bar Association, the lack of corporate regulation subverts democracy: “These transactions—ranging from donor-driven federal appointments to dropped investigations, lucrative business deals, and foreign gifts—have enriched Trump and his allies while undermining long-standing ethical norms and public trust in democratic institutions.” Another instance of a proposed initiative that is blatantly unethical, anti-democratic, and politically corrupt is the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to reward Trump's political allies including the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2020.
The development of corporate capitalism has always been anti-democratic to one degree or another. Private boards of elite shareholders decide corporate policy and virtually all decisions are aimed at increasing profits. Corporate elite have historically fought against workers' organized power. The corruption and assumption of executive power at the center of the current American government reflect the intrusion of rank corporate values and ethos central to modern markets. Donald Trump runs the presidential office as a mafia organization with a pay-for-play ethos, the raw corruption expected when corporate elite are untethered from social supervision and management. As corporate policies and investments become existential threats, they cannot afford a citizenry awakened to the catastrophic direction of the American and global economy.
Desperate to continue profiting from a degraded natural and social environment, those with the most resources work to keep the truth about looming disasters from influencing public discourse. Trump is the harbinger of a totalitarian state that is the likely outcome of unregulated corporate investment and planning, one in which the flow of information must be managed. So, he attacks the media and censors reports and even words and phrases that are based in research and backed by skeins of evidence. To ensure authority over information flow, Trump values loyalty as the fundamental qualification of his appointees. Attorney General Todd Blanche exemplifies just how corrupted executive appointments throughout the administrative agencies and cabinet-level departments actually have become. As with other presidential nominees and appointments, Blanche was obviously selected for his fealty to Donald Trump. Just how much he identifies with supporting the president was revealed in a hearing for his confirmation in the Senate. While being questioned by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) about his relationship to Trump, Blanche stated, "I'm his lawyer—was his lawyer," before correcting himself, saying that he was now the deputy attorney general.
The ongoing general attack on American democracy stems directly from the presidential office and his friends in business. The impunity with which Trump aggrandizes himself through specious, if not illegal, projects is clearly a wide-ranging assault on citizens' rights to democratic decision-making theoretically safeguarded by the US Constitution. The decision to destroy the East Wing of the White House and construct a ballroom is one example. Numerous other projects dismissive of congressional approval also exist. To list just a few: planning an 'Arc of Trump'; adding his name to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with only the approval of his hand-picked board; negotiating no-bid contracts such as the one repainting the Reflecting Pool; receiving a luxuriously outfitted plane from a foreign government. These are examples of his many mundane acts of corruption. More far-reaching and pernicious anti-democratic actions also abound: expending American lives and resources in wars with Iran and supporting Israeli genocide in Gaza; instituting universally costly tariffs; restricting and censoring public reports on various issues affecting the health and livelihood of Americans everywhere; abducting—even killing—immigrants to achieve quotas of deportation without legal recourse; and on and on.
One of the most egregious assaults on democracy is the proposed proliferation of data centers. It reveals how insidious the march toward corporate elite dominance actually is. Polls indicate that 80% of Americans oppose the construction of data centers yet Trump supports Big Tech's drive to establish data centers across the country. Data centers are environmental and human health disasters. Not only do they tax the electrical grid and use unsustainable amounts of water, through massive data collection and deep analysis they also have the very real potential to construct a totalitarian state through government contracts in which algorithms of artificial intelligence are applied in projects ranging from facial recognition to autonomous military and police personnel. Without democratic control of industry and governance, the power of Big Tech to control our lives into the future presents a rapidly escalating existential threat.
At this stage in the historical evolution of capitalism it is the people who must resist being alienated from their own governance, from the power to construct a sustainable economy and to restore their responsibility to each other and the environment. If citizens fail to contain the juggernaut of corporate-authoritarian forces unleashed in recent decades, our children will likely live in a wholly dystopian world. But it doesn't have to be that way. Organized and sustained political protests, progressive reform movements, and mass mobilizations have saved the nation and other nations from the worst excesses and transgressions of powerful elites and their destructive capitalist practices and designs.
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Trump's TSA Sued Over 'Insane Proposal' to Privatize Airport Screening
"They’re selling the safety of the traveling public for corporate greed," said one critic.
Aug 06, 2026
The nation's largest public employees union filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Trump administration accusing it of trying to conceal a scheme aimed at privatizing the federally controlled airport screening process.
In its complaint, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) asked a federal court to force the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to comply with its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for TSA Gold+, which the union described as a "secretive push to expand the privatization of airport security screening functions."
The union originally filed its FOIA request in May, but has since received none of the records requested, although the TSA last month did acknowledge the program's existence and said that there are plans to launch it at three airports next year.
AFGE's complaint alleges that the program "would jeopardize the employment conditions of tens of thousands of TSA employees and the safety of the traveling public," while noting that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last year tried to "eliminate the collective bargaining rights of approximately 47,000 employees" before being enjoined by a court order.
AFGE also pointed to a proposal contained in the Heritage Foundation's notorious Project 2025 blueprint to "privatize the screening function" at US airports.
The union said it was demanding more information from the TSA because "of its interest in the TSA GoldPlus program, the lack of public information about the program, and the potential threat to its membership."
Everett Kelley, national president of AFGE, said that the administration appeared to be headed back toward the kind of system used before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in which airports relied on private contractors with less stringent standards for screening passengers.
"TSA has been keeping everyone in the dark about its privatization plans–TSA employees, members of Congress, airport authorities, and the flying public,” said Kelley. "Changes of this magnitude must not be made in the dark."
Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, said in an interview with The American Prospect published Monday that "nobody should be surprised" by the administration's efforts given how they were foreshadowed by Project 2025.
"This is about dismantling government everywhere, dismantling worker rights everywhere," said Nelson, who described the privatization initiative as "an insane proposal" by the Trump administration.
Chris Finlay, a TSA worker in Tampa and president of AFGE local 556, told The Guardian in an interview published Wednesday that having for-profit firms in charge of security would inevitably lead to a decay in safety standards.
"As a business, their primary goal is to be profitable," said Finlay, "and staffing is the most expensive part of that contract, so if they can reduce how much they have to pay staff, they’re going to... They’re selling the safety of the traveling public for corporate greed. That’s what is happening."
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Whose Green Transition Is It Anyway?
Development banks must stop promoting false solutions that are implemented without community consultation, cause environmental damage, and lead to the further grabbing of local lands and resources.
Jun 20, 2026
Two years ago, the International Accountability Project, or IAP, first launched the Energy Finance Tracker, or EFT, and Energy Finance Tracker Report, as the accompanying analysis of energy investment trends between 2022 and 2023. The goal of EFT was to provide a tool for movements and communities to follow the money, hold 16 major development banks accountable for their role in the global energy transition, and push them to support priorities for a just energy transition. However, that direction looks less certain. As we dug deeper into the data from January 2024 to December 2025, we noticed that development banks still favor privatization and promote greenwashing and false solutions.
In just four years, EFT tracked 2,119 projects related to energy financing. We noticed a staggering increase in development bank funding toward energy projects, with total investment increasing from US$ 139.8 billion (as of December 2023) to US$ 304.3 billion (as of December 2025). However, we argue that this increase does not represent a victory for the climate and communities. Instead, we find that this capital is flowing into an increasingly privatized landscape. The share of public sector funding has slipped to just 30.1% (US$ 91.5 billion as of December 2025), as development banks increasingly prioritize private sector interests that now command nearly 69% (US$ 209.5 billion as of December 2025) of the total portfolio.
The EFT also tracked a surge in high-risk (Category A) projects, which jumped from 9.9% (92 projects as of December 2023) to 14% (297 projects as of December 2025) of total investments by development banks. We argue that this shows a dangerous trend where development banks accelerate large-scale energy infrastructures by sidelining environmental and social safeguards. Such a rush replicates extractive colonial models that promote greenwashing and false solutions, which bring harsher impacts on local communities’ livelihoods, lands, and resources.
A prime example is found in Brazil’s Alto Jequitinhonha region, where International Finance Corporation (IFC) has provided a US$ 155.64 million loan, complemented by up to US$ 117,2 million (€100 million) from other lenders, to expand Aperam BioEnergia’s large-scale eucalyptus plantations and charcoal production for the steel industry. While marketed as a “sustainable” project eligible for carbon credits, the operation of Aperam BioEnergia has been criticized as a “greenwashing” that functions more like an ecological desert than a forest. The expansion of this project impacts more than 30 local communities, including four Quilombola groups. These groups reported that the eucalyptus plantations strain and pollute their water sources, and further damage their health and traditional livelihoods. Beyond these human impacts, the project also causes significant biodiversity loss. Researchers have found that non-native eucalyptus monocultures are known to harm the local ecosystems they replace.
We believe that a just transition requires a shift to supporting decentralized, community-led renewable energy through direct grants rather than debt-intensive loans.
The preference for greenwashing and false solutions also still pertains elsewhere. Despite the severe harm and rising tensions reported by local communities, IDB Invest has proposed a US$ 150 million loan to AES Colombia and the oil company Ecopetrol SA for large-scale wind farm projects in the Upper and Middle Guajira region of Colombia. While framed as Colombia's just energy transition initiative, the project actively threatens the traditional livelihoods of the Indigenous Wayúu people and has proceeded without their Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC). IDB Invest is moving forward with this funding even though this negligence has caused dangerous levels of conflict. The Indigenous Wayúu people, who maintain deep spiritual and customary law over their lands, have made it clear how far they will go to protect their home. One community leader stated, “The Wayuu defend their territory with blood and death, if necessary.”
The threats to the region extend beyond wind farms, as La Guajira is also being designated as a hydrogen production hub to supply Europe with “green” fuel through the European Union’s Global Gateway program. This initiative has been criticized as neocolonial because it prioritizes European energy needs over local rights in a region that already suffers from some of the lowest energy access rates in Colombia. A community leader from the Indigenous Wayúu people, Eliel de Jesus Castillo, denounced the injustice by saying, “While large electricity projects are being installed in our territories, we have no energy in our homes.”
The words of Indigenous Wayúu leader Eliel de Jesus Castillo are a stark reminder for development banks, corporations, and governments that the current energy transition often perpetuates deep injustices against the very communities whose resources are being extracted. Instead of replicating extractive models, development banks must stop promoting false solutions that are implemented without community consultation, cause environmental damage, and lead to the further grabbing of local lands and resources.
We believe that a just transition requires a shift to supporting decentralized, community-led renewable energy through direct grants rather than debt-intensive loans. A successful example of this approach is found in Nepal, where a local initiative supported by the Community Empowerment and Social Justice Network (CEMSOJ) developed a community-based renewable energy project for the Indigenous Tamang and Chepang communities. Additionally, it is also evident in Malaysia.
We further believe that a just transition can finally serve the people it claims to help by prioritizing the voices of those promoting climate justice and being community led. If the system continues to favor corporate profit over human rights and the environment, we are forced to ask: Whose transition is it anyway? Because at the end of the day, the word “just” before transition means changes must ensure that the “whole of society is brought along in the pivot to a net-zero future,” rather than shifting power into the hands of a few.
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Miles and Miles of Protest in Bolivia as Miners and Unions March Against Privatization and Low Wages
Peasants' unions and other groups are protesting a law that they say would allow corporate control of small farmers' land, as well as fuel shortages and a low minimum wage.
May 14, 2026
An economic crisis and the repeal of a crucial gas subsidy, fuel shortages, and a law that opponents say will allow the encroachment of corporate interests on Indigenous and peasant lands are among the central concerns of thousands of miners and other workers who have joined a march from Bolivia's northern Amazon territories to La Paz, with a major miners union in the capital joining the protest on Wednesday.
The Federation of Mining Cooperatives of La Paz and an influential peasant union met land workers and Indigenous representatives this week as they arrived in the capital after having marched 1,100 kilometers (683 miles) "for over 20 days from the tropics into freezing high-altitude terrain, many wearing nothing more substantial on their feet than plastic sandals," as Olivia Arigho-Stiles reported at Jacobin.
At least 50 marchers required medical treatment last week for exhaustion, dehydration, and other ailments, but the unions are showing no sign of ending the general strike that was begun by Bolivian Workers’ Central (COB), with the mass mobilization also including at least 70 road blockades around the country, according to the Bolivia Highway Association.
TeleSUR reported that the entry of the miners union signified "a substantial increase in pressure" on right-wing President Rodrigo Paz, whose resignation some workers' organizations are calling for.
The Federation of Mining Cooperatives joined the ongoing marches and protests after Paz failed to attend a scheduled dialogue. Miners have been alarmed by the scarcity of fuel, "a dire shortage of essential explosive material, and significant delays in the liberation of new areas designated for mining exploitation," reported TeleSUR.
The broader protests began in response to stagnant, low wages as well as Law 1720, which the government has claimed will benefit small-scale farmers by allowing them to obtain mortgages after converting their smallholdings into "medium-size" businesses.
But Roger Adan Chambi, an Aymara lawyer and specialist in Indigenous land law, told Jacobin that the measure was passed "without consulting the sectors it was supposed to benefit (peasants and small producers), jeopardizing legal security and constitutional guarantees regarding land ownership."
“Far from being an opportunity for small producers to access credit, this law weakens the property rights of peasants and Indigenous communities, especially those resisting on the agricultural frontier,” Chambi said. “Structural insecurity and the lack of basic services will, in the future, force them to mortgage or sell their plots, facilitating dispossession and the transfer of land to corporations.”
Oscar Cardoza, a peasant union leader and a representative of the marchers, declared at a public gathering in La Paz this week: “Our life is collective, not individual. The land must be respected; it’s not for sale.”
Al Jazeera reported that the end of a fuel subsidy, which was cut after Paz took office last year during what he called an "economic, financial, energy, and social emergency," also pushed COB to issue the call for a general strike.
The subsidy had been crucial for working Bolivians, and the cut has made quality fuel increasingly inaccessible.
"Starting today, a general, indefinite, and active strike is declared, until the government understands the people’s demands,” COB secretary-general Mario Argollo told a group of 1,000 supporters on May 1.
The union is also calling for a 20% increase to the nation’s minimum wage, which currently sits at 3,300 bolivianos ($477.71) per month.
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Ted Cruz Admits Trump Accounts Are Designed to Privatize Social Security Over Time
One advocate said the Texas Republican laid bare the "two-pronged strategy to push Social Security privatization: Creating the Trump accounts with one hand and gutting the Social Security Administration with the other."
May 08, 2026
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said during a public conference this week that the so-called Trump Accounts established under the GOP's 2025 budget law represent a viable path toward Social Security privatization—something the Texas lawmaker described as a "dirty little secret."
During a panel discussion at the Milken Institute Global Conference in California, Cruz said that "conservatives in America, for 50 years... have been trying to do Social Security personal accounts." Cruz, who lamented the failure of Bush-era efforts to privatize Social Security, described such personal accounts as vehicles into which the payroll taxes that finance current Social Security benefits could be diverted.
In the not-too-distant future, Cruz envisioned, "we're going to be able to go to parents and say, 'Hey, you know that Trump Account your kid has? ... Wouldn't you like to be able to keep a portion of your tax payments that you're paying already and, instead of sending it to Uncle Sam, wouldn't you like to have a Trump Account just like your kid does?'''
"My prediction is, within five years, that is going to have a really compelling constituency," the Texas Republican added.
🚨🚨🚨
Ted Cruz says the quiet part out loud…
Trump Accounts are a scheme to privatize Social Security.
HANDS OFF OUR EARNED BENEFITS! pic.twitter.com/Oo3owRF7bM
— Social Security Works ❌👑 (@SSWorks) May 8, 2026
Linda Benesch, vice president of communications at the progressive advocacy group Social Security Works, told Common Dreams that Cruz's comments laid bare the "two-pronged strategy to push Social Security privatization: Creating the Trump Accounts with one hand and gutting the Social Security Administration with the other."
Benesch pointed to the remarks of an anonymous Social Security Administration (SSA) worker, who warned in comments to The New Yorker earlier this week that privatization advocates plan to point to the decimated agency and declare, "Look how Social Security sucks."
"They’ve been trying to privatize it for decades," said the SSA worker. "Now this will give them the excuse.”
Benesch said Friday that Cruz is "giving away the other half" of the Republican scheme by promoting the eventual expansion of Trump Accounts, investment vehicles under which children born between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2028 are eligible for $1,000 in "seed money" from the federal government. Parents of eligible children can contribute up to $5,000 per year to the accounts.
Cruz's comments are not the first time a Republican official has openly characterized Trump Accounts as a potential avenue for Social Security privatization.
"In a way, it is a backdoor for privatizing Social Security," US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last summer. "Social Security is a defined benefit plan paid out that—to the extent that if all of a sudden these accounts grow, and you have in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for your retirement—then that's a game changer, too."
It’s been twenty years since Bush tried to do Social Security private accounts and they still haven’t realized workers’ Social Security taxes pay for *current retiree* benefits and not future benefits so you can’t do this without cutting current retiree benefits. https://t.co/eq9OnuhXVr pic.twitter.com/vguJN6pfuO
— Brendan Duke (@Brendan_Duke) May 8, 2026
Axios reported Friday that "the idea that Trump Accounts could replace or augment Social Security is something that has been talked about behind closed doors with lawmakers."
"But no one has wanted to touch that third rail, at least publicly," the outlet added, citing a person familiar with the private conversations.
Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, noted in a Friday statement that polling has found little support for privatizing Social Security, with a 2022 survey finding that just 15% of American voters back the idea.
"Turning over Americans’ hard-earned benefits to Wall Street would expose future retirees to unnecessary risk while lining the pockets of the financial elites who donate to Republicans," said Richtman. "Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and their Republican allies should realize that the people will not stand for privatization of their hard-earned benefits, and we in the advocacy community will continue to ensure that it never happens."
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If We Want a Different Future, We Have to (Literally) Build It
We have a power imbalance in this country and a big part of that is that we no longer believe that we can demand a better life and it's a serious problem that we have too little skill in organizing ourselves and constructing the future we deserve.
May 02, 2026
When you grow up in this country one thing that’s wired into you early is that the government can’t do anything right. The free market is the only way things get done. Public is a dirty word. By the time you’re an adult, it sits in your head like it’s always been there. You don’t question it any more than you question gravity.
The problem is that it puts so many solutions out of reach and out of our imagination.
If we look around at the things that make our society work and our lives better, we can see we’ve been duped from the start. This didn’t all come from some pure, untouched version of the free market. Our roads, our bridges, libraries, fire departments, the internet, Social Security. All of these things happened because we came together as people and decided we wanted them.
These weren’t accidents. They weren’t side effects of private competition. They came out of a period when ordinary people had power. Real power. Power to demand that the systems they paid for actually delivered. The government was the instrument of that power. Not a side player. Not a check writer. Not a referee. A doer. A builder of things, on behalf of the people who built it.
In 1981, more than 40% of the hospitals in this country were owned by federal, state, or local government. Cities and counties ran their own hospitals.
That’s the idea we don’t name anymore. The idea that the public has the right to organize, to own, and to demand. That’s the competing idea. And without it, the system has no counterweight.
That tension mattered. It forced decisions. It forced investment. It forced the country to build.
Now that pressure is gone. Not completely, but enough that it doesn’t function anymore. There’s no real counterweight shaping outcomes. And what you’re left with is a system that just expands in the direction of profit. Profit over efficiency. Profit over outcomes. Profit over people.
You can see it most clearly in healthcare. We spend nearly six trillion dollars a year on it. Six trillion. And we are not the healthiest country on earth. We are not even close. We are paying the most and getting the least. That’s not an efficiency problem. That’s a power problem.
We’ve run this experiment for decades now. Consolidation, extraction, pricing that has no relationship to reality. It’s not competitive in any meaningful sense. It’s a closed loop. The product isn’t working. People feel it every day. They don’t need a study to tell them.
And here’s the thing nobody remembers. We used to own a lot of this. In 1981, more than 40% of the hospitals in this country were owned by federal, state, or local government. Cities and counties ran their own hospitals. States ran academic medical centers. The federal government ran the VA, military hospitals, the Indian Health Service. We the people owned the means of caring for ourselves.
That’s what made the whole system function. Not the charity of it. The leverage of it. We knew what it cost to set a bone. We knew what it cost to do a bypass. We knew what it cost to deliver a baby. Because we ran the hospitals where it happened. We paid the salaries. We bought the supplies. The numbers were public and the numbers were real.
You can’t lie to someone about the price of something they already produce. Public ownership wasn’t an alternative to the market. It was the thing that kept the market honest. It was the public’s seat at the table. It was the public’s power over the price. Strip it out and the private side stops competing and starts extracting. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s what happened. We sold the seat. We lost the power. The bills came due.
There was a time when we knew certain things were too important to leave entirely to the market. We didn’t let private companies own nuclear weapons.
Today that public share is closer to 15%. Most of the rest has been sold off, shut down, or absorbed into chains. What’s left is doing the hardest work the private system refuses to do. Public hospitals still handle most of the trauma care and most of the burn care in this country’s cities. They are the safety net. They are also the proof that we know how to do this. We just decided to stop.
Same thing starting to happen with AI. Something as transformative as the Industrial Revolution, arguably bigger, is being built and controlled by a handful of private actors. Massive margins. Massive control. No real public stake. No real competition in the way we used to understand it. No seat at the table for the rest of us.
There was a time when we knew certain things were too important to leave entirely to the market. We didn’t let private companies own nuclear weapons. We didn’t let them build private armies with that kind of power. We understood the scale of the risk. The consequence of getting it wrong.
AI sits in that category. Healthcare sits in that category. These are not normal sectors. They shape everything else. And the question of who owns them is the question of who has power in the country that comes next.
It’s not about fairness. Fuck fairness. This is about power. About whether ordinary people have any leverage left in a system that has spent forty years stripping it from them. About whether the country we live in is something we shape or something that happens to us.
Here are the numbers. The top 20% of earners in this country now account for nearly 60% of all consumer spending. Consumer spending is about two-thirds of GDP. So a small slice of households is propping up the entire economy. And the jobs most exposed to AI displacement, finance, law, software, analysis, corporate work, are concentrated in exactly that slice.
The same people whose spending holds the economy up are the ones whose work is about to be automated.
That’s not a labor problem. That’s a structural problem. You can’t retrain your way out of it. You can’t UBI your way out of it at the scale required. The CEOs warning you about 20-30% unemployment are running companies with 40% margins. They’re not wrong about the disruption. They’re wrong about it being something the private sector can absorb.
The market is facing a situation it cannot handle.
The market is the thing that brought us here.
Here’s the part people don’t say out loud. A future of plenty is possible. Not in some abstract, theoretical way. In a very real, material sense.
Health. Wellness. Safety. Time. Travel. Freedom. Education. Meaning. Food. Clothing. Shelter. All high quality and abundant. Enough for everyone.
Most people want that. You can feel it when you talk to them. But they don’t say it plainly because it sounds naive. It sounds like something you’re supposed to grow out of. Like if you take it seriously, you won’t be taken seriously.
Here’s the part people don’t say out loud. A future of plenty is possible. Not in some abstract, theoretical way. In a very real, material sense.
It reminds me a little of The Matrix. The idea that a version of the world that actually worked for people would be rejected because it didn’t match what they believed was real or possible. So instead, we settle into something worse and call it reality.
I grew up in East Tennessee, in the Bible Belt. And one of the things that always stuck with me was how religion was used. Not as a mission to improve people’s lives through effort and sacrifice, but as a way to sort people. To rank them. To separate. To justify who had what and why.
That same instinct shows up here. The idea that wanting a system that delivers for everyone is childish. That building something better is unrealistic. That you’re supposed to accept what exists and work within it, even if it’s clearly failing.
Here’s what gets forgotten. This country has done it before. Not once. Many times.
The New York City subway was built and is owned by the public. The interstate highway system is public. The Hoover Dam, the TVA, every river dam that powers the South and the West, public. The arsenal that won the Second World War was organized and largely paid for by the federal government. Rural electrification was a public project because no private company would run wire to a farmhouse for a price the farmer could pay. The internet started as a public research program. Public universities trained the engineers and doctors and scientists who built the modern American economy. Medicare is a public health insurance program that works better and costs less than what the private market offers people under 65.
Every one of those is a story about power. The public looked at a sector that mattered too much to leave to private capital, and the public took it. Owned it. Ran it. Set the terms. Made it deliver.
This is not foreign. This is not theoretical. This is the history of our country.
What comes next has to be built in public, owned in public, and run in public. The market had its turn at healthcare. The market is having its turn at AI. We’ve seen how this ends.
If we want a different future, we have to build it.
That’s not a metaphor.
We need hospitals, clinics, wellness centers. That means training tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, mental health professionals, dentists, physical trainers. Not hoping the market decides to produce them. Deciding to produce them. Owning them. Running them. Setting the price by knowing the cost.
What comes next has to be built in public, owned in public, and run in public. The market had its turn at healthcare. The market is having its turn at AI. We’ve seen how this ends.
We need millions of homes. New cities. New towns. That means builders, electricians, plumbers, framers, engineers. It means supply chains based in America that can deliver materials at scale. It means breaking the leverage that landlords and developers have spent decades accumulating.
We need to transition energy. Renewable generation. Storage. Transmission. A modern grid that can handle it. High-speed rail. A competitive EV industry that isn’t just a handful of companies protected by scale and capital. Independence from utilities that have spent a century turning a public good into a private toll booth.
Every one of these is a sector where the public used to have power and gave it up. Every one is a sector where the public can take that power back, if it decides to.
There is more to build in this country than we currently have people trained to build it. The bottleneck is not technology. It is not money. It is the decision to organize the effort. Those decisions will never be made by the market.
Solutions are going to take public action and competition. A new way of thinking.
Real work. Coordination. Training. Time. Effort. Change.
It’s a shame but nobody is coming to do this for us.
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Under Pressure From Trump, Venezuela's Leader Signs Bill Opening Oil Industry to Privatization
"Trump is deploying drone and gunboat diplomacy to coerce Venezuela into serving up its oil resources to Big Oil," said one US watchdog group.
Jan 29, 2026
Venezuelan scholars and a US watchdog group were among those expressing concern on Thursday after Venezuela's government caved to pressure from President Donald Trump and signed a bill opening up the South American country's nationalized oil industry to privatization.
After US forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores—who have both pleaded not guilty to federal narco-terrorism charges—the Trump administration installed the deposed leader's former deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, as acting president.
On Thursday, Venezuela's National Assembly—which is led by the acting president's brother, Jorge Rodríguez—approved and Delcy Rodríguez signed legislation that "promises to give private companies control over the production and sale of oil and allow for independent arbitration of disputes," according to the Associated Press.
As AP reported:
Rodríguez's government expects the changes to serve as assurances for major US oil companies that have so far hesitated about returning to the volatile country. Some of those companies lost investments when the ruling party enacted the existing law two decades ago to favor Venezuela's state-run oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA.
The revised law would modify extraction taxes, setting a royalty cap rate of 30% and allowing the executive branch to set percentages for every project based on capital investment needs, competitiveness, and other factors.
It also removes the mandate for disputes to be settled only in Venezuelan courts, which are controlled by the ruling party. Foreign investors have long viewed the involvement of independent courts as crucial to guard against future expropriation.
Malfred Gerig, a sociologist from Central University of Venezuela, said on social media that the Rodríguez siblings' United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) "has just approved the most anti-nationalist and damaging oil law since, at least, 1943. The absolute surrender of the state as an oil producer and a sudden conversion of the property rights of the Venezuelan nation into private rights of foreign companies."
Victor Lovera, an economics professor at Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas, said that "it must be really fucking tough for the Rodríguez siblings to end up as the empire's lapdogs and open up the oil sector, taking us back to the 1970s, before the nationalization of oil. All just to cling to power for a few more months."
Trump—who returned to office a year ago with help from Big Oil's campaign cash—has made clear that his aggressive policy toward Venezuela is focused on the country's petroleum reserves, which critics have blasted as a clear effort to further enrich his donors and himself.
"Trump is deploying drone and gunboat diplomacy to coerce Venezuela into serving up its oil resources to Big Oil," said Robert Weissman, co-president of the US watchdog group Public Citizen, in a Thursday statement.
"Imperfectly, Venezuela has for most of the last century sought to manage its oil and gas reserves to advance its national interest, rather than that of outside investors," he noted. "Brutal sanctions and the threat of still more military action from the Trump regime are now forcing Venezuela to turn from that history and make its oil available to Big Oil at discount rates and to agree that investor disputes should be resolved at corporate-friendly international tribunals."
"This is imperial policy to benefit Big Oil, not Americans—and certainly not Venezuelans," Weissman stressed. "Even still, US oil companies are likely to be reluctant to invest heavily in Venezuela without US government guarantees—a likely next step in Trump’s oil imperialism, unless Congress moves proactively to block it."
Both chambers of the US Congress are narrowly controlled by Trump's Republican Party, and they have so far failed to pass war powers resolutions aimed at stopping more military action in Venezuela and the administration's bombings of boats allegedly smuggling drugs in international waters—all of which some American lawmakers and other experts have argued are illegal.
When Trump's secretary of state and acting national security adviser, Marco Rubio, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—on which he previously served—on Wednesday, he insisted that the president wasn’t planning for any more military action in Venezuela, but would take it, potentially without congressional authorization, in "self-defense."
Rubio also laid out how the United States intends to continue controlling Venezuelan oil and related profits, telling senators that Venezuela's government will submit periodic budgets, and as long as they comply with preset restrictions, the Trump administration will release funds from a US Treasury blocked account.
After the legislation passed Thursday, the Trump administration began easing sanctions on Venezuela's oil industry, with the Treasury issuing a general license authorizing certain activities involving Venezuelan-origin oil.
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Sanders Blasts Trump and His Billionaire Allies for Pushing ‘Two-Tier Education System’ That Harms Students
"Vouchers are being used to benefit private schools that reject students because they have a disability or because of their religion and benefit some of the wealthiest families in America."
Jan 28, 2026
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday released a report blasting what he described as President Donald Trump and his billionaire allies' plan to create "a two-tier education system in America."
The new report from Sanders (I-Vt.) focuses on the nationwide private school voucher program included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by Republicans last year. The report estimates the program could cost taxpayers up to $51 billion per year.
To put this total spending on vouchers into perspective, the report notes that it "is more than current federal spending on Title I-A to support students from low-income backgrounds ($18.4 billion) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) state grant program ($14.6 billion) to provide services to students with disabilities, combined."
In addition to potentially being a costly boondoggle, the report argues that the voucher program as it currently exists is likely to further widen inequality in the US.
"Without federal requirements or oversight, private schools can pick and choose which students to serve and turn away the highest need students to already under-resourced public schools, fueling a two-tiered education system," the report warns.
One major issue identified by the report is the high cost of tuition at many private schools that cannot be paid by many low-income families even with the assistance of vouchers. Unless this changes, the report finds "the vouchers could effectively function as a subsidy to the rich who can already afford to pay for private education."
Another reason the program is likely to widen inequality, the report says, is because of private schools' treatment of students with disabilities.
"Private schools systemically deny admission to students with disabilities outright, limit how many students with disabilities they serve, only serve children with certain types of disabilities, or charge extra tuition," notes the report. "Nearly half of analyzed private schools (48%) explicitly state that they choose not to provide some or all students with disabilities with the services, protections, and rights provided to those students in public schools under federal law."
Finally, the report raises questions about the quality of education students participating in the program will receive since "private schools often lack basic credentialing, accountability and transparency requirements related to ensuring students receive a quality education."
Commenting on the report, Sanders described the voucher program as yet another way that the wealthiest Americans are enriching themselves at US taxpayer expense.
"President Trump and his billionaire campaign contributors have been working overtime to create a two-tier education system in America," Sanders said, "private schools for the wealthy and well-connected and severely underfunded public schools for low-income and working-class students. That is unacceptable."
Sanders emphasized that "vouchers are being used to benefit private schools that reject students because they have a disability or because of their religion and benefit some of the wealthiest families in America," adding that the Trump program "will only make a bad situation even worse."
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Medicare Advantage, Privatized Medicaid Could Cost Americans $2 Trillion Extra Over Next Decade
"If the administration were serious about curbing waste and inefficiency, it would start by reducing the diversion of public funds to these corporate intermediaries," argues a new paper.
Nov 07, 2025
US President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress took a sledgehammer to Medicaid over the summer, justifying the unprecedented cuts by falsely claiming the program that provides health coverage to tens of millions of low-income Americans is overrun with waste and abuse.
But a new paper published Friday in the journal Health Affairs argues that if the administration actually wanted to target waste, fraud, and abuse, it would have been much better off taking aim at Medicare Advantage (MA) and Medicaid privatization.
The paper's authors estimate that overpayments to MA plans—which are funded by the government and run by for-profit insurers—and private Medicaid managed care will likely cost US taxpayers a total of $1.92 trillion over the next 10 years.
"Ending that waste would inflict losses on private insurers' shareholders and executives (the CEO of the largest MA firm made $26.3 million last year). But patients, not just government coffers, might gain," wrote Adam Gaffney, Danny McCormick, Steffie Woolhandler, and David Himmelstein.
"Even Congress' trillion-dollar cuts to Medicaid and food assistance amount to little more than half of the potential savings from de-privatizing Medicaid and Medicare," they added. "Reclaiming those funds would require reversing the decades-long trend of outsourcing to profit-seeking intermediaries and restoring Medicare and Medicaid as efficiently administered public programs."
Far from aggressively taking on Medicare Advantage fraud, the Trump administration handed MA plans a major gift earlier this year by approving an average federal payment increase of roughly 5.1%—more than double the 2.2% increase proposed by the Biden administration in January.
The authors of the new paper noted that the huge raise for MA plans, which are notorious for denying necessary care in pursuit of ever-larger profits, will add $25 billion in waste to the US healthcare system next year alone.
"If the administration were serious about curbing waste and inefficiency," they wrote, "it would start by reducing the diversion of public funds to these corporate intermediaries."
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