Books about Privatization from Amazon.com

While draught and desertification are intensifying around the world, corporations are aggressively converting free-flowing water into bottled profits. The water wars of the twenty-first century may match-or even surpass-the oil wars of the twentieth. In Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit, Vandana Shiva, "the world's most prominent radical scientist" (the Guardian), shines a light on activists who are fighting corporate maneuvers to convert this life-sustaining resource into more gold for the elites.

In Water Wars, Shiva uses her remarkable knowledge of science and society tooutline the emergence of corporate culture and the historical erosion of communal water rights. Using the international water trade and industrial activities such as damming, mining, and aquafarming as her lens, Shiva exposes the destruction of the earth and the disenfranchisement of the world's poor as they are stripped of rights to a precious common good.

In her passionate, feminist style, Shiva celebrates the spiritual and traditional role water has played in communities throughout history, and warns that water privatization threatens cultures and livelihoods worldwide. Shiva calls for a movement to preserve water access for all, and offers a blueprint for global resistance based on examples of successful campaigns.

Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and recipient of the 1993 Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award). She is author of several books, including Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (South End Press, 2000); Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (South End Press, 1997); and Staying Alive (St. Martin's Press, 1989). Shiva is a leader, along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin, in the International Forum on Globalization. Before becoming an activist, Shiva was one of India's leading physicists.

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The astonishing range of industries, corporations, and individuals profiting from the imprisonment of over 2.3 million Americans.

"Positive: With the baby boomlet demographics, we foresee increasing demand for juvenile [incarceration] services. Negative:...it is often difficult to maintain the occupancy rates required for profitability."—from a report produced for the private prison industry by investment analysts First Analysis Securities Corporation

Locking up 2.3 million people isn't cheap. Each year federal, state, and local governments spend over $185 billion annually in tax dollars to ensure that one out of every 137 Americans is imprisoned. Prison Profiteers looks at the private prison companies, investment banks, churches, guard unions, medical corporations, and other industries and individuals that benefit from this country's experiment with mass imprisonment. It lets us follow the money from public to private hands and exposes how monies formerly designated for the public good are diverted to prisons and their maintenance. Find out where your tax dollars are going as you help to bankroll the biggest prison machine the world has ever seen.

Contributors include: Judy Greene on private prison giants Geo (formerly Wackenhut) and CCA; Anne-Marie Cusac on who sells electronic weapons to prison guards; David Lapido on how private corporations profit from prison labor; Wil S. Hylton on the largest prison health care provider; Ian Urbina on how prison labor supports the military; Kirsten Levingston on the privatization of public defense; Jennifer Gonnerman on the costs to neighborhoods from which prisoners are removed; Kevin Pranis on the banks and brokerage houses that finance prison building; and Silja Talvi on the American Correctional Association as a tax-funded lobbyist for professional prison bureaucracies..
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Out of sight of most Americans, global corporations like Nestlé, Suez, and Veolia are rapidly buying up our local water sources—lakes, streams, and springs—and taking control of public water services In their drive to privatize and commodify water, they have manipulated and bought politicians, clinched backroom deals, and subverted the democratic process by trying to deny citizens a voice in fundamental decisions about their most essential public resource.

The authors' PBS documentary Thirst showed how communities around the world are resisting the privatization and commodification of water. Thirst, the book, picks up where the documentary left off, revealing the emergence of controversial new water wars in the United States and showing how communities here are fighting this battle, often against companies headquartered overseas.

Read a review...http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/18/RVGS9OHPKT1.DTL.
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The Divided Welfare State is the first comprehensive political analysis of America's distinctive system of public and private social benefits Everyone knows that the American welfare state is unusual--less expensive and extensive, later to develop and slower to grow, than comparable programs abroad. Yet, U.S. social policy does not stand out solely for its limits. American social spending is actually as high as spending is in many European nations. What is truly distinctive is that so many social welfare duties are handled not by the state, but by the private sector with government support. With sweeping historical reach and a wealth of statistical and cross-national evidence, The Divided Welfare State demonstrates that private social benefits have not merely been shaped by public policy, but have deeply influenced the politics of public social programs--to produce a social policy framework whose political and social effects are strikingly different than often assumed. At a time of fierce new debates about social policy, this book is essential to understanding the roots of America's distinctive model and its future possibilities. Jacob S. Hacker is the Peter Strauss Family Assistant Profesor of Political Science at Yale University. Previously, he was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows and Fellow at the New America Foundation as well as a Guest Scholar and Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of The Road to Nowhere: The Genesis of President Clinton's Plan for Health Security (Princeton, 1997), which was co-winner of the 1997 Louis Brownlow Book Award of the National Academy of Public Administration. His articles and opinion pieces have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and Washington Post. A regular media commentator, he has discussed his work widely on C-Span, national public radio and in papers nationwide..
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From the author of The War Against America's Public Schools, Bracey's Consumer's Guide to the War Against America's Public Schools will answer the questions you have about the how private schools, charters and vouchers are affecting the future of public education!

• Written in a clear, straightforward and engaging fashion so that all consumers of public education will find answers to their questions and criticism.
• Written by a well-known independent researcher, educator, and writer, this text challenges public education's critics with accurate analysis derived from current data.
• The book looks at interesting and popular experiments in private schooling such as Nobel Learning Communities and Michael Milken's Knowledge Universe.

A must-read for people who care about public education! A Consumer's Guide to the War Against America's Public Schools provides a comprehensive analysis of public schools and forces such as charters, vouchers, Educational Management Organizations (EMO's), and private schools that are altering the future of public education. In this extraordinary book, Gerald Bracey describes why Americans are nervous about their public schools and examines whether their anxieties are justified. Bracey provides a summary of the findings from research and evaluations on charter schools and vouchers, and findings concerning Edison Schools, Inc., TesseracT and other Education Management Organizations in an easy-to-read style that is sometimes funny, challenging and insightful.

Gerald W. Bracey holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University. He has held positions at Educational Testing Service, Indiana University, the Virginia Department of Education and Cherry Creek (Colo.) Schools. Since 1991 he has been an independent educational researcher and writer who specializes in assessment and policy analysis..
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Privatization is one of the most important political and economic developments of our time, affecting virtually every person and state in the world. The purpose of "The Fox in the Henhouse is to present, in clear, direct terms, an analysis of privatization that helps readers understand what is happening to them and what they can do about it. It gives people on all sides of many different privatization struggles -- over hospitals, schools, sanitation, water, Social Security, the military, public lands, the postal service, national parks, prisons -- the arguments that have been used to place privatization at the center of the corporate agenda and to dominate the public debate. It also offers a historical framework that allows readers to center their thinking on what it means to build a democratic society, while providing the counterarguments -- and inspiration -- that people need both to argue and to fight back..
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Partnerships between the public and private sectors to fulfill public functions are on the increase at every level of government. In the United States and Canada they currently operate in most policy areas, and in the U.S. trial programs are planned by the Internal Revenue Service, the Census Bureau, and the Social Security Administration.

Partnerships represent the second generation of efforts to bring competitive market discipline to bear on government operations. Unlike the first generation of privatizing efforts, partnering involves sharing both responsibility and financial risk. In the best situations, the strengths of each sector maximize overall performance. In these cases, partnering institutionalizes collaborative arrangements in which the differences between the sectors become blurred.

This is the first book to evaluate public-private partnerships in a broad range of policy areas. The chapters focus on education, health care and health policy, welfare, prisons, the criminal justice system, environmental policy, energy policy, technology research and development, and transportation. The contributors come from a number of fields, including political science, education, law, economics, and public health. They merge experiential and social-scientific findings to examine how partnerships perform, to identify the conditions in which they work best, and to determine when they might be expected to fail.

Contributors:
Ronald J. Daniels, James A. Dunn, Jr., Sheldon Kamieniecki, Harry M. Levin, Stephen H. Linder, Nicholas P. Lovrich, Jr., Mark Carl Rom, Pauline Vaillancourt Rosenau, Walter A. Rosenbaum, Anne Larason Schneider, David Shafie, Julie Silvers, Michael S. Sparer, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Michael J. Trebilcock, Scott J. Wallsten..
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