"With the launch of the Falcon 1 rocket in 2008, Elon Musk's SpaceX became the first private company to build a low-cost rocket that could reach orbit. And that milestone carried major implications: Silicon Valley, not NASA, was suddenly cemented as the epicenter of the new Space Age. Start-ups and the wealthy investors behind them began to realize that the universe-ungoverned and infinite-was open for business. Welcome to the wild west of aerospace...

"When the tough-on-crime politics of the 1980s overcrowded state prisons, private companies saw potential profit in building and operating correctional facilities. Today more than a hundred thousand of the 1.5 million incarcerated Americans are held in private prisons in twenty-nine states and federal corrections. Private prisons are criticized for making money off mass incarceration--to the tune of $5 billion in annual revenue. Based on [the author's]...

"In an era characterized by levels of school segregation the country has not seen since the mid-twentieth century, cultural critic and American studies professor Noliwe Rooks provides a trenchant analysis of our separate and unequal schools and argues that profiting from our nation’s failure to provide a high-quality education to all children has become a very big business. As our public education infrastructure crumbles, Rooks’s book manages...

"A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door is about the right-wing agenda to dismantle public education, assessing the myriads of ways our education system is being eroded with privatization measures that exacerbate inequality"-- If America's public schools don't survive the COVID-19 pandemic, it won't just be due to the virus. The crisis had provided opponents of public education their best opportunity to dismantle our system of free, universal, and taxpayer-funded...

"A deep-dive investigation of education privatization that reveals voucher programs as the faulty products of decades of work by wealthy patrons and influential conservatives In The Privateers, Josh Cowen lays bare the surprising history of tax-funded school choice programs in the United States and warns of the dangers of education privatization. A former evaluator of state and local school voucher programs, Cowen demonstrates how, as such programs...

"The story behind the ultimate American privatization, which has taken place gradually and almost invisibly: how we privatized our national security"--

Robocop: "Set in Detroit sometime in the near-future, the film is about a policeman killed in the line of duty, who the department decides to resurrect as a half-human, half-robot supercop. The robocop is indestructible, and within a matter of weeks he has removed crime from the streets of Detroit. However, his human side is tortured by his past, and he wants revenge on the thugs who killed him."--Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Movie Guide. Robocop...

"Why government outsourcing of public powers is making us less free. Many governmental functions today--from the management of prisons and welfare offices to warfare and financial regulation--are outsourced to private entities. Education and health care are funded in part through private philanthropy rather than taxation. Can a privatized government rule legitimately? The Privatized State argues that it cannot. In this boldly provocative book, Chiara...

An activist and a philosopher discuss how privatization harms society and how we can challenge it. Privatization has been on the right-wing agenda for years. Health care, schools, Social Security, public lands, the military, prisons-all are considered fair game. Through stories, analysis, impassioned argument-even song lyrics-Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich show that corporations are, by their very nature, unable to fulfill effectively what have traditionally...