Thomas M. Hanna is the founder and president of the Institute for a Democratic Economy and Society (IDES) and author of Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership in the United States (Manchester University Press, 2018).
Working-class reformer Brandon Johnson will soon be inaugurated Chicago’s next mayor, and already businesses are threatening to undermine his agenda. Johnson and the movement behind him should challenge those threats directly by asserting public control of capital.
You might not expect a novel about regulatory capture by private utility companies to be particularly compelling. But Peter and Sarah Lazare’s Testimony, a thriller about corporate power and government corruption in a state regulatory agency, is exactly that.
Antitrust lawsuits against companies like Facebook stand little chance of effectively breaking them up. Bringing Big Tech into public ownership is the only way to fight monopolization under surveillance capitalism.
Nationalization might seem like an alien idea in the hyper-capitalist United States. But the country has a long history of nationalizing all sorts of industries — and we should revive that tradition today.
The Labour Party announced today that in the next election, it will fight for Universal Basic Services, making public services free at the point of use and universally accessible. It’s a landmark in the fight to curb the influence of the market over our lives.
The Green New Deal won’t get far if it’s left hostage to the whims of private finance. We need to set up public banks and democratize the Federal Reserve.
The US has a surprisingly large amount of public ownership. But in order for it to truly serve the social good, it must be expanded — and democratized.