Democracy and Regulation: How the Public Can Govern Essential Services

by Greg Palast, Theo MacGregor, Jerrold Oppenheim

Book Overview

Essential services are being privatised the world over. Whether it's water, gas, electricity or the phone network, everywhere from Sao Paulo in Brazil to Leeds in the UK is following the US economic model and handing public services over to private companies whose principal interest is raising prices. Yet it's one of the world's best kept secrets that Americans pay astonishingly little for high quality public services. This book, based on work for...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0745319424
• ISBN13: 9780745319421
• Release Date: February 2003
• Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

most important book

This is a very important book as it describes what is wrong with the marketisation of public utilities and why they need to be strongly regulated and controlled through democratic institutions and transparent processes. The neoliberal hegemony managed to untangle the more than a hundred year legislation on governing competition rules and prices setting in public utilities. Certainly with the new democractic government, we can expect the pendulum to swing back. As a European it is also important to learn how we adopted from the USA only marketisation without its regulation. This book is important for me and I am using it all the time in my campaigns.

If Greg had anything to do with it...

...this book has to be both entertaining and educational. Greg is the writer who educated the educable on what is really going on in Venezuela, what really happened between the Carlisle Group and the Bin Ladens, and how we are being slowly duped by those who work cleverly behind the scenes. Conspiracy, but with facts to back it up. Read it now or forever hold your peace.