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Democracy and Regulation: How the Public Can Govern Essential Services
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. Uniquely in the world, every aspect of US regulation is wide open to the public. How is this done and why has this process not taken root elsewhere? How is regulation threatened even in the US? And what power does the public have to ensure that services are regulated along these US lines? This book, based on work for the United Nations International Labour Organisation and written by experts with unrivalled practical experience in utility regulation, is the first step-by-step guide to the way that public services are regulated in the United States. It explains how decisions are made by public debate in a public forum. Profits and investments of private companies are capped, and companies are forced to reduce prices for the poor, fund environmental investments and open themselves to financial inspection. In a world where privatisation has so often led to economic disaster -- in Peru, telephone charges increased by 3000%; in Rio de Janeiro, 40% of electricity workers lost their jobs; in Britain water prices rose by 58% -- this book is essential reading. Palast, Oppenheim and MacGregor examine what's right with the traditional American system, why regulation elsewhere has failed, and -- most importantly -- what can be done to fix it.
- GenresPoliticsNonfiction
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
73 people want to read
About the author
Greg Palast
40 books138 followersGreg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year on BBC Newsnight Review.
Palast turned his skills to journalism after two decades as a top investigator of corporate fraud. Palast directed the U.S. government’s largest racketeering case in history – winning a $4.3 billion jury award. He also conducted the investigation of fraud charges in the Exxon Valdez grounding.
Following the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Palast set off on a five-continent undercover investigation of BP and the oil industry for British television’s top current affairs program, Dispatches.
Palast is best known in his native USA as the journalist who, for the Observer (UK), broke the story of how Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black Florida citizens from voter rolls before the 2000 election, thereby handing the White House to his brother George. His reports on the theft of the 2000 and 2004 US elections, the spike of the FBI investigations of the bin Ladens before September 11, the secret State Department documents planning the seizure of Iraq's oil fields have won him a record six Project Censored awards for reporting the news American media doesn't want you to hear. "The top investigative journalist in the United States is persona non grata in his own country's media." [Asia Times.] He returned to America to report for Harper's Magazine.
Palast's Sam Spade style television and print exposés about financial vultures, election manipulations, the War on Terror and globalization, are seen on BBC's Newsnight and Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!
Palast, who has led investigations for governments on three continents, has an academic side: the author of Democracy And Regulation How the Public can Govern Essential Services, a seminal treatise on energy corporations and government control was commissioned by the United Nations based on his lectures at Cambridge University and the University of São Paulo.
Beginning in the 1970s, having earned his degree in finance at the University of Chicago studying under Milton Friedman and free-trade luminaries, Palast went on to challenge their vision of a New Global Order, working for the United Steelworkers of America, the Enron workers' coalition in Latin America and consumer and environmental groups worldwide.
In 1998 Palast went undercover for Britain's Observer, worked his way inside the prime minister's inner circle and busted open Tony Blair's biggest scandal, "Lobbygate," chosen by Palast's press colleagues in the UK as "Story of the Year." As the Chicago Tribune said, Palast became a "fanatic about documents--especially those marked "secret and confidential" from the locked file cabinets of the FBI, the World Bank, the US State Department and other closed-door operations of government and industry--which regularly find their way into his hands. The inside information he obtained on Rev. Pat Robertson won him a nomination as Britain's top business journalist.
Palast is Patron of the Trinity College Philosophical Society, an honor previously held by Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde. His writings have won him the Financial Times David Thomas Prize--and inspired the Eminem video, Mosh. "An American hero," said Martin Luther King III. In the BBC documentary, Bush Family Fortunes, Palast exposed George Bush Jr.'s dodging the Vietnam War draft. Greg Palast, says Noam Chomsky, "Upsets all the right people."
Palast won the George Orwell Courage in Journalism Award for his BBC documentary, Bush Family Fortunes.
Palast turned his skills to journalism after two decades as a top investigator of corporate fraud. Palast directed the U.S. government’s largest racketeering case in history – winning a $4.3 billion jury award. He also conducted the investigation of fraud charges in the Exxon Valdez grounding.
Following the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Palast set off on a five-continent undercover investigation of BP and the oil industry for British television’s top current affairs program, Dispatches.
Palast is best known in his native USA as the journalist who, for the Observer (UK), broke the story of how Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black Florida citizens from voter rolls before the 2000 election, thereby handing the White House to his brother George. His reports on the theft of the 2000 and 2004 US elections, the spike of the FBI investigations of the bin Ladens before September 11, the secret State Department documents planning the seizure of Iraq's oil fields have won him a record six Project Censored awards for reporting the news American media doesn't want you to hear. "The top investigative journalist in the United States is persona non grata in his own country's media." [Asia Times.] He returned to America to report for Harper's Magazine.
Palast's Sam Spade style television and print exposés about financial vultures, election manipulations, the War on Terror and globalization, are seen on BBC's Newsnight and Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!
Palast, who has led investigations for governments on three continents, has an academic side: the author of Democracy And Regulation How the Public can Govern Essential Services, a seminal treatise on energy corporations and government control was commissioned by the United Nations based on his lectures at Cambridge University and the University of São Paulo.
Beginning in the 1970s, having earned his degree in finance at the University of Chicago studying under Milton Friedman and free-trade luminaries, Palast went on to challenge their vision of a New Global Order, working for the United Steelworkers of America, the Enron workers' coalition in Latin America and consumer and environmental groups worldwide.
In 1998 Palast went undercover for Britain's Observer, worked his way inside the prime minister's inner circle and busted open Tony Blair's biggest scandal, "Lobbygate," chosen by Palast's press colleagues in the UK as "Story of the Year." As the Chicago Tribune said, Palast became a "fanatic about documents--especially those marked "secret and confidential" from the locked file cabinets of the FBI, the World Bank, the US State Department and other closed-door operations of government and industry--which regularly find their way into his hands. The inside information he obtained on Rev. Pat Robertson won him a nomination as Britain's top business journalist.
Palast is Patron of the Trinity College Philosophical Society, an honor previously held by Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde. His writings have won him the Financial Times David Thomas Prize--and inspired the Eminem video, Mosh. "An American hero," said Martin Luther King III. In the BBC documentary, Bush Family Fortunes, Palast exposed George Bush Jr.'s dodging the Vietnam War draft. Greg Palast, says Noam Chomsky, "Upsets all the right people."
Palast won the George Orwell Courage in Journalism Award for his BBC documentary, Bush Family Fortunes.
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