Donald Cohen

About

Donald Cohen is the founder and executive director of In the Public Interest (ITPI,) a national strategy center committed to advancing democracy, shared prosperity and the common good. He is a founding board member of the Partnership for Working Families (now called PowerSwitch Action.) He is the former political director of the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, AFL-CIO. He is the founder and former executive director of the Center on Policy Initiatives, a San Diego-based think tank and policy organization. His opinion pieces and articles have appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The New York Daily News, The New Republic, The American Prospect, The Nation and other online and print outlets. He is the co-author of two books; The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back with Alan Mikaelian and Corporate Bullshit: Exposing the Lies and Half-truths that Protect Profit, Power and Wealth in America with Joan Walsh and Nick Hanauer.

Agenda

Apr

Resisting Austerity: Keeping Public Infrastructure Public

Austerity is not an abstract concept–it is a key feature of our day-to-day lives. Austerity–translated through public finance–changes our communities’ libraries, water and sanitation systems, education, and roads. These public systems and systems of political power are fundamentally changed so they are able to become marketable assets. To make valuable public assets valuable assets for the private sector, a number of concrete steps must be taken. These include the actions of credit rating agencies, accounting, financial, engineering, and contractor consultants. This constellation of this long...