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Privatization of assets that most of us consider public goods - like airports and highways - has a long, often-uncontroversial history.

We are a coalition government, and that limits our options in some ways. Privatization happens to be one such area.

The American people do not like privatization. They are afraid of the debt the president's willing to do. And they don't like benefit cuts. And everyone here should understand all 45 Senate Democrats are united. We are not going to let this happen.

Proponents of privatization argued that cities and states needed private capital to fund all the upgrades that our decaying infrastructure so desperately needed.

It is really quite amazing that all of the folks supporting privatization, from the president on down, keep invoking the name of my grandfather, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Privatization of the state-owned economy is not yet on the agenda. We cannot do it immediately; my colleagues would not agree to it. But we must put all forms of ownership on an equal footing immediately and let different types of ownership compete with the state firms.

More and more I think of privatisation as being not just about the takeover of resources and power by corporate interests, but as the retreat of citizens to private life and private space, screened from solidarity with strangers and increasingly afraid or even unable to imagine acting in public.

If I just produce the transparent ideal accepted by the Western experts, a process of privatization which will be very good but never happen, that means nothing.

Chicago's privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration, which ran from 1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace. For Rahm's investment banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For citizens? Not so much.

Many people say the privatisation was unfair: that is true - it was unfair. That is a fact: some people became rich and others did not. Unfair does not mean illegal, but it was inevitably unfair.