Corporation Nation: How Corporations are Taking Over Our Lives -- and What We Can Do About It

Corporation Nation: How Corporations are Taking Over Our Lives -- and What We Can Do About It

Charles Derber

Language: English

Pages: 384

ISBN: 031225461X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Foreword by Ralph Nader. In Corporation Nation Derber addresses the unchecked power of today's corporations to shape the way we work, earn, buy, sell, and think―the very way we live. Huge, far-reaching mergers are now commonplace, downsizing is rampant, and our lines of communication, news and entertainment media, jobs, and savings are increasingly controlled by a handful of global―and unaccountable―conglomerates. We are, in effect, losing our financial and emotional security, depending more than ever on the whim of these corporations. But it doesn't have to be this way, as this book makes clear. Just as the original Populist movement of the nineteenth century helped dethrone the robber barons, Derber contends that a new, positive populism can help the U.S. workforce regain its self-control.

Drawing on core sociological concepts and demonstrating the power of the sociological imagination, he calls for revisions in our corporate system, changes designed to keep corporations healthy while also making them answerable to the people. From rewriting corporate charters to altering consumer habits, Derber offers new aims for businesses and empowering strategies by which we all can make a difference.

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Government as well as the tends to distract attention with political lead- elites, allied have always exercised extensive power in America. Since the Gilded Age, public and private power have intimately intertwined. Government and which wields public powers, have public/private monolith. partially melded to create a Through much of the twentieth this joint enterprise has served the interests of political leaders rather than balancing become corporation, each of them century,.

With other superbanks markets, traders retailing as full-service one-shop financial super- mutual funds, and increasingly becoming and speculative investors. Merrill Lynch is the largest in- vestment bank, with about 20 percent of the American market in 1993. and It is the leading underwriter in corporate stock offerings in virtually every debt market, the third largest manager behind Fidelity mutual funds and Vanguard, and a huge player in do- mestic and international.

Empamost Americans, despite their persistent sense of insecurity, do not their employers. Instead, they see business itself as a victim, blame disempowered by the global cal tide of competition change. Sociologist Joel Rogers says workers boss is trying hard, but there is and technologitell nothing he can do him: '"My either'. They say he does not have the ability to protect them, much different than saying but he chooses not If it sees 'He could protect me if . . which .

Era, and writes, up to today. Corporations evolved, he from "publicly created entities devoted to a public pur- bound by restrictive public charters, to 'natural' business entities bound by broadly applicable private duties, to combinations bound by strictly delimited private duties in the name of public goals, and finally to private business entities pose, to private entities regulated by public authority solely in the interest of promoting efficiency The and profit. "^^ early.

Whole," writes O'Connor, "are the costs of research, development of new all, products, new productive processes, and so on, and, above the costs of training and retraining the labor force, in particu- lar technical, administrative, and crucial importance from was the massive new cost of infrastructure, electric or nuclear power a global satellite network. Government nonmanual workers." Also of stations and world-class airports to ^^ increasingly footed the bill. After.

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