CORPORATE PREDATORS
Common Courage Political Literacy Course
No Such Thing as Corporate Crime? Corporations are getting a bad rap? Just ask Jeffrey Parker, a professor of law at George Mason University:
"Crime exists only in the mind of the individual." Therefore, he argues, "since a corporation has no mind, it can commit no crime."
The Justice Department, which keeps close watch on street crime and tabulates the results consistently, doesn't bother to collect statistics on corporate crime. It's as if the Department shares Parker's view.
How are corporations tightening their grip on the global political economy? How does this affect you? Read Mokhiber and Weissman's "Corporate Predators: The Hunt for Mega-Profits and the Attack on Democracy" and find out:
Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates' net wealth [now topping $100 billion, ED.] is greater than the combined net worth of the poorest 40 percent of Americans (106 million people).
Hundreds of hospitals are "dumping" patients who can't afford to pay.
T
he feds are criminally prosecuting big tobacco companies for smuggling cigarettes into Canada. (Never mind addicting young kids to smoke and thus condemning them to a certain, albeit, slow, death--can't criminally prosecute them for that.)
Prescription drugs may cause 100,000 deaths a year.
Two Fox-TV reporters in Florida are fired for trying to report on adverse health effects associated with genetically engineered foods.
The US Department of Agriculture proposes that genetically engineered foods be labelled "organic."
Coal companies continue to cheat on air quality tests as hundreds of coal miners continue to die each year from black lung disease.
The North American Securities Administrators Association estimates that Americans lose about $1 million an hour to securities fraud.
Robert Reich says that megamergers threaten democracy. Corporate crime explodes, but the academic study of corporate crime vanishes. Three hundred trade unionists around the world were killed in 1997 for defending their rights.
Corporate firms lobbying to cripple the Superfund law outnumber environmental groups seeking to defend it by 30 to one.
Down on Nike? Chinese political prisoners allegedly make Adidas products.
Blue Cross Blue Shield Illinois is a corporate criminal.
Chemical companies are testing pesticides on human beings.
Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, questions whether the Pentagon's financial controls have suffered a "complete and utter breakdown."
Environmental crimes prosecution are down sharply under Clinton/Gore. Bush/Quayle had a better record. Bell Atlantic buys Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" illustrations to sell telephone products.
Companies that have workers die on the job continue to be met with fines. Criminal prosecutions are still rare.
This is the price paid for living in a corporate-dominated society. Wealth disparity, megamergers, and the resulting consolidation of corporate power, commercialism run amok, rampant corporate crime, death without justice, pollution, cancer and an unrelenting attack on democracy.
From union-busting to food irradiation, from faulty air bags that kill but are kept on the market anyway to judges who take bribes, from the IMF to oil companies--wherever the corporate predators strike, Mokhiber and Weissman are there, reporting from a relentlessly human perspective, sounding the alarm and calling people to action.
"The Raw Power of Corporate America," a Beyond the Book interview with Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, is also available.
See <http://www.commoncouragepress.com/corporateinterview.html> for a list of questions that Common Courage Press asked them.
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CORPORATORS:
THE HUNT FOR MEGA-PROFITS AND THE ATTACK ON DEMOCRACY
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
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Common Courage Press
P.O. Box 702, Monroe, ME 04951
<www.commoncouragepress.com/corporate.html>