The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power

by Joel Bakan

Book Overview

The inspiration for the film that won the 2004 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary, The Corporation contends that the corporation is created by law to function much like a psychopathic personality, whose destructive behavior, if unchecked, leads to scandal and ruin.Over the last 150 years the corporation has risen from relative obscurity to become the world's dominant economic institution. Eminent Canadian law professor and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743247469
• ISBN13: 9780743247467
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Informative, easy read

I think this should be required reading for all citizens.Exposes (without ideological idealism) the facts about corporations. Most people have vague misgivings about corporations, but don't have much of an idea of why. This book helps to clarify and explain what we instinctively feel. I got a kick out of the psychological assessment of the corporation, a legal person without moral conscience, as a psychopath.

great book even better movie

corporations rule the world. if you don't agree you are living in a dream world. extremely importaint topic. A must read.

Highly recomended

I highly recomend this book for anyone that is even remotely interested in globilization and the corporate world. It shows just how much of our daily lives are influenced and even controlled by corporations. It makes you realize that no matter what they say, a corporation really does only look out for itself, and any advertisements that claim that corporations help communities and people and save the environment out of their own good will have absolutely no truth to them. It also makes you realize how far a corporation will go to save a few dollars, knowingly putting lives at risk in the process. The book is also very well written, with plenty of explinations, so you don't need a background in economics to understand it.In short, I totally recomend this book to anyone that wants to know the truth about the corporation. It will make you sick to realize what lengths they will go to in order to exploit everyone and everything.

If you really care, you'll not miss this book

The author accurately describes the corporation as a pooling of money by shareholders into a legal, protected entity run by managers and directors, hopefully to the benefit of the investors but too often with an unsettled trust in the board. Limiting the shareholder?s personal liability to their investment undoubtedly has nourished the growth of corporations, jobs and the economy. But it is bittersweet, as Bakan notes the hyping of worthless stock and corporate fraud that facilitates the wealth of those extracting enormous and unjustified salaries and perks. As well, he notes that ?? over the last 300 years corporations have amassed such great power as to weaken governments ability to control them.? But he who gives it can take it away.Indeed congress has gotten its piece of the action as corporate leaders share part of their profits with the very politicians charged with regulating them. Some politicians even own stock in the companies they regulate.What else would explain why congress has failed to strongly intervene in the blatant corporate corruption of late? Is there any question that, were money not changing hands at the political level, corporate CEOs would have been allowed to form sweetheart deals with the very corporate boards charged with their oversight, when instead they should be protecting the shareholders? In virtually every congressional vote, one needs only to follow the money to predict its outcome.Bakan has many good ideas for cleaning up the corporate system, but his (and any) proposed fixes simply will not happen under the current moneyed political system. Until we stop the cash that flows from those who want laws written to those who write them, corporate abuse of shareholders and the taxpayers will continue. Only full public financing of our electoral system (at a cost of about $10 per taxpayer) will stop the abuses and the $1500 per taxpayer congress soles out each year to its funders. In any other country we?d call our system bribery and payola; in America we call it freedom of speech. In the corporate world we fire employees who take money from vendors; in the political world we reelect them. Where are our heads?This book is a must read for anybody interested in cleaning up the political system before we pass it on to the next generation.

A thought-provoking, empowering book

I watched The Corporation movie just a few weeks ago and loved it. It has changed the way I look at things and raised questions on my view on the world. I enthusiastically recommend the book as well!