Wednesday, May 15, 2002
Corporation Nation
by Charles Derber
Who's in charge here, anyway? According to Charles Derber, the answer to that is increasingly becoming "the corporations". Corporation Nation attempts to show how corporations have been steadily increasing their power in government and our personal lives and how the the power of the prevailing counter forces -- like unions or the elected governments -- has been waning. My inclination is to agree with him, noticing how the evidence he cites has echoes in my own experience and reading. However, I did have a few problems with the book. One is that the footnotes that caught my eye -- the ones that I would be tempted to research further -- seem to be secondary citations from other books, rather than primary source material. The bigger problem I had was Mr. Derber's fixation on populism as the answer to the problem. I find populism attractive myself, but the picture I got from the book was not the populism of the 19th Century, or even Pat Buchanan, but rather an idealized version shorn of the racism and nationalism that existed in real populist movements. Not that I have a problem eschewing racism and nationalism. I just think that if you seek to build a coalition of different groups, be it laborers, ethnic or religious groups, you need to seriously recognize and consider the biases and agendas they will bring into the movement. (Listen to me, I've become an armchair politician. Sheesh!) Anyway, despite my dissatisfactions, I'm going to recommend that you check it out. The concerns Mr. Derber has are very real and we need not just sit on our couches and take whatever is heaped upon us.
LibraryThing link
Who's in charge here, anyway? According to Charles Derber, the answer to that is increasingly becoming "the corporations". Corporation Nation attempts to show how corporations have been steadily increasing their power in government and our personal lives and how the the power of the prevailing counter forces -- like unions or the elected governments -- has been waning. My inclination is to agree with him, noticing how the evidence he cites has echoes in my own experience and reading. However, I did have a few problems with the book. One is that the footnotes that caught my eye -- the ones that I would be tempted to research further -- seem to be secondary citations from other books, rather than primary source material. The bigger problem I had was Mr. Derber's fixation on populism as the answer to the problem. I find populism attractive myself, but the picture I got from the book was not the populism of the 19th Century, or even Pat Buchanan, but rather an idealized version shorn of the racism and nationalism that existed in real populist movements. Not that I have a problem eschewing racism and nationalism. I just think that if you seek to build a coalition of different groups, be it laborers, ethnic or religious groups, you need to seriously recognize and consider the biases and agendas they will bring into the movement. (Listen to me, I've become an armchair politician. Sheesh!) Anyway, despite my dissatisfactions, I'm going to recommend that you check it out. The concerns Mr. Derber has are very real and we need not just sit on our couches and take whatever is heaped upon us.
LibraryThing link
Labels: CheckItOut
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