The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy

by Lee Drutman, Charlie Cray

Giant corporations wield excessive influence over our lives, often with frightening environmental destruction, political corruption, increased polarization of wealth, and stagnating wages and benefits. The rampant epidemic of accounting fraud, tax avoidance, outsourcing and war profiteering in recent years has reconfirmed the widespread conviction that corporations are getting increasingly out of control, with potentially dangerous consequences for the communities where they operate, their own employees and even for their owners, the shareholders.

The People’s Business tells us what we can do to fight back. Drutman and Cray show how corporations achieved their current privileged position and offer a comprehensive approach for reforming them so that they serve as engines of public prosperity, rather than as the tools of private plunder. They present recommendations from the prestigious members of the Citizen Works Commission on Corporate Reform—which includes such notable members as Ralph Nader, David Korten, Herman Daly, Medea Benjamin, and many others—to outline a clear-headed plan of action

Get corporations out of politics
Establish truly public-minded regulation of corporate behavior
Combat unfair market domination by a handful of large corporations
Crack down on corporate crime
Challenge the corporate claim to constitutional rights

Bolstered with relevant history and recent examples, The People’s Business details immediate measures for effectively reforming the corporation.

Genres: Nonfiction

360 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2004

About the author

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America. He is the author of The Business of America is Lobbying (Oxford University Press, 2015) and winner of the 2016 American Political Science Association's Robert A. Dahl Award, given for "scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy." In addition, he writes regularly for Polyarchy, a Vox blog. Drutman also teaches in the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at The Johns Hopkins University. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

[Jonathan]

A number of good ideas, presented in an accessible way, from a commission filled with top names in the corporate accountability world. Unfortunately, we seem to have moved in the opposite direction in many ways in the decade since...