Corporate Assaults
Yesterday’s mail brought two book ads: Why is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? by Kathy Emery and Susan Ohanian, and Sickness and Wealth: The Corporate Assault on Global Health, edited by Meredith Fort, Mary Anne Mercer, and Oscar Gish. The ads remind me I haven’t yet ranted on this new blog about corporate power. I’ll have to remedy that soon.
As visitors to my regular website may have noticed, I have written about corporate issues on and off for some time. I recently joined the advisory board of the new Massachusetts group Center for Democracy and the Constitution, which aims to end the legal rights corporations never should have gotten in the first place. I first looked into this issue more than a decade ago, when I learned about the sorry process leading to the legal fiction that corporations are “legal persons.” I’m glad to see there’s now a large literature on the subject.
I have the Emery-Ohanian book, by the way (I keep getting things for free in the mail, I suppose because publishers think I’ll review them). Though I haven’t read it yet, I know Susan Ohanian from our common work against government-mandated high-stakes testing of public school students, a bipartisan corporate-pushed corruption of public education that began even before the Bush Administration’s so-called No Child Left Behind Act made things worse. Ohanian does good work, much of it on her website.