Title: Unchecked corporate power : why the crimes of multinational corporations are routinized away and what we can do about it /
Authors: Barak, Gregg,
Year: 2017
Subjects: Corporate power.; Corporations Corrupt practices; Corporation law.; Industrial management Environmental aspects; Corporate power; Corporation law; Corporations Corrupt practices; Industrial management Environmental aspects
Abstract: Why are crimes of the suite punished more leniently than crimes of the street? When police killings of citizens go unpunished, political torture is sanctioned by the state, and the financial frauds of Wall Street traders remain unprosecuted, nothing succeeds with such regularity as the active failures of national states to obstruct the crimes of the powerful. Written from the perspective of global sustainability and as an unflinching and unforgiving exposé of the full range of the crimes of the powerful, Unchecked Corporate Power reveals how legalized authorities and political institutions charged with the duty of protecting citizens from law-breaking and injurious activities have increasingly become enablers and colluders with the very enterprises they are obliged to regulate. Here, Gregg Barak explains why the United States and other countries are duplicitous in their harsh reactions to street crimes in comparison to the significantly more harmful and far-reaching crimes of the powerful, and why the crimes of the powerful are treated as beyond incrimination. What happens to nations that surrender ever-growing economic and political power to the globally super rich and the mammoth multinational corporations they control? And what can people from around the world do to resist the criminality and victimization perpetrated by multinationals, and generated by the prevailing global political economy? Barak examines an array of multinational crimes - corporate, environmental, financial, and state - and their state-legal responses, and outlines policies and strategies for revolutionizing these contradictory relations of capital reproduction, criminality, and unsustainability. --
Contents: Preface -- Routinizing the crimes of the powerful -- Introduction: on the state routinization of unchecked corporate power -- Capitalism, corporations, and criminality -- Why capitalist states "fail" to control the crimes of the powerful -- Violating the commons -- Financial crimes : violations of trusted securities -- Environmental crimes : violations of health and safety -- Colluding crimes of states and corporations : violations of the community -- Halting corporate harm -- Checking corporate power and state-routinized crime in an age of global capitalism -- Conclusion: democratic capitalism, state owned multinationals, and sustainable pragmatism.