For-profit democracy
Subtitle: why the government is losing the trust of rural America
By: Loka Ashwood
Series: Yale Agrarian studies series; Yale agrarian studies
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 306
ISBN-13: 9780300215359
Subjects: Politics and government; Rural Sociology; Public opinion; Attitudes; Rural population; Rural conditions
Other titles: Why the government is losing the trust of rural America
Description: A fascinating sociological assessment of the damaging effects of the for-profit partnership between government and corporation on rural Americans. Why is government distrust rampant, especially in the rural United States? This book offers a simple explanation: corporations and the government together dispossess rural people of their prosperity, and even their property. Based on four years of fieldwork, this eye-opening assessment by sociologist Loka Ashwood plays out in a mixed-race Georgia community that hosted the first nuclear power reactors sanctioned by the government in three decades. This work serves as an explanatory mirror of prominent trends in current American politics. Churches become havens for redemption, poaching a means of retribution, guns a tool of self-defense, and nuclear power a faltering solution to global warming as governance strays from democratic principles. In the absence of hope or trust in rulers, rural racial tensions fester and divide. The book tells of the rebellion that unfolds as the rights of corporations supersede the rights of humans.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-285) and index.