Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Unequal Protection : The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights by Thom Hartmann ISBN: 1-57954-955-1 Publisher: Rodale Press Pub. Date: 24 April, 2004 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.54 (39 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Better informed citizens make better choices
Comment: If cheap is how you like your products and services then read the consequences of those purchases in usurped rights and world contamination. Unequal Protection is a critical asset to anyone interested in keeping informed of world ecological, human and political interests. The comparison books of political evidence blamming bi-partisanship for America's weak legislative role is debunked. The footnoted research points to resources including websites showing how small our corporate world really is but how well fed they are keeping themselves. I recommend this book for teenagers as well. The historical information that Thom has uncovered at length should not be kept from the new citizenry. Thom has done a fine job including not only statistics provided by the U.S. Department heads but also quotes from founding fathers and Presidents that take all confusion and skeptism whatsoever out of Supreme Court decisions that put words and concepts in the founders mouths that were blatently erroneous. Supplement to government courses. A continuous theme of the book is the Santa Clara landmark case which has been a zerox copied "mistake" to every nation using U.S. democracy as a role model. A mistake that needs the heart and mind to return the power to the people from corporate toxicity of the planet and humans. A very hardlined look with a, "let's keep to the facts" organization. Learn the real meaning and intention of "fast tracking" in U.S. Government and fast track being informed and empowered in the decisions you make and how you understand the aftermath of the U.N.W.T.O./GATT/NAFTA treaties affecting every citizen from cradle to grave. The names are huge in industry but the network small that brings them together. Well-written, researched, and footnoted. They call it "free trade" when really it is corporate aristocracy at its best.
Rating: 5
Summary: Well written and thoughtful
Comment: Did you ever ask yourself, "How do they get away with it?" When you read or hear, what seem to be unreal stories in the news about a corporation that was caught doing the most unthinkable, treacherous thing? Well this book explains how they get away with it.
It's a great book. Well written and thoughtful. It's a powerful tragedy that unfortunately is non-fiction. The protagonist is our own democracy, which apparently was mortally wounded 116 years ago. I'm not sure what disturbs me more, the unyielding greed of corporations, our own lack of attention to defend our democracy and human rights or the fact that I had no clue what "Corporate Personhood" was before I read this book.
I mean the idea that our government currently recognizes a corporation, as a "person" with equal human rights is just wrong. Isn't it? I could understand having separate laws to protect corporations. The corporation itself is a protection against limited liability. But they also have all of the same human rights and protections that we have under the US Constitution and The Bill of Rights. That's just wrong!
Over the past 5 years we have averaged 7,000 bankruptcies per hour. This has contributed to a loss of 2.2 million jobs in the past two years. Our National Debt was $-909 billion in 1980. In 2001 it topped $-7,600 billion in debt (yes, that's $7.6 trillion). And yet in 1982 the US had only 13 billionaires but in 2000 they had increased to 274 billionaires. In the US, the richest 20% earn 49.2 percent of the national income. That same 20% own 85% of the wealth, while the remaining 80% of us own only 15% of the nations total wealth.
All of this economic disparity hangs on a clerical error in the head notes of an 1886 Supreme Court case. The language has no actual legal basis but has been spun into the most significant and yet little known lie in world history, otherwise know as "Corporate Personhood."
The Boston Tea Party was a protest against a corporate trade monopoly (the East India Co.), protected by a corrupt British government. Ninety thousand pounds of tea, owned by the East India Co. (not the British government), was destroyed, worth over $1 million by today's standard.
The US Constitution was primarily concerned with preventing this kind of corruption from happening. And so, the Constitution specifically prevents corporations from having political influence. It has never been legally amended to allow corporations to make any political contributions or to have lobbyists. And yet in 2000 corporations paid $1.1 billion in political contributions directly to the 2 main parties.
How do they get away with it? Read the book.
Rating: 5
Summary: How Corporations Came to Rule
Comment: How is it that corporations have come to exert so much power and influence over our everyday lives, to have rights and privileges unavailable to individuals, to take so much from, and return so little to, the general wealth both of this country and the rest of the world?
Thom Hartmann traces the history of corporations from their Elizabethian inception in the East India Company to the present; he describes in some detail the changes in the relationship among corporations, their governmental patrons and their societal prey. Historically corporations were granted charters by governments subject to their being monitored, controlled and mandated to provide for the general good in exchange for specific commissions and concessions. In America's early history, this principle was understood and effectively implemented to control the excesses of corporate behavior. Then in 1886, the US Supreme Court ruled on arguments in the case of Santa Clara County[CA] v Southern Pacific Railway. A clerical misstatement in the court reporter's notes, separate and distinct from the formal decision, led to the interpretation that the Bill of Rights was intended to apply to corporations, not just individual human beings. Although Jefferson had cautioned specifically against the power of corporations unrestrained, thenceforth their lawyers have succeeded in prizing successively greater concessions from and precedences over the rights of individuals.
Acceptance of corporations as 'persons', entitled to the same rights and restrictions as human beings, has come to be capriciously applied. Corporations buy, sell, trade, dismember, even kill other corporations - the corporate equivalent of slavery - without being held accountable as they would if corporations were human beings. There are other glaring inconsistencies in the logic of corporate 'personhood' but our law is governed more by precedent, than by logic, or common sense. Once entrenched and established, no matter how egregiously erroneous, the tradition of corporate personhood would take an act of Congress, or an amendment to the Constitution, to rectify the mistake.
There are a number of fallacies in the assignment of 'person' status to fictitious, fictional entities such as corporations. A principal function of good government is to level the playing field between the weak and powerful, to protect the weak from the predatory ravages of the strong. Although all 'men' are presumed equal, in rights if not in innate abilities, corporations are clearly, intrinsically, manifestly vastly more powerful than any one man or small group of men. As Hartmann shows, this difference in power is important yet our present governance fails utterly to protect the populace from the ravages of corporate rapacity and indifference to the plights of its victims.
Although the purpose of government is to provide for the general good, while minimizing harm to the weak and minority interests, the purpose of corporations is to accumulate wealth for its management and stockholders without regard to the source of that wealth. The wealth of a few individuals is not coincident with the general good. Nor are the managers and stockholders of a concern, a tiny subset of the general populace, coincident with the general population. Thus the purposes of good government in general do not coincide, indeed are often at odds, with the purposes of any given corporation.
Further, the activities of corporations in the aggregate - concentrating and focussing wealth for their individual stockholders by taking it from the general population - does not result in general good for the population. The myth that entities acting in unrestrained pursuit of their self-interests somehow produce the greater general good is amply disproven by the history of the American experiment. Rather the general wealth and good is redistributed, concentrated and focused to the benefit of the most powerful and the detriment of the least. Left to themselves, corporations parasitize the general population, suck the wealth out of it for corporate gain while often degrading the environment and denuding the resources employed to accumulate that gain. Corporatism results not in shared wellbeing for the general population but concentrated and focussed wellbeing for a few in a sea of general deprivation.
In other chapters, Hartmann describes the effect of Free Trade and the supranational World Trade Organization: to ravage national economies for the benefit of Corporations, to degrade the wellbeing of the middle class and workers in developed countries, only minimally to improve that of those in developing countries, while enriching the beneficiaries of corporations. Wealth and wellbeing are transferred from those who need it, to those who have it already.
Mussolini defined fascism as the merger of state and corporate power. It appears that America, indeed the entire planet, is well on its way to becoming a fascist state. Ruled by corporations, our 'elected' leaders and representatives are beholden and accountable principally to the interests of their various corporate contributors, only secondarily to the public. It is perhaps ironic that Hartmann, a self-confessed 'founder and former CEO of seven corporations that have generated over a quarter billion dollars in revenue', concludes this fascinating book with proposed grass-roots intiatives to unravel the tangled skein of corporate dominance. He offers no alternatives to the corporate model for the management of production and the distribution of wealth and wellbeing. Rather he advocates the return of effective control and regulation of corporations to the people, making them less the victims of corporations and more their overseers and regulators; and he and offers model actions to be pursued at the local level. But the present processes of government from legislatures to the courts are seemingly similarly enthralled to business interests intent on maximizing profit, not the general welfare. Whether or to what extent anything can be done to reverse this state of affairs is unclear. Readers will be provoked to wonder whether there are other means of advancing the general good and wellbeing than increasing the disparity in both for the general populations. Rather than a definitive solution to the problem of corporatism, this book provides a clear, readable and provocative depiction of the extent of that overwhelming problem.
...
 |
Title: The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight : Waking Up to Personal and Global Transformation by THOM HARTMANN, NEALE DONALD WALSCH, Joseph Chilton Pearce ISBN: 0609805290 Publisher: Three Rivers Press Pub. Date: 10 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: We the People: A Call to Take Back America by Thom Hartmann, Gene Latimer, Paul Burke, Neil Cohn ISBN: 1882109384 Publisher: Coreway Media Pub. Date: May, 2004 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
 |
Title: The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century by Thom Hartmann ISBN: 1571741666 Publisher: Hampton Roads Pub Co Pub. Date: March, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
 |
Title: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Truth About Corporate Cons, Globalization and High-Finance Fraudsters by Greg Palast ISBN: 0452283914 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: 25 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing by Robert Wolff, Thom Hartmann ISBN: 0892818662 Publisher: Inner Traditions Intl Ltd Pub. Date: 15 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
