Childhood Under Siege How Big Business Targets Children (Audible Audio Edition) Joel Bakan Rebecca Jenkins Inc Post Hypnotic Press Books
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In Childhood Under Siege, Joel Bakan reveals the callous and widespread exploitation of children by profit-seeking corporations and society's failure to protect them. The creator of the award-winning film and internationally best-selling book The Corporation, Bakan shows how corporations pump billions of dollars into rendering parents and governments powerless to shield children from a relentless commercial assault designed solely to exploit their unique needs and vulnerabilities.
Focusing on the United States in particular, Bakan demonstrates how
- Marketers target children with increasingly devious methods to manipulate their vulnerable emotions, cultivate compulsive behavior, and addle their psyches with violence, sex, and obsessive consumerism.
- More and more children take dangerous psychotropic drugs as pharmaceutical companies commandeer medical science and deploy dubious and often illegal marketing tactics to boost sales.
- Children's chronic health problems are rising dramatically as corporations dump thousands of new chemicals, in increasing amounts, into the environment, usually with the blessings of industry-influenced governments.
- Children as young as six are working illegally on farms, getting injured, becoming ill, and dying on the job, while the legal age for farm work remains a shockingly low 12 years old in the U.S.
- America's schools are becoming private-sector markets for profit-seeking companies, harnessing education to the needs of industry and promoting increasingly regimented and standardized learning.
- And more
"As governments retreat from their previous roles of protecting children from harm at the hands of corporations," Bakan writes, "we, as a society, increasingly neglect children's needs, expose them to exploitation, and thus betray what we, as individuals, cherish most in our lives."
Childhood Under Siege is a call to action to reverse these trends, and provides the necessary insights, information, and concrete proposals to do so.
Childhood Under Siege How Big Business Targets Children (Audible Audio Edition) Joel Bakan Rebecca Jenkins Inc Post Hypnotic Press Books
This book is an evaluation of corporation in contemporary society. Bakan provides a critical but convincing analysis of the profound influence of corporations in the world. His criticism of company as selfish, immoral profit-maximizing creature is accurate and sound. Corporate social responsibility, as he described, is a public relations strategy to cover the unpleasant core of corporation. The pursuit of financial returns has indeed led to environmental and social damages and drastically reshaped the political landscape. I largely agree with Bakan's observation but remain skeptical to his suggestions. His call for return to New Deal-era regulations is not very applicable to 21st-century America, as most of the multinationals have become stronger than any single state. He also emphasized collective action among citizens and cooperation among states. Both of them are easier said than done. In general, Bakan's work is a pleasant reading and raises important issues concerning the corporation. The policies he proposed are more debatable. As we can see, government oversight over financial activities remains inadequate after 2008. That any particular government can unilaterally better its control of corporations does not match with reality.Product details
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Childhood Under Siege How Big Business Targets Children (Audible Audio Edition) Joel Bakan Rebecca Jenkins Inc Post Hypnotic Press Books Reviews
Bakan first explains why we need to consider every corporation -- and especially those traded on the NY Stock Exchange -- as a pathologically insane psychopath. Does that sound extreme to you? It did to me, until I read his book and realized that every for-profit corporation fits that diagnosis. Yet we need them, and we need both government and civic action to control their pathological behavior.
For example, Bakan makes a strong case for passing a 38th amendment to our Constitution stating that corporations are not people and money is not speech. These two concepts have woven their way into the fabric of our corporate legal system over the last 150 years. The consequences of corporate personhood are far-reaching, yet way below the radar of your typical news program.
Before you take to the streets and rally against Citizen's United, you need to read Bakan and discover that the problem runs deeper than that one Supreme Court decision.
This book here argues that the modern corporation, despite doing some good, is basically a force of evil. I know that it sounds melodramatic to call corporations a force of “evil,” but how would you call the very opposite of a force of goodness? The reason why corporations are so bad is because they are greedy, completely amoral, totally ruthless and too powerful.
The author starts with describing how corporations came to be. They have their beginnings as early as the 16th century. Back then they were created either through a direct act of government of with government’s tacit approval. They came into being to run large scale business enterprises that individual businessmen could never finance and run. Corporations had a very bad opinion back then and were seen as a dirty but necessary evil. They were plagued by corruption and scandals and many eventually collapsed due to their own shady dealings, pulling down the economy in the process and forcing the government to come in and clean up their mess. (Sounds familiar?)
As world trade and infrastructure grew, the number and size of corporations also grew. They often came into being to construct such things as canals, bridges and roads. But they really took off in later half of 19th century with the rise of the railroads and the industrial revolution. All this time the corporations chafed and struggled against the laws and regulations put on the by governments. Through a number of (back then) controversial judicial decisions they were eventually granted personhood. Nowadays, according to the law they are a person like you and me and they have all the same rights (but few of the duties).
Aside for the obvious fact that it is ridiculous to treat an organization exactly like a human being, the problem here is that corporations act like psychopaths. A corporation is required by law to exist for one and only one purpose, and that is to make money, make more money and make even more money. Corporations must seek profits any way they can and the profits must always grow.
To some extent this is only to be expected. A corporation has a lot of expenses and it must make enough money to cover them or it will go bankrupt. Naturally, earning enough to cover the expenses is not enough. Everyone who runs any kind of business wants to be able to pay all the expenses and make a little bit of profit on top of that. But corporations don’t want to make just a little bit of profit. They want (must) make as much profit as they can and keep doing it over and over again.
Isn’t that the very definition of greed?
If corporations were greedy and nothing else, it would have been very bad but not dangerous. But corporations pose a danger to human society by being completely ruthless in their pursuit of greed. They violate laws whenever they believe that they can get away with it. They lobby governments to weaken regulations that protect people. They poison and destroy the ecosystem. They brutally exploit employees and discard them when they are no longer needed. The examples of corporate abuses, scandals and crimes are countless. This book was written somewhere around 2004 or 2005 (I don’t recall exactly) and it talks a lot about Enron.
Enron was a respected, gigantic energy company that claimed to be nothing but a concerned, responsible “citizen” all the while it was orchestrating electricity blackouts in order to raise prices of electricity and reap record profits. It was its own greed and lack of morality that shattered it.
Corporations are not sadistic. They do not hurt other people because they like it, but it is part of doing business. Any corporate manager who is putting the interests of someone or something else above the interests of his corporations is failing in his legal duties and can be fired or sued by the shareholders.
If you were to meet an individual who cares only about making money, who has no honor, morals or integrity and who is ready and willing to hurt, abuse and even kill others for money so long as he thinks that he can get away with it, what would you think of him? But corporations are not people. They are organizations composed of thousands of people. How can these people commit such wicked deeds and sleep at night? They can’t be all psychopaths, can’t they?
No, they are not psychopaths. The vast majority of corporate managers are decent, good people. In the book we meet some of them who openly admit that what they do is immoral, but they justify themselves by saying that this is only a job and what matters is being a decent human being in private life.
Sadly, in my other readings (and even in real life) I have encountered this way of thinking. It is a form of mentality and philosophy that is utterly incomprehensible to me. I guess that it is better to be a bad person only from 9 to 5 rather than 24/7, but in the end you are still hurting other people and making the world a bad place. Try to imagine yourself at the receiving end of this philosophy. Imagine that someone hurts you and when you confront them about it they say “Look. It was just part of my job. I am not a bad person. When I go home, I am a really decent guy. What I did to you, that was not personal.” Would you accept this is a justification?
But most corporate people do think even in this way. The people quoted above at least recognize that what they do from 9 to 5 is bad. The majority of corporate people see absolutely nothing wrong with what they do from 9 to 5. The most likely reason for that is that they are educated and raised to think that what corporations do is perfectly normal. Quite often they are born into corporate families, they go to business schools where corporate philosophy is drilled into them and when they get a job in some corporation, they are surrounded by people who think just like them. Why would they question their life?
Another reason is that corporate people rarely, if ever, see the effects of their destructive policies. For example, corporations have outsourced most of their manufacturing to Third World countries where workers are treated like dogs and paid less than dogs. And if the workers ever rebel, the corporations bribe the local generalissimo to send his thugs to put them down. But the corporate managers simply never see the despair and suffering of those workers. They sit in their posh offices in New York, London or Tokyo and read reposts about productivity and profits coming from these factories, but the reports say nothing about the human suffering that goes into obtaining this productivity and profits. And even if the company president goes to those countries to visit one of these factories, these are highly controlled visits where the local management shows him what they want him to see.
If you have been paying attention to the news and/or reading other books about the recent (2008) financial crisis, none of this will be surprising to you. For decades banks have been lobbying for financial deregulation. Eventually they finally got it and they started immediately investing in risky, shoddy business ventures that were unsafe in the long run but they brought in high profits in the short run. There were people in and outside of the financial establishment warning against it, but they were ignored. The pressure to seek profits wherever possible proved so strong and irresistible that the management chose to invest in these risky ventures anyway. As a result, they nearly destroyed their own companies. Had it not been for the massive (the biggest in history, in fact) government intervention, all of the world’s major financial institutions would have been wiped out.
The danger that the corporations pose to human society is enormous, but also insidious and difficult to notice. Corporations are hurting people through their unhealthy and dangerous practices. They poison and destroy the environment. They are also afraid of popular resistance so they influence governments to crush it and persecute activists. They oppose any form of political and social progress that is perceived as threatening their profits. They fight and often defeat organizations like labor unions or environment protection groups. But the worst thing in my opinion is that they want to create a society where people are interested only in consuming and buying. When people think that buying things is the purpose of life, they are going to spend more money. And the more money they spent, the more money the corporations are going to make.
The power and influence of the corporations is tremendous, but the author does not give in to despair. He believes that corporations can be defeated through activism and popular resistance. It is already happening. Why do you think the corporations pretend to be so charitable and eco friendly? It is because of the popular pressure. Nowadays, a corporation who openly declares that it cares about nothing else than profit and gives nothing to charitable causes will not do business for long.
In the past centuries the power of the Church and feudal aristocracy was tremendous. The Church and the feudal system were so ingrained into the society that most people could not even conceive a world without them. And just like corporations today, the Church and the aristocracy claimed that their role is essential and the world cannot go on without them.
And where are those feudal lords and the all-powerful Church today? Corporations have not always been there and they don’t have to be there forever.
I saw the movie for The Corporation back in 2003. It was the first time I had ever heard of Monsanto, and while I was not completely politically unaware at the time, the movie caused kind of a jump forward in awareness. I had always meant to read the associated book; it just took me a while.
Having done so, I have to say that it is still well-written, still timely, and still pretty horrifying. I wish there were better answers, but we have often shown that we are not willing to put people before profits, and that is what a lot of it comes down to.
I still recommend the book for some valuable historical information, and also for the help it gives in cutting through the crap of what various companies might say about corporate responsibility and things like that.
This book is an evaluation of corporation in contemporary society. Bakan provides a critical but convincing analysis of the profound influence of corporations in the world. His criticism of company as selfish, immoral profit-maximizing creature is accurate and sound. Corporate social responsibility, as he described, is a public relations strategy to cover the unpleasant core of corporation. The pursuit of financial returns has indeed led to environmental and social damages and drastically reshaped the political landscape. I largely agree with Bakan's observation but remain skeptical to his suggestions. His call for return to New Deal-era regulations is not very applicable to 21st-century America, as most of the multinationals have become stronger than any single state. He also emphasized collective action among citizens and cooperation among states. Both of them are easier said than done. In general, Bakan's work is a pleasant reading and raises important issues concerning the corporation. The policies he proposed are more debatable. As we can see, government oversight over financial activities remains inadequate after 2008. That any particular government can unilaterally better its control of corporations does not match with reality.
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