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REVIEW:

Corporate Predators:
The Hunt for Mega-Profits and the Attack on Democracy

By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999
216 pp., $14.95, paper; ISBN: 1-56751-158-9

Some readers will already be familiar with Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman's weekly column published on the Internet called "Focus on the Corporation," a regular report on the behavior of big corporations. Mokhiber is the editor of Corporate Crime Reporter, the D.C.-based weekly; and Weissman is editor of Multinational Monitor, the longtime "watchdog" of corporate activity and its impacts.

Corporate Predators: The Hunt for Mega-Profits and the Attack on Democracy is a collection of columns written by Mokhiber and Weissman between December 1997 and December 1998, arranged not by chronology but by theme. The first three parts focus on actual criminal behavior by corporations (from government fraud committed by Blue Cross-Blue Shield to illegal price-fixing by Archer Daniels Midland); corporations' "attack" on democracy by influencing legislation (to skirt food safety responsibility, maintain highest profits for prescription drugs, and conduct mega-mergers); and corporations' dealings with foreign governments, side-stepping or directing U.S. foreign policy. Part four includes a run-down of Multinational Monitor's "10 worst corporations of 1997" along with accounts of corporate takeovers of a national consumer group and de facto censorship by Monsanto. Four more groupings highlight "merger mania in the 1990s," the commercialism of public spaces (like the Smithsonian), union-busting and sweat-shop labor practices abroad, and, finally, corporations and some points of law.

These well-written, often witty and entertainingly deft columns are engaging and to the point, but like the op-ed pieces they are, they don't take responsibility for proving anything. But they do serve the valued function of pointing the finger of rebuke at the bad behavior by corporations that goes on day after day, month after month, and to provoke reaction. There's a bit of preaching to the choir here, and readers may more likely find gratification in the effective expression of their own resentment of corporations' amoral zeal in exploiting every natural and human resource on the planet than be inspired to take action. The book may not win many new readers, who may be put off by Ralph Nader's unusually polemical introduction that doesn't represent his usual eloquence, and by sentences like, "The opportunities to control or defeat government attempts for corporate accountability that flow from transcending national jurisdictions into globalized strategies to escape taxation and pit countries and their workers against one another appear to be endless."

Weissman and Mokhiber's columns display a bitter contempt doubtless acquired from years of repeated exposure to many little known facts of corporate behavior, one outrageous action piled on another. As Nader points out in his foreword, such accumulated anecdotes illustrate the history and also the relentless will and direction of corporations to overwhelm democracy and gain complete control. One almost longs for the swaggering political corrupters of old, the Boss Tweeds, the old-fashioned villains of greed J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, those figures we could hate while we still envied them. Instead we have a faceless entity (as if individuals weren't the CEOs, the managers, and the stock holders making the decisions), some amoral mechanistic force, some primordial cold-blooded serpent (Matt Wuerker's apt cover illustration) squeezing the blood out of a helpless globe!

Why is the Archer Daniels Midland corporation able to run those interminable self-promoting ads on public television while being indicted (and convicted) of price-fixing? How do Exxon, Mobil, Citicorp, World Com, Monsanto, Nike, R.J. Reynolds, and Philip Morris get away with all the bailouts, price-fixing, marketing products abroad banned in the U.S., hiding dangerous defects to avoid costly redesigns, exploiting of child labor, union-busting, and when did they manage to gain legal status as individuals? (A surprising omission is any reference to the Program on Corporations, the Law and Democracy (POCLAD), which works to educate the public about corporations and the law and advocates for revoking corporate charters that give corporations unfair protections as individual citizens.)

Though comments are added to the ends of columns where updated information is needed, the collection would be helped by even brief overviews to each section, which could add coherence to what seems rather arbitrarily arranged material. The writers, busy writing new columns at a prolific rate, have relied on Ralph Nader's foreword to speak their conclusions that "the facts must be linked to civic engagement and democratic activity for change." In a future collection, perhaps Mokhiber and Weissman will do more to make that important link. Reading Corporate Predators is sure to get anyone's blood boiling, though, and perhaps inspire a few people to action. — Kathy Cone

Available from:
Common Courage Press
Box 702, Red Barn Road
Monroe, ME 04951

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