Recommended Reading

I was up at the Watchung Library this morning, and picked up a few books at the book sale, on corporate power in America, the relationship between corporations and democracy, and the effects of two-party power concentration on citizen-led democracy.

All three are recommended reading for anyone who wants to get a better idea of where we’re coming from with the ordinance, which is designed – not to ban corporate enterprise altogether – but to bring corporations within the control of citizen-directed democratic structures so as to reign in power abuses that hurt individual people, communities and ecosystems.

Political Fictions, by Joan Didion: From the book jacket:

In 1988, Joan Didion began looking at the American political process for The New York Review of Books. What she found was not a mechanism that offered the nation’s citizens a voice in its affairs but one designed by – and for – “that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.”In Political Fictions…Didion covers the ways in which the continuing and polarizing nostalgia for an imagined America led to the entrenchment of a small percentage of the electorate as the nation’s deciding political force, the ways in which the two major political parties have worked to narrow the electorate to this manageable element, the readiness with which the media collaborated with this project, and, finally and at length, how this mindset led inexorably over the past dozen years to the crisis that was the 2000 elections. In this book Didion cuts to the core of the deceptions and deflections to explain and illuminate what came to be called “the disconnect” – and to reveal a political class increasingly intolerant of the nation that sustains it…

Divine Right of Capital, by Marjorie Kelly:

Wealth inequality, corporate welfare, and industrial pollution are symptoms – the fevers and chills of the economy. The underlying illness, says Business Ethics magazine co-founder Marjorie Kelly, is shareholder primacy: the corporate drive to make profit for shareholders, no matter who pays the cost. We think of shareholder primacy as the natural law of the free market, much as our forebears thought of monarchy as the most natural form of government. In The Divine Right of Capital, Kelly brilliantly demonstrates that this corporate aristocracy is in fact unnatural and irrational. She articulates six aristocratic principles that corporations are built on, principles that we would never accept in our modern democratic system but which we accept unquestioningly in our economic system. People designed this system and people can change it, Kelly says. She calls for a movement to build economic democracy in two stages: first, by raising consciousness about wealth discrimination, and second, by aiming for structural change in corporate institutions…

Taking Back Our Lives in an Age of Corporate Dominance:

Never before have so many people felt the American Dream crashing down around their shoulders. The bottom-line profit mentality is bottoming out our lives and the planet. Taking Back Our Lives in the Age of Corporate Dominance presents alternatives to being victimized by a pressure-cooker lifestyle and buffeted by the winds of global change. It draws the connections between our lives and the culture, the economy, and the vast forces moving us closer to the edge…