Corporateering: How Corporate Power Steals Your Personal Freedom

From Starbucks to Nike, companies across industry lines spend untold millions selling themselves not as engines for corporate profit but as reflections of human culture, values and relationships. Court, a consumer advocate, calls this corporateering, when corporations exceed their traditional role in a marketplace to dominate the cultural sphere and compromise individuals’ rights, freedoms, power and the democratic systems that protect them. Setting out to explore the tactics and strategies that corporations employ to transmit cultural messages to gain what he argues is too much power, Court shows through numerous examples how such corporations rob citizens of their personal freedoms, including privacy, security and the right to legal recourse. Why is that: An individual’s private medical and financial information can be bought and sold by corporations without the person’s permission? When a company makes a mistake, the burden is on the individual to spend as much of the time as is needed fixing it without ever being reimbursed for the value of that lost time? This book offers many examples of corporate control - an interesting perspective on the power of the corporate world and a decidedly antagonistic view of it.