Jamie Court • Tarcher/Putnam • 2003
Corporations have invaded every corner of American life — stealing privacy, eroding rights, and replacing culture with commerce. Consumer advocate Jamie Court names the phenomenon and shows you how to fight back.
Buy the Book → Foreword by Michael MooreIn Corporateering, Jamie Court — a nationally recognized consumer advocate and President of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights — demonstrates how corporations have transcended their traditional economic role to colonize the spaces of daily life. From voice mail hell and credit card bait-and-switches to the privatization of legal recourse and the erosion of privacy, Court traces these irritations and injustices back to a single operating principle: the subordination of human values to commercial ones.
Drawing on his frontline experience fighting the California energy crisis and HMO abuses, Court identifies seven distinct forms of corporateering, analyzes how corporations construct a “corporateering ideology,” and offers concrete counter-corporateering strategies for individuals, communities, and policymakers. Published by Tarcher/Putnam, June 2003.
“Voice mail hell, credit card rate bait-and-switches, television commercials playing at the urinal. In this book Jamie Court shows how such everyday ‘corporateering’ springs from the same assumptions and strategies that led to the fire sales on stock at Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom, and so on. This book teaches you how to see the invisible hand of the corporation, and the finger is pointing at you.”
— Michael Moore, from the Foreword“A thought-provoking look at the condition of American society.” Court brings “firsthand knowledge” from the California energy crisis and connects the micro-annoyances of daily life to the macro-forces of corporate power.
“Keeping the muckraking tradition alive.” Court “knows how to generate publicity” and delivers an urgent, well-documented call to action against corporate overreach.
Praises Court’s analysis of how “51 of the 100 largest economies in the world were corporations,” and his insight that corporateering ideology functions as a replacement value system for American culture.
Highlights Court’s concept of “corporate transcendence” and the $1 trillion/year marketing machine. “With a foreword by Michael Moore, the book arrives with built-in buzz.”
How corporate is your city? Court commissioned landmark studies measuring the Corporateering Quotient — the degree to which corporate values have displaced human values — across seven major American cities.
Full city reports available at consumerwatchdog.org.
Jamie Court discussed Corporateering on national and local media, including NPR Marketplace, C-SPAN, CNN, The Today Show, Fox News, KCET-PBS Life & Times, KQED Forum, and more.