Common Reads
Join our book club to read and discuss Common Cause issues with other book lovers!
Through open discussion, Q&A, guided discussion on specific topics, and a live chat, you can explore the democracy issues that Common Cause is working on while reading with and learning from other democracy activists.
Winter 2012 book: Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It – Discussion leader TBD
Rarely have so few imposed such damage on so many. When five conservative members of the Supreme Court handed for-profit corporations the right to secretly flood political campaigns with tidal waves of cash on the eve of an election, they moved America closer to outright plutocracy, where political power derived from wealth is devoted to the protection of wealth … (foreword by Bill Moyers)
This is the first practical guide for every citizen on the problem of corporate personhood and the tools we have to overturn it. Jeff Clements explains why the Citizen’s United case is the final win in a campaign for corporate domination of the state that began in the 1970s under Richard Nixon. More than this, Clements shows how unfettered corporate rights will impact public health, energy policy, the environment, and the justice system.
The book’s ultimate goal is to give every citizen the tools and talking points to overturn corporate personhood state by state, community by community with petitions, house party kits, draft letters, shareholder resolutions, and much more.
Corporations Are Not People website
Fall 2011 book: Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children – Discussion leader: Hegemommy
Corporations have found a new resource to be mined for profit: our children. In this shocking and indelible behind-the-scenes journey, Joel Bakan, acclaimed author and award-winning maker of the renowned film and international bestselling book The Corporation, uncovers the astonishing degree to which companies exploit the special vulnerabilities of children, manipulate parents’ fears, and operate with callous disregard for children’s health and well-being. ….
Childhood Under Siege leaves no room for doubt that this assault on childhood is a major crisis of our time. A powerful manifesto for urgent change, it empowers us to shield our own children while offering concrete and realistic proposals for legal reforms that would protect all children from these predatory practices.
This is new? I was under siege by Corporate America from my earliest memories over 50 years ago. I don’t need to read another book to tell me that I was manipulated and that my children are also targets. One small example: candy cigarettes.
Anyone who doesn’t recognize the need to inoculate their children against the greed of those who would take advantage of them (be it corporations or religious factions) absolutely needs to educate themselves.
From my book “Apollo’s Consternation” to be published shortly, a pair of poems:
Concentrated Ergosomes:
Those ergosomes do concentrate, explosion is the price.
Matter’s orders evaporate, the fission isn’t nice.
A critical mass of special things is trigger for these big kah-chings.
And sapience needs be careful what ods it does entice.
The Derivatives Black Hole:
Apollo’s consternation must wax strong whene’er he sees
Our economic sages, riding godlike through the ages,
Taking money to be an ergosome, and writing many a leaned tome,
without a word on the critical mass of derivatives or any other class
of negative wealth’s accumulation in any of their pages.
The dollars chain reactions’ results are just the same
as neutrons’: an explosion, devastation, in the name of a phantasy of balance called “free market” that’s not free,
but well controlled, and bought by stealth of the few controlling all the wealth. The concentration is to blame. It’s Nature’s law; Apollo cries and government by consent just dies.