America, INC. Who Owns and Operates the United States - Morton Mintz ^ Jerry S. Cohen - 1971 - Hardcover - The Dial Press

America, INC. Who Owns and Operates the United States

From Ralph Nader's Introduction
"The management of power In a complex society is built around institutions. In our country, the most enduring, coordinated and generic manager of power is the corporate institution. Controlling great wealth and metabolized by the most fungible of factors�the dollar�the modern corporation possesses a formidable unity of motivation and action with great stamina. Much of what passes as governmental power is derivative of corporate power whose advocacy or sufferance defines much of the direction and deployment of government activity. The federal government is replete with Supportive' programs - subsidies, research, promotion, contracts, tax privileges, protections from competition - which flow regularly into the corporate mission of profit arid sales maximization. So much of government resources is allocated and so much government authority is utilized to transfer public wealth into corporate coffers that Washington can be fairly described as a bustling bazaar of accounts receivable for industry-commerce."

This well-documented expose reveals the incorporated rulers of the United States and, indeed, much of the world. It shows them to be private governments which, as effectively as legitimate public governments, decide whether large numbers of us live or die. They levy taxes in the form of price increases, unrestrained by competition. They manipulate legitimate governments, turning nations into welfare states for corporations. And they are generally responsible only to themselves.
The authors show how two hundred corporations interlocked with great banks sit astride the economy, controlling our pocketbooks, our health, our safety, and our environment. They demonstrate how economic power turns into political power all the way from the regulatory agencies to Capitol Hill, and even to the White House.
Few readers will fail to be appalled by the numerous specific illustrations of avoidable massive corporate blood shed and the way that some politicians are forced to cooperate because they are dependent on the great corporations for campaign contributions. Thus, the citizen, whether conservative or liberal, is powerless while the conglomerates enforce private socialism and decry public socialism.
John Kenneth Galbraith and Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber come under attack in America, Inc. Galbraith's assumption that the new technologies require further concentration under the guise of planning is assailed. Servan-Schreiber is faulted for assuming that Europe's answer to the American industrial might lies in imitating the American pattern. The authors propose an alternative solution.

MORTON MINTZ is a prize-winning investigative reporter for the Washington Post. JERRY S. COHEN is a lawyer and was chief counsel and staff director of the Senate Anti-Trust and Monopoly Subcommittee.