Quotations

from the book

Corporate Predators

by Russel Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Common Courage Press, 1999

p24

Most corporate crminologists agree that corporate crime and violence inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined. That includes killings and deaths.

 

p47

"Capitalists now all want it one way. They want to do whatever they feel like, but let someone else pay. It's called privitizing the profits and socializing the risks."

Michael Thomas, former financial columnist for Lehman Brothers corporation

 

p112

"These corporate executives tended to use the same language as the paid assassins on the Geraldo show, 'I feel fine about this because I'm just doing what the market requires,' " Derber explains. "I develop an analogy between paid assassins on the street and those in the suites. In the most general sense, these corporate executives are paid hitmen who use very much the same language and rationalization. I argue that corporations are exemplifying a form of anti-social behavior which is undermining a great deal of the social fabric and civilized values that we would hope to sustain."

Charles Derber, professor of sociology, Boston College

 

p113

Today ... there is no mass-movement attacking the corporation as the cause of the wealth disparity, destruction of the environment and all the many other corporate driven ills afflicting society.

 

p116

...big business is eating out the democratic foundation of this country, and when the empty shell crumbles, what kind of chaos might we anticipate?

 

p130

When the Teddy Roosevelt-ear trustbusters broke up the Standard Oil monopoly, they were motivated by political as much as economic concerns. They understood that concentrated economic power translates into concentrated political power, and that concentrated political power is incompatible with democracy.

 

p132

The multinationals are often larger in economic terms than the developing countries in which they do business, meaning Third World governments are routinely going to have a ver hard time regulating the corporate goliaths. That the company's headquarters are outside of the country, and that the corporation has no allegiance to the country in which it is operating, will make the regulatory challenge that much more difficult.

 

p151

Our priorities are that we want to dominate North America first, then South America, and then Asia and then Europe.

Wal-Mart President and CEO David Glass, to a USA Today business reporter

 

p154

If you serve power, power rewards you with respectibility.

Noam Chomsky

 

p168

Disney, to its everlasting shame, has in recent years outsourced production of Disney clothing and toys to sweatshops in Haiti, Burma, Vietnam, China and elsewhere.

 

p189

It's time to redirect First Amendment law. The simple solution to the problem is to deny corporations First Amendment protections. Extending constitutional protections to corporations hurts democracy by putting artificial entities with enormous resource and legal advantages (limited liability, perpetual life, inability to be jailed) on the same footing as people.

 

p198

Throughout the nation's history, the states have had the authority to give birth to a corporation by granting a corporate charter and to impose the death penalty on a corporate wrong-doer by revoking its charter.

 

p199

... the law has always allowed the [state's] attorney general to go to court to simply dissolve a corporation for wrongdoing and sell its assets to others who will operate in the public ilnterest.

...convicted individuals iln California get only three strikes. Why should big corporations get endless strikes?

Loyola Law School Professor Robert Benson


Corporate Predators