Virtually the entire political conflict in America today is over who will control our government: entrenched wealth and corporations or the people?

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"Corporate Dominance of Every Aspects of Our Lives Is Suffocating us." Rescue Our Society: "Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back" (Hardcover) By Douglas Rushkoff

BuzzFlash.com's Review (excerpt)
Remember, virtually the entire political conflict in America today is over who will control our government: entrenched wealth and corporations or the people.

The Dittoheads and Hannity Head Bangers are just tools used by corporate wealth to create a distraction and sense of victimhood that helps entrenched wealth achieve their legislative goals.

This is an important book to get your thinking to rise above the maelstrom of day-to-day politics and media.

Booklist:

Since the Renaissance, the corporation—the operating system of the market—has formed and controlled people, and Rushkoff describes how it has infiltrated all aspects of American life. In the twenty-first century, we continue to consider corporations as role models and saviors but engage other people as competitors to be beaten or resources to be exploited. The author bemoans extreme networking (called buzz marketing), which makes our personal, social interactions become promotional opportunities and the lines between fiction and reality and friends and market become blurred. Our lives are overextended, and there is no time, energy, or commitment to do anything but work and perhaps consider family. Rushkoff recommends that we fight back by “de-corporatizing” ourselves. His suggestions include thinking locally by participating directly with our neighbors in community activities and using various Internet sites that provide opportunities to contribute directly to a particular school or to extend a “micro loan” to a specific entrepreneur in the Third World. This is an excellent, thought-provoking book.

In an interview posted on Alternet, the author notes:

Doug Rushkoff: What happens is corporations like automobile industry have a need for roads or the energy industry has a need for regulation that doesn't let people use solar. So they go to government and get laws written that change -- they get laws written to get the things they want. So they basically steer the rail road through the real estate that they want to own or the automobile industry wants more people to use cars, so they get their guy in to be Secretary of Defense and he builds roads for cars and develop suburbs that require people to use cars to get to work. The next generation that grows up with things being that way, thinks that things just are that way. So the way we internalize corporate values is by assuming that the rules that are in place are pre-existing conditions of the universe rather than rules made by certain people at certain times....

Convincing people to stop outsourcing all of their economic activity, consumption and production to extremely inefficient long distance corporations that extract the human value without creating any values. You lose all your leverage. That's not to say that everyone has to do everything in some protest against every corporation out there but what if you reclaim the 90% of stuff that you can do locally or with friends and just give corporations 10% of what they need? It's the most activist thing you can do. Just the idea that people are now going to save maybe eight percent instead of three percent of their money has people shuddering in finance...

It persisted because kings rewrote laws to preserve corporations whenever I mean corporation. Corporations were invented by kings as a way they could make money by having money and creating no value themselves. So they granted monopoly charters to their friends in return for shares in those companies. And it persisted because the kings were able to write laws that gave corporations unfair advantage at every term. So whenever corporations have been threatened by some form of competition or another, the king or in our era government ends up rewriting the laws to favor corporate activity over competitive local, small business activity. It's just corruption.

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