51 of the world's biggest 100 economies are corporations, not countries. As the most powerful institution of our time, the multinational corporation dominates not only global economics, but politics and culture as well. Yet the mechanisms of corporate control have remained largely hidden from public perception-until now.

“Connie Bruck traces the rise of this empire with vivid metaphors and with a smooth command of high finance’s terminology.” —The New York Times “The Predators’ Ball is dirty dancing downtown.” —New York Newsday From bestselling author Connie Bruck, The Predators’ Ball dramatically captures American business history in the making, uncovering the philosophy of greed that dominated Wall Street in the 1980s. During the 1980s, Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert was the Billionaire Junk Bond King. He invented such things as “the highly confident letter” (“I’m highly confident that I can raise the money you need to buy company X”) and the “blind pool” (“Here’s a billion dollars: let us help you buy a company”), and he financed the biggest corporate raiders—men like Carl Icahn and Ronald Perelman. And then, on September 7, 1988, things changed... The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Milken and Drexel Burnham Lambert with insider trading and stock fraud. Waiting in the wings was the US District Attorney, who wanted to file criminal and racketeering charges. What motivated Milken in his drive for power and money? Did Drexel Burnham Lambert condone the breaking of laws?

Charles Ferguson, who electrified the world with his Academy Award-winning documentary, Inside Job, now reveals how rogues with influence have taken over the country and are driving it to financial and social ruin. In Predator Nation, Ferguson exposes the networks of academic, government, and congressional influence--in all recent administrations, including Obama's--that prepared the path to conquest. He reveals how once-revered figures like Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers have become mere courtiers to the elite. And based on many newly released court filings, he details the extent of the crimes--there is no other word--committed in the frenzied chase for storied wealth that marked the 2000s. And, finally, he lays out a brief plan of action for how we might take it back.

If you work in a human resources department, you have a great opportunity to display leadership by thinking like a businessperson, shaping the company culture, and hiring the right people. With this guidebook, youll learn strategies to improve your performance as a human resources professional so you can exude great leadership. Discover how to promote entrepreneurship; promote teamwork through a corporate manifesto; stretch your organizations capabilities to achieve growth; build more engaged cultures by energizing employees. Todays human resources professional is a key player in driving growth and innovation. Its no longer enough to just be effective; you must also be a leader and take steps to help your company achieve its goals. Step out of the back office and take on key roles as a business partner, strategic thinker, and profit builder. With Greatness-Cored Leadership, youll understand the key challenges that companies face and learn how to translate visions into reality.

We live in an era defined by corporate greed and malfeasance—one in which unprecedented accounting frauds and failures of compliance run rampant. In order to calm investor fears, revive perceptions of legitimacy in markets, and demonstrate the resolve of state and federal regulators, a host of reforms, high-profile investigations, and symbolic prosecutions have been conducted in response. But are they enough? In this timely work, William S. Laufer argues that even with recent legal reforms, corporate criminal law continues to be ineffective. As evidence, Laufer considers the failure of courts and legislatures to fashion liability rules that fairly attribute blame for organizations. He analyzes the games that corporations play to deflect criminal responsibility. And he also demonstrates how the exchange of cooperation for prosecutorial leniency and amnesty belies true law enforcement. But none of these factors, according to Laufer, trumps the fact that there is no single constituency or interest group that strongly and consistently advocates the importance and priority of corporate criminal liability. In the absence of a new standard of corporate liability, the power of regulators to keep corporate abuses in check will remain insufficient. A necessary corrective to our current climate of graft and greed, Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds will be essential to policymakers and legal minds alike. “[This] timely work offers a dispassionate analysis of problems relating to corporate crime.”—Harvard Law Review

It is not often that we have the opportunity to hear from the early pioneers of a social movement about how it grew and evolved, but that is exactly what this book sets out to do. The Difference Makers tells the stories of 23 entrepreneurs who have been instrumental in developing corporate responsibility; offers an analysis of how CSR has emerged as a key business issue, why it has evolved so quickly, and the visions of its thought leaders. The book examines 23 of the key players who have been instrumental in developing the corporate responsibility movement. They include John Ruggie and the Global Compact, Allen White and the Global Reporting Initiative, John Elkington and SustainAbility, Simon Zadek and AccountAbility, Alice Tepper Marlin and Social Accountability International, Bob Dunn and Business for Social Responsibility, and Joan Bavaria and Ceres – along with many others. The Difference Makers is a history and detailed analysis of how corporate responsibility has emerged as a key political, social, and business issue, why it has evolved so quickly, and what the visions of its thought leaders are for the future. It is essential reading for academics, business people and all those interested in the future of the corporation.

The recent accounting and corporate scandals of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, K-Mart and McWane (producer of cast iron water and sewer pipes), which has killed 9 workers and injured 4600 more with impunity since 1995- and other greedy and lawless billion dollar behemoths- are just the tip of the iceberg relative to the serious and pervasive harm that corporations and greed are doing to people, communities, the earth and to our children's and grandchildren's future. How Corporations Hurt Us All examines many crises including how Big Oil, billion dollar weapons contractors, and unaccountable private firms like DynCorps are continuing dangerous and immoral Cold War policies by driving multiple wars and military operations; our collapsing corporate health care system that restricts free speech, stifles public debate, and manipulates public opinion to serve narrow corporate and political goals. Some of the world's largest multinational corporationsDExxonMobil(#1 oil company), Wal-Mart (#1 retailer), HCA (#1 hospital conglomerate), Citigroup (the world's #1 financial institution)- and other rogue operations are profiled in the book. The good news is that there are effective approaches to all of these interrelated, greed-driven crises. Even more hopeful are the corporate reform and global economic democracy movements representing thousands of dedicated citizens' groups and millions fo individuals throughout the world. Yet, what is ultimately necessary to reverse global economic, social, and environmental deterioration and eventual collapse, insure world peace and security, strength our weakened civil liberties, and fulfill our human potential, as the book explains, is forging a broad consensus on a new bottom line, or organizing principle, for business and society.

The cult of the free market has dominated economic policy-talk since the Reagan revolution of nearly thirty years ago. Tax cuts and small government, monetarism, balanced budgets, deregulation, and free trade are the core elements of this dogma, a dogma so successful that even many liberals accept it. But a funny thing happened on the bridge to the twenty-first century. While liberals continue to bow before the free-market altar, conservatives in the style of George W. Bush have abandoned it altogether. That is why principled conservatives -- the Reagan true believers -- long ago abandoned Bush. Enter James K. Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist. In this riveting book, Galbraith first dissects the stale remains of Reaganism and shows how Bush and company had no choice except to dump them into the trash. He then explores the true nature of the Bush regime: a "corporate republic," bringing the methods and mentality of big business to public life; a coalition of lobbies, doing the bidding of clients in the oil, mining, military, pharmaceutical, agribusiness, insurance, and media industries; and a predator state, intent not on reducing government but rather on diverting public cash into private hands. In plain English, the Republican Party has been hijacked by political leaders who long since stopped caring if reality conformed to their message. Galbraith follows with an impertinent question: if conservatives no longer take free markets seriously, why should liberals? Why keep liberal thought in the straitjacket of pay-as-you-go, of assigning inflation control to the Federal Reserve, of attempting to "make markets work"? Why not build a new economic policy based on what is really happening in this country? The real economy is not a free-market economy. It is a complex combination of private and public institutions, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, higher education, the housing finance system, and a vast federal research establishment. The real problems and challenges -- inequality, climate change, the infrastructure deficit, the subprime crisis, and the future of the dollar -- are problems that cannot be solved by incantations about the market. They will be solved only with planning, with standards and other policies that transcend and even transform markets. A timely, provocative work whose message will endure beyond this election season, The Predator State will appeal to the broad audience of thoughtful Americans who wish to understand the forces at work in our economy and culture and who seek to live in a nation that is both prosperous and progressive.

The inspiration for the film that won the 2004 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary, The Corporation contends that the corporation is created by law to function much like a psychopathic personality, whose destructive behavior, if unchecked, leads to scandal and ruin. Over the last 150 years the corporation has risen from relative obscurity to become the world’s dominant economic institution. Eminent Canadian law professor and legal theorist Joel Bakan contends that today's corporation is a pathological institution, a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and societies. In this revolutionary assessment of the history, character, and globalization of the modern business corporation, Bakan backs his premise with the following observations: -The corporation’s legally defined mandate is to pursue relentlessly and without exception its own economic self-interest, regardless of the harmful consequences it might cause to others. -The corporation’s unbridled self-interest victimizes individuals, society, and, when it goes awry, even shareholders and can cause corporations to self-destruct, as recent Wall Street scandals reveal. -Governments have freed the corporation, despite its flawed character, from legal constraints through deregulation and granted it ever greater authority over society through privatization. But Bakan believes change is possible and he outlines a far-reaching program of achievable reforms through legal regulation and democratic control. Featuring in-depth interviews with such wide-ranging figures as Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, business guru Peter Drucker, and cultural critic Noam Chomsky, The Corporation is an extraordinary work that will educate and enlighten students, CEOs, whistle-blowers, power brokers, pawns, pundits, and politicians alike.

Are corporations cults? Do they control our behavior, thoughts, information and emotions? Zubaty makes a pretty good case for that. Should the legal status of corporate ?persons? be challenged as a religious violation ? a gross infringement of the supposed boundary between church and state? He makes a pretty good case for that. Have we done a good job of keeping religion out of government but a miserable job of keeping government out of religion? He makes a pretty good case for that. Is Darwinism a science? Or a religion? You'll get vertigo over his take on that. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.