Suiting Themselves: How Corporations Drive the Global Agenda

by Sharon Beder

In this brilliantly researched expos 'communications Rottweiler' Sharon Beder blasts open the backrooms and boardrooms to reveal how the international corporate elite dictate global politics for their own benefit. Beder shows how they created business associations andthink tanks in the 1970s to drive public policy, forced the worldwide privatization and deregulation of public services in the 1980s and 1990s (enabling a massive transfer of ownership and control over essential services) and, still not satisfied, have worked relentlessly since the late 1990s to rewrite the very rules of the global economy to funnel wealth and power into their pockets. Want a globalized and homogenized world of conflict, poverty and massive environmental degradation run by a corporate oligarchy that wipes its feet on democracy? Or a democratic world, where poverty is history, companies work for people and clean water is a right, not a privilege you pay for? Beder‘s message is clear - it‘s your world, and it‘s time to fight for it.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 4, 2006

About the author

Sharon Beder is an honorary professor in the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong.

Sharon's research has focussed on how power relationships are maintained and challenged, particularly by corporations and professions. She is interested in environmental politics; the rhetoric of sustainable development; the philosophies behind environmental economics; and trends in environmentalism and corporate activism/public relations. Most recently she has broadened her research interests to critique various manifestations of neoliberalism including privatisation and deregulation, market solutions to social problems and the business takeover of school education.

She has written 10 books, around 150 articles, book chapters and conference papers, as well as designing teaching resources and educational websites.

Reviews

[Γιώργος Πισίνας · Rating 4 out of 5]

During the centuries of modernity, people were struggling to enforce a framework of their social lives. Following tremendous efforts, the constitutions of nations were written by the red ink provided from the pile of bodies falling in this struggle. Following the bloodbath of World War II similar texts were written in the global scenery. The aim was to provide people with the welfare they needed to prosper and protect them from aspiring exploiters.But in the last decades, some other texts have come to replace these documents, written by the green ink provided from tons of money spent in lobbying, PR, and manipulation of public opinion. Texts that are binding and are aiming to provide corporations with the welfare they need to prosper and protect them from the people's desire for prosperity.

Sharon Beder is providing in this well researched book the process of writing these international treaties. One may be dazzled by the multitude of names and acronyms in the book, but Beder is here providing with all the main agents of this process as well as the multitude of the roles they played.A must read book, well written for anyone who wants to see how big Corporations are setting the agenda and are providing guiding national and international policies.
What I also noticed at the sidelines of the main theme of this book was a plethora of examples on how agency is moving history forward. A concrete record of the dialect between the objective and subjective laws of human societies. This is something I noticed in the text, as a reader who with a marxist philosophical background and understanding. Beder though is not utilising this background at all, though this is not something that makes her work any less worse.

I recommend this book with a full heart!