Rebecca Jenkins has narrated 3 audiobooks on Listento.it by 2 authors, with an average listener rating of 3★ across 5 ratings. The most-rated is The Corporation.
The Corporation
Summary
Joel Bakan's book is a brilliantly argued account of the corporation's pathological pursuit of profit and power. An eminent law professor and legal theorist, Bakan contends that the corporation is created by law to function much like a psychopathic personality whose destructive behavior, if left unchecked, leads to scandal and ruin. In the most revolutionary assessment of the corporation as a legal and economic institution since Peter Drucker's early works, Bakan backs his premise with the following claims: 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 - a concept endorsed by no less a luminary than the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. 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. While corporate social responsibility in some instances does much good, it is often merely a token gesture, serving to mask the corporation's true character. Governments have abdicated much of their control over the corporation, despite its flawed character, by freeing it from legal constraints through deregulation and by granting it ever greater authority over society through privatization. Despite the structural failings found in the corporation, Bakan believes change is possible and outlines a far-reaching program of concrete, pragmatic, and realistic reforms through legal regulation and democratic control. Backed by extensive research, The Corporation draws on in-depth interviews with such wide-ranging figures as CEO Hank McKinnell of Pfizer, Nobel Prize-winner Milton Friedman, business guru Peter Drucker, and critic Noam Chomsky of MIT.
©2004 Joel Bakan (P)2012 Post Hypnotic Press Inc.
Childhood Under Siege
Summary
In Childhood Under Siege, Joel Bakan reveals the callous and widespread exploitation of children by profit-seeking corporations and society's failure to protect them. The creator of the award-winning film and internationally best-selling book The Corporation, Bakan shows how corporations pump billions of dollars into rendering parents and governments powerless to shield children from a relentless commercial assault designed solely to exploit their unique needs and vulnerabilities. Focusing on the United States in particular, Bakan demonstrates how: Marketers target children with increasingly devious methods to manipulate their vulnerable emotions, cultivate compulsive behavior, and addle their psyches with violence, sex, and obsessive consumerism. More and more children take dangerous psychotropic drugs as pharmaceutical companies commandeer medical science and deploy dubious and often illegal marketing tactics to boost sales. Children's chronic health problems are rising dramatically as corporations dump thousands of new chemicals, in increasing amounts, into the environment, usually with the blessings of industry-influenced governments. Children as young as six are working illegally on farms, getting injured, becoming ill, and dying on the job, while the legal age for farm work remains a shockingly low 12 years old in the U.S. America's schools are becoming private-sector markets for profit-seeking companies, harnessing education to the needs of industry and promoting increasingly regimented and standardized learning. And more "As governments retreat from their previous roles of protecting children from harm at the hands of corporations," Bakan writes, "we, as a society, increasingly neglect children's needs, expose them to exploitation, and thus betray what we, as individuals, cherish most in our lives." Childhood Under Siege is a call to action to reverse these trends, and provides the necessary insights, information, and concrete proposals to do so.
©2011 Joel Bakan (P)2012 Post Hypnotic Press, Inc
The Business of Baby
Summary
Why, despite our state-of-the-art medical technology, does the United States have among the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the industrialized world? Why do pregnant women who are planning to breastfeed receive "free" samples of infant formula from American obstetricians? Why are American newborns given a vaccine at birth against hepatitis B, a sexually transmitted disease? The Business of Baby, an eye-opening work of investigative journalism, exposes how current cultural practices during pregnancy, childbirth, and the first year of a baby's life, are not based on the best evidence or the most modern science. Rather, as the audiobook reveals, current cultural practices reflect how American moms and their babies are being undermined by corporate interests. An illuminating combination of meticulous research and in-depth interviews with parents, doctors, midwives, nurses, health care administrators, and scientists, Margulis's impassioned and eloquent critique is shocking, groundbreaking, and revelatory. The Business of Baby arms parents with the information they need to make informed decisions about their own health and the health of their infants.
©2013 Jennifer Margulis (P)2013 Post Hypnotic Press