Corporations Are Gonna Get Your Mama: Globalization and the Downsizing of the American Dream

While Hollywood has replaced politics with silly diversions about alien invasions, many Americans face a tangible fear: the seemingly inexorable grip of corporate power over their lives. Wages have been dropping for twenty years. Income inequality that grew under Reagan and Bush has accelerated under Clinton. More and more people face an uncertain future as the "land of opportunity" becomes a cynical and empty phrase for millions of Americans. This hard-hitting anthology offers an incisive overview of how corporations, long plunderers of the Third World, are unleashing "market forces" like a pack of rabid dogs attacking the American way of life.

In "Paying to Lose Our Jobs," Patricia Horn shows that U.S. women, especially women of color, are the big losers in the low-wage bidding game. Each year from 1979 to 1992, an average of 41,000 apparel workers in the U.S. lost their jobs. Three-quarters of American apparel workers are women, over a third of whom are minorities. This combination makes them the U.S.'s most vulnerable workers.

But some sectors of society are well-off. As Ralph Nader points out in his chapter, Washington is a federal forum whose operating slogan is "Billions for corporations, bills for people." Societies rot from the top down. They reconstruct from the bottom up. Real democracy is not just good for the economy, it is good for peace and tranquillity, for character and local initiative, for justice and the pursuit of happiness.

Yet CORPORATIONS ARE GONNA GET YOUR MOMMA brings you the good news as well: there are hundreds of groups struggling to create more democratic control of capital and the capitol.