Joel Bakan famous quotes

Goodwin has done the seemingly impossible-he has made economics comprehensible and funny.
-- Joel Bakan

#Done #Impossible #Economics

The corporation is not an independent "person" with its own rights, needs, and desires that regulators must respect. It is a state created tool for advancing social and economic policy.
-- Joel Bakan

#Independent #Rights #Desire

The corporation was originally conceived as a public institution whose purpose was to serve national interests and advance the public good.
-- Joel Bakan

#Purpose #Corporations #Institutions

These are the elements of an emerging order that may prove to be as dangerous as any fundamentalism that history has produced. For in a world where anything or anyone can be owned, manipulated, and exploited for profit, everything and everyone will be.
-- Joel Bakan

#Order #Elements #World

A century and a half after its birth, the modern business corporation, an artificial person made in the image of a human psychopath, now is seeking to remake real people in its image.
-- Joel Bakan

#Real #People #Half

The notion that business and government are and should be partners is ubiquitous, unremarkable, and repeated like a mantra by leaders in both domains. It seems a compelling and innocuous idea - until you think about what it really means.
-- Joel Bakan

#Mean #Thinking #Government

As institutional psychopaths, corporations are wont to remove obstacles that get into their way.
-- Joel Bakan

#Corporations #Way #Obstacles

The corporation, like the psychopathic personality it resembles, is programmed to exploit others for profit.
-- Joel Bakan

#Personality #Corporations #Profit

As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.
-- Joel Bakan

#Corporations #Moral #Reason

Corporations now govern society, perhaps more than governments themselves do; yet ironically, it is their very power, much of which they have gained through economic globalization, that makes them vulnerable.
-- Joel Bakan

#Government #Corporations #Vulnerable

By leveraging their freedom from the bonds of location, corporations could now dictate the economic policy of governments.
-- Joel Bakan

#Government #Corporations #Location

As the corporation's size and power grew, so did the need to assuage people's fears of it. The corporation suffered its first full-blown legitimacy crisis in the wake of the early-twentieth-century merger movement, when, for the first time, many Americans realized that corporations, now turned behemoths, threatened to overwhelm their social institutions and governments.
-- Joel Bakan

#Government #People #Needs

The genius of the corporation as a business form, and the reason for its remarkable rise over the last three centuries , was - and is - its capacity to combine the capital, and thus the economic power, of unlimited numbers of people.
-- Joel Bakan

#Numbers #People #Three

Dodge v. Ford still stands for the legal principal that managers and directors have a legal duty to put the shareholders' interests above all others and no legal authority to serve any other interests - what has come to be known as "the best interests of the corporation" principal.
-- Joel Bakan

#Directors #Corporations #Dodge

Quotes from the Underground is a remarkable resource and must-read for writers, researchers, activists and indeed anyone who embraces progressive values and hopes to rescue politics from corporate control.
-- Joel Bakan

#Progressive #Embrace #Resources