The I Hate Corporate America Reader: How Big Companies from McDonald's to Microsoft Are Destroying Our Way of Life

Americans are beginning to take note that large corporations are at the heart of what ails our country—from job losses to mad cow disease to pollution to rising cancer rates to obesity to empire building. Every week brings new headlines of some new outrage by companies ranging from the former Enron and Halliburton to McDonald's and Wal-Mart; meanwhile, other crimes are hidden from public view. This book will energize, empower, entertain, and mobilize readers who are disgusted with the behavior of the corporate powers-that-be. Some of America's most influential writers—such as Molly Ivins, Erik Schlosser, Arianna Huffington, Jim Hightower, and others—offer their views on price-fixing and other anticompetitive practices that boost consumer prices, anti-labor tactics (often illegal), near-slave wages and working conditions, marketing practices, drug tests, and other activities that destroy worker and consumer privacy, overseas sweat shops (complete with sex slaves) run by U.S. companies, environmental violations that lead to higher cancer rates and other disease, armies of corporate lobbyists who bribe our lawmakers and judges, unsafe products that endanger our lives and our children's lives, corporate downsizing, benefit cutbacks, and job exporting, and—last, but not least—overpaid executives and board members who rip off shareholders and workers.