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Ian Sinclair talks to academic JOEL BAKAN about his new book on corporate power and asks whether multinational giants have really changed and what concerned citizens can do to resist capital’s assault on democracy

Academic and author Joel Bakan

PUBLISHED in 2004 alongside the 2003 film documentary of the same name, Joel Bakan’s The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power was a timely and influential critique of the central institution of contemporary capitalism.

Bakan, professor of law at the University of British Columbia in Canada, has now published a sequel — The New Corporation: How ‘Good’ Corporations Are Bad For Democracy. 

In your 2004 book and 2003 documentary you argued corporations, as institutions, are imbued with the character traits of a human psychopath. What is the central argument of your new book? 

Can you give a couple of examples of how these “new” corporations act in contradiction to their socially conscious public rhetoric? 

What do you mean by the book’s subtitle “How ‘good’ corporations are bad for democracy”? 

In terms of how concerned citizens should respond to corporate power, you argue “protest is not enough.” What do you propose? 

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