Unchecked Corporate Power ─ Why the Crimes of Multinational Corporations Are Routinized Away and What We Can Do About It

Why are people with excessive corporate power permitted to engage in wide-ranging forms of harm and victimization? How are governing bodies, originally established to protect and defend modern democracies from despotic and ancient regimes of abuse, abdicating their responsibilities and surrendering to the requirements of corporate-security states? In his new book, Gregg Barak offers an exposé of the globalized, the corporate, the financial, the environmental, the governmental and the state-corporate crimes of powerful organizations.

Central to the book’s thesis is the concept of ‘state-routinized’ crime: the way in which otherwise criminal activities are normalized within society and how crimes of the powerful are reproduced. Drawing on a range of current cases from the recent epidemic of Wall Street securities frauds to the torturing of prisoners by the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Barak lays bare the duplicity of nation states in their harsh reactions to street crime in comparison to their lenient reaction of the crimes of the powerful. He explains how and why it is that crimes of the powerful are seemingly beyond incrimination in the current climate of fear and legalized corruption.

Gregg Barak is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Eastern Michigan University, USA. He is the editor of the Routledge International Handbook of the Crimes of the Powerful, author of Theft of a Nation: Wall Street Looting and Federal Regulatory Colluding, and recipient of the National White Collar Crime Center/White Collar Crime Research Consortium’s Outstanding Book Award for 2012.