Overview

The author of the international bestseller The Corporation investigates the shocking exploitation of children by big business There is now an estimated 1 trillion dollars of buying power in the hands of children. Tens of millions of children world-wide are prescribed psychotropic drugs today, compared to close to none in 1980. Food and drink industries spend billions each year marketing junk food to children. This is the story of how big businesses are transforming our children into obsessive and narcissistic mini-consumers, media addicts and pharmaceutical industry guinea pigs. In this insightful and chilling exploration, Joel Bakan throws a brilliant light on the ruthless manipulation of children and on our failure to protect them.

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9780099527053

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Reviews

Powerrful...we are allowing our kids to be abused right under our noses, and we don't even know it -- Doug Johnstone Independent on Sunday A truly terrifying book...clearly written and forcefully argued Big Issue The assault on childhood in our corporate-dominated and profit-driven society, painfully dissected in this penetrating study, is a tragedy not only for the immediate victims but for hopes for a better future. It can be resisted, as Joel Bakan discusses. And it is urgent not to delay -- Noam Chomsky

Our new century of unlimited private profits has put an end to the era of publicly protected childhood. Separated by corporate design from their parents, kids have become capitalism's newest and most lucrative (and most vulnerable) consumers. In his Childhood Under Siege , Joel Bakan offers an angry but careful analysis of how the market flourishes today by selling our children everything from dangerous drugs, toxic plastics and unhealthy snack foods to violent and addictive video games and for-profit standardized tests. The villains here are not playground stalkers but supposedly child-friendly companies like Nickelodeon, Facebook, Pfizer and Edison Schools, along with a trillion dollar children's marketing machine and a government is the problem ideology that hasmade public regulation of the interests of children all but impossible. If they read Bakan carefully, once they get over their rage, both parents and policy makers may be ready to lift the corporate siege that is threatening not just our children but childhood itself. <p>--Benjamin R. Barber, author of Consumed: How Markets Infantilize Adults, Corrupt Children andSwallow Citizens Whole

Author Information

Joel Bakan is professor of law at the University of British Columbia. A Rhodes Scholar and former law clerk to Chief Justice Brian Dickson of the Supreme Court of Canada, he holds law degrees from Oxford, Harvard and Dalhousie Universities. An internationally renowned legal authority, Bakan has written widely on law and its social and economic impact. He is the author of the bestselling and critically-acclaimed The Corporation- The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.

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