Apex Press – förlag

Action and Knowledge draws on twenty years of experience with the techniques and philosophy of Participatory Action-Research (PAR). PAR is an innovative approach to economic and social change, which goes beyond usual institutional boundaries in development by actively involving the people in generating knowledge about their own condition and how it can be changed. PAR requires a strong commitment by participating social scientists to deprofessionalize their expertise and share it with the people, while recognizing that the communities directly involved have the critical voice in determining the direction and goals of change as subjects rather than objects. PAR has its origins in the work of Third World social scientists more than three decades ago as they brought new ways to empower the oppressed by helping them to acquire reliable knowledge on which to construct countervailing power. It has since spread throughout the world, as reflected in this book with contributions from Asia, Africa Latin America and North America in the form of case studies of actual experience with the PAR approach. PAR is not static and fixed but dynamic and enduring, as the case studies and the theoretical chapters that precede and follow the case studies amply reveal.

In these 70 essays, speeches, sermons and screeds, POCLADers probe: corporations as "legal persons"; corporate social responsibility as a ploy; strategies for amending state corporation codes and challenging judge-made laws; and much, much more.This collection, which Howard Zinn calls "powerfully persuasive," chronicles POCLAD's evolution — among the twelve POCLADers and with thousands of activists. Here are hidden histories, crisp analyses and thoughtful responses to corporate apologists — all in one provocative book.

You Call This a Democracy? is a penetrating and troubling look at how the U.S. ruling class and the power elite dominate wealth, power and decision-making in all aspects of our lives and institutions. Arguing that the United States has always had a ruling class, this book does not focus on the current administration or rogue corporations, but presents a deeper, longer-term analysis of how the ruling class has created and uses the Constitution, corporations and the courts, as well as a host of other mechanisms such as tax laws, wars, buffer zones, and distractions, to dominate our society and accumulate wealth.The book is carefully researched and referenced, and filled with numerous examples and illustrations. It is an indispensable resource for every person concerned about the undemocratic concentration of wealth and power in our society.This revised second printing adds a new workshop and classroom friendly study guide which makes this an easy to use book for activists and educators focused on issues of poverty, inequality, multiculturalism, diversity, politics, and economic, racial, and gender justice. The new Afterword includes practical suggestions for incorporating democratic practice in our everyday family, classroom and workplace processes.You Call This a Democracy? is being used in high school and college classes, in study groups, in religious based social justice projects, and by activists throughout the country because it provides a framework and common vocabulary to talk about issues of economic justice and to help guide people's everyday decisions and political involvement.

This chronicle of the multifaceted Bhopal campaign against two of the world's most powerful chemical corporations, Union Carbide and Dow Chemical Co. (which now owns Union Carbide), parallels the emergence of public understanding of environmental safety and corporate accountability that Bhopal helped to create.Written at the 20th anniversary, the Reader includes primary source documents of this evolution. In 1984, the deadly pesticide used in Bhopal and in the United States was hailed by agro-business as part of its "revolution." A valuable reference text for industrial accidents and corporate crimes as well as a handbook for research, prevention and activism, the collection includes gripping first person stories of some of the 200,000 permanently-injured survivors, activists, journalists, scientists, doctors, government and corporate officials. This anthology brings together never-before published testimonies, archival documents translated from Hindi, legal and scientific evidence and commentary, social analysis, even corporate perspectives on liability, and web debates, with comprehensive introductions for each aspect of the disaster. The Bhopal Reader documents forces that are even now bringing Bhopali women to the very doors of the corporation in protest. Some 21 years later, the drinking water is contaminated because Union Carbide never cleaned up its abandoned factory with bags of stored chemicals, causing genetic damage to yet another generation from the deadly methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas. The book reports on the international Bhopal campaign being waged today by survivors, activists, lawyers, doctors - in India, the U.S., Britain and elsewhere around the world - for compensation for all the Bhopal victims. It takes its readers across continents, into newspapers, television stations, websites, courtrooms, shareholders annual meetings, campuses, and chemical plants. The Bhopal Reader presents a valuable case study of the complexities of fighting for justice in a world increasingly overrun by the politics of corporate rule under globalization. Its voices herald the dialogues that will dominate this new century and The Bhopal Reader is the indispensable guide to understanding them.

In Gaveling Down the Rabble, author/activist Jane Anne Morris explores a century and a half of efforts by corporations and the courts to undermine local democracy in the United States by using a "free trade" model. It was that very nineteenth-century model that was later adopted globally by corporations to subvert local attempts at protecting the environment and citizen and worker health.Gaveling Down the Rabble is essential reading for understanding the background of the current struggle for U.S. democracy — local, state and national — against growing corporate power and how we can challenge it.Since the late 1800s the U.S. Supreme Court has been cutting our local, state and national democracy off at the knees — in the name of "free trade" — by usurping the power to make public policy from our elected representatives in the Congress and the state legislatures and by giving power to corporations over citizens.By erecting a "free trade" zone in the U.S., corporations and their champions on the Supreme Court have seen to it that "we do not have a chance of building a democracy." Morris looks at what substantive democracy should look like, and how far from that ideal the Supreme Court — without consent of Congress — has moved us.As presidential candidates are deploring the loss of American jobs from the global trade agreements that were supposed to bring us new prosperity, a public debate is finally opening about the consequences of the last decade of global corporatization. In contrast, we do not debate the internal "free trade" at home that is hidden from view.This urgent new book reveals one hidden source of the corporate power that has been steadily crushing our self governance: namely, the U.S. Commerce Clause in the U.S. Constitution, implemented by nine unelected Presidential appointees.Most significant: Morris shows how environmental, labor and civil-rights cases using Commerce Clause arguments, rather than Constitutional Rights arguments, have distorted citizens' rights by defining them in terms of their value to commerce. But just as alarming is how tenuous the major legislation protecting our democratic rights becomes when based on the Commerce Clause and not grounded in legal rights.Morris also shows how the courts have ruled time and again against local attempts to control large corporations. From efforts to protect public health in the face of slaughter house abuses in the nineteenth century to attempts at regulating wages and hours of migrant workers in the present, the Commerce Clause has been used in favor of corporate interests.Gaveling Down the Rabble describes the development of this national "free trade" zone through Supreme Court decisions over many decades The idea that we live in a "free trade" zone is a commonplace among legal historians. "Supreme Court Justices have been intoning it like a mantra for over a century," Morris writes.She makes the case that the U.S. Supreme Court has subverted our representative government through narrow rulings based on the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause — creating a hidden domestic "free trade" zone as undemocratic as the global "free trade" zone. Using this clause, the Court has incrementally built a large — and growing — body of law favoring large corporate interests over the rights of states, municipalities, labor, minorities and the environment.She finds it astonishing that "a fact so present in legal discourse" is so absent from public debate. This book is her attempt to stimulate that debate.