The Corporate Sabotage of America's Future by Robert Weissman and Joan Claybrook

Long-time corporate accountability crusaders Robert Weissman, Public Citizen president, and Joan Claybrook, Public Citizen president emeritus, investigate how giant corporations the corrupt the policy-making process to block reforms favored by overwhelming majorities of the American people and to enrich themselves through far-reaching corporate welfare schemes.

Robert Weissman is president of Public Citizen and an expert on corporate and government accountability. At Public Citizen, he has helped lead the charge for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, lower the price of prescription drugs and advance corporate accountability. He worked as director of the corporate accountability organization Essential Action from 1995 to 2009. From 1989 to 2009, he was editor of the Multinational Monitor, a magazine that tracked multinational corporations. He previously worked as a public interest attorney at the Center for Study of Responsive Law. With Russell Mokhiber, Weissman is co-author of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for Mega-Profits and the Attack on Democracy and On the Rampage: Corporations Plundering the Global Village (both Common Courage Press). He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

Joan Claybrook was president of Public Citizen from 1982 until she retired in 2009. During that time she played a key role in many successful advocacy campaigns, including enactment of the McCain-Feingold law that placed federal limits on money in political campaigns, preventing enactment of a federal law that would have limited consumer rights to sue multinational companies for sale of defective products, securing congressional enactment of a mandate for airbags in all consumer vehicles which have saved over 60,000 lives in the U.S., and laws to prevent vehicle rollover and to require rear cameras in all vehicles. She was appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1977-1981 to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, where she issued the airbag rule, the first ever federal fuel economy standards, tire safety rules and initiated the New Car Assessment Program requiring motor vehicle manufacturers to label their new cars with safety data to inform consumers before purchase. This consumer information program has been copied across the world. Before serving as NHTSA Administrator she worked with Ralph Nader to create Congress Watch, Public Citizen’s lobby arm. She is a graduate of Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, and Georgetown University Law Center and received honorary degrees from both.