Alan Cohen’s Hijacked: How Deregulated Large Corporations with the Collusion of the R and DNC Have Absconded with Equality, Democracy, and Freedom, and How to Get Them Back is an ambitious work of political and economic criticism built around a straightforward concern: who actually exercises power in the United States, and who benefits from it? Cohen argues that over roughly the past fifty years, large corporations and wealthy interests have gained increasing influence over government while ordinary citizens have lost economic security, political influence, and equality of opportunity. He approaches this subject as someone who believes strongly in capitalism but also believes capitalism requires active government oversight to remain competitive and socially useful. The result is a book driven less by party loyalty than by Cohen’s conviction that concentrated economic power has distorted both major political parties. He describes the book as a selective introduction drawing together hundreds of sources on inequality and corporate behavior, and that description captures its character well. It’s essentially a very large argument assembled from history, economics, politics, journalism, and case studies.

One of the book’s most effective choices is to begin by asking what inequality actually means and how much of it a society should accept. Cohen acknowledges that differences in ability, responsibility, effort, and circumstance will naturally produce some inequality. His deeper concern is equality of rights, opportunity, treatment under the law, political influence, and access to economic security. From there, Hijacked builds its central case that markets don’t operate independently of government. Laws establish everything from minimum wages and bankruptcy procedures to union rights, taxation, corporate charters, environmental standards, and financial regulations, so political decisions inevitably shape economic outcomes. Cohen argues that decades of deregulation have steadily changed those rules in favor of large corporations and wealthy individuals. This historical framework is important because it keeps the book from treating present-day inequality as an isolated problem. Cohen places it in a much longer struggle between concentrated wealth and democratic power, moving through ancient societies, the American founding, the rise of corporations, the Gilded Age, the New Deal, postwar prosperity, and the turn toward deregulation beginning in the late twentieth century.

The middle of Hijacked is where its scale really becomes apparent. Cohen moves through pollution, climate change, corporate welfare, military contracting, privatization, food production, medicine, pharmaceuticals, finance, law, housing, education, the arts, retail, transportation, privacy, labor, media, science, and other parts of everyday life. His purpose is cumulative. He wants readers to see these subjects as connected expressions of the same underlying problem. The section on corporate welfare is especially revealing of his method. Cohen surveys tax advantages, subsidies, contracts, bailouts, bankruptcy protections, liability protections, failures of regulation, and other mechanisms that he believes transfer wealth and risk from the public to large corporations. From there he turns to what he calls the destruction of businesses, institutions, and professions, examining how corporate consolidation can alter the priorities of industries that once operated according to professional, civic, or local values. Reading these sections can feel like moving through an enormous case file. Cohen is interested in accumulation, patterns, and connections, and the sheer number of examples is part of his argument.

Cohen writes with urgency and with a strong personal point of view, so readers are rarely left wondering what conclusion he wants them to draw. At his best, he takes subjects that are usually discussed separately and makes their relationships easier to see. A discussion of deregulation leads naturally into corporate influence, which leads into campaign financing, regulatory capture, weakened professional independence, and growing inequality. He also spends considerable time challenging what he considers misleading cultural narratives about free markets, government, taxation, privatization, corporate efficiency, upward mobility, and the political identities of the two major parties. His style is closer to an extended civic argument than a detached academic study. That gives Hijacked energy, but it also means the reader is continually being asked to evaluate Cohen’s interpretation of a very large collection of evidence. The book rewards an engaged reader who’s willing to follow hundreds of examples and pause occasionally to consider where the evidence is strongest, where a conclusion is more interpretive, and how the pieces fit into the broader thesis.

I think Cohen wants Hijacked to produce political action. His proposed answer is an alternative party organized around what he repeatedly calls government “of, by, and for the people,” with reducing inequality and limiting concentrated corporate power as its central commitments. He argues that reform efforts in health care, environmental protection, labor rights, education, voting rights, and numerous other areas keep encountering the same political obstacles, so people working on separate causes would gain more by joining forces to change who controls government. Whether readers embrace that solution or reach a different conclusion, the book makes clear why Cohen believes structural political change has to accompany economic reform. I’d recommend Hijacked most strongly to politically engaged readers who are interested in economic inequality, corporate power, regulation, American political history, and the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It will especially appeal to readers who enjoy big-picture nonfiction that gathers material from many fields and tries to turn it into a single explanation of how contemporary America got where it is. Even when readers disagree with Cohen, there’s plenty here to argue with, think about, and investigate further.

Pages: 628 | ASIN : B0H8W5SMSX