Volume 20, Number 19 · November 29, 1973
Owing Your Soul to the Company Store
By Mark Green, Ralph Nader
Economists, preoccupied with theories of the corporation and the national economy, rarely ask what happens when a corporation monopolizes not only a product but the local work force, when a town is obliged to 'consume' a company's pollution, when one business controls a city by political intimidation. While such questions are largely ignored, local families and local owners increasingly become appendages of the absentee-owners, usually of national and multinational conglomerates. 'He who was a leader in the village becomes dependent on outsiders for his action and policy,' Justice William O. Douglas said of this condition. 'Clerks responsible to a superior in a distant place take the place of resident proprietors beholden to no one.'[1]
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