For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of Rural America
Loka Ashwood
Abstract
Why is government distrust rampant, especially in the rural United States? This book offers a simple explanation: corporations and the government together dispossess rural people of their prosperity, and even their property. Based on four years of fieldwork, this eye-opening assessment plays out in a mixed-race Georgia community that hosted the first nuclear power reactors sanctioned by the government in three decades. This work serves as an explanatory mirror of prominent trends in current American politics. Churches become havens for redemption, poaching a means of retribution, guns a tool o ... More
Why is government distrust rampant, especially in the rural United States? This book offers a simple explanation: corporations and the government together dispossess rural people of their prosperity, and even their property. Based on four years of fieldwork, this eye-opening assessment plays out in a mixed-race Georgia community that hosted the first nuclear power reactors sanctioned by the government in three decades. This work serves as an explanatory mirror of prominent trends in current American politics. Churches become havens for redemption, poaching a means of retribution, guns a tool of self-defense, and nuclear power a faltering solution to global warming as governance strays from democratic principles. In the absence of hope or trust in rulers, rural racial tensions fester and divide. The book tells of the rebellion that unfolds as the rights of corporations supersede the rights of humans.
Keywords:
corporations,
government,
rural people,
American politics,
redemption,
retribution,
self-defense,
nuclear power,
government distrust
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780300215359 |
| Published to Yale Scholarship Online: May 2019 |
DOI:10.12987/yale/9780300215359.001.0001 |
