MIDNIGHT IN THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

A Moscow-based, American political commentator for the TV news channel Russia Today looks with alarm and dismay at what he sees as the corporate domination of his native land.

In this passionate debut laced with sardonic humor, Pittsburgh native Bridge writes that American citizens, formerly rugged individualists, have been reduced to mere consumers under the heel of profit-driven, power-hungry transnational corporate elites. These corporations, he asserts, have vastly enriched themselves by waging war on ordinary workers, while virtually turning the U.S. government into a wholly owned subsidiary. “Today in America,” he writes, “a handful of powerful corporate forces are exerting pressure on the political system to such a degree that to speak of democracy is to sound like a fool and a simpleton.” U.S. Supreme Court decisions granting personhood to corporations, he writes, have perverted the intentions of the founders by giving corporate entities rights meant for living, breathing human beings. In this well-argued, liberally footnoted book, he finds that even the press is too deeply infected by corporate ownership to sound a clarion call over all that has gone wrong, since to do so, he writes, would be to bite the hand of the master. Instead, he notes, corporate-owned mass media deliver increasingly coarse entertainment, while military adventures flicker in the background. The book reads like the heartfelt cry of an expatriate, although his style is sometimes a bit over-the-top. Bridge obviously depicts contemporary America as an oppressive place, but he makes his case too strongly for readers to completely discount it—even if he isn’t the first to present such a picture. However, since Bridge has been living in Moscow, readers might be interested in his take on post-Soviet Russian society, but about this subject, he’s largely silent.

A view of corporate America from afar that will likely offend some readers but ring with truth for others.