A Giant's World

...The result is a powerful, impressively documented exposure of how big business dominates so much of our lives...

...As one of the world's largest private employers, it numbers 404,000 on its staff in more than 240 plants and 100 laboratories around the world...

...Moreover, GE sold $13 billion in goods and services in 1974, and piled up more than a billion dollars in profits...

...The authors' explanation makes sense: General Electric is the sixth largest and the most diversified corporation in the world, in the variety of its products and services, so that a study of its activities reveals the effects of corporate involvement in a great range of fields...

...It is only rarely, as in the past year or so, that Federal Government investigations have permitted us a glimpse of the aspects of corporate conduct not available in the artful propaganda that pours daily into the nation's news media...

...The World of a Giant Corporation probes into many of the crucial operations of GE—its impact on our energy crisis, its worldwide growth as a multinational corporation, the significant part it plays as a prime mover in the military-industrial complex, a study of its workers and managers, its role as a monopoly, and its cunning campaign of public relations...

...The result is a superb and immensely useful study of the corporate culture in action...

...Why GE...

...The authors' conclusions are a bit thin, but they do include reflections on meaningful proposals for change and reform, together with essays by Ralph Nader ("Federal Chartering: A Handle on Corporate Power") and Derek Shearer ("Converting the War Machine to Social Programs that We Can Control...

...Thus, we were recently permitted a fleeting peek into the extent to which bribery, corruption, price-fixing, and the stealthy process of slipping slush funds into the pockets of our legislators and government officials at home and abroad are major ingredients in the world of the corporate giants...

...Morris H. Rubin is Publisher of The Progressive...

...It was the need to provide Americans with something more solid and meaningful than a fleeting headline or a thirty-second bit on the evening television news that led John Woodman-see and his associates, working with the cooperation of the New England regional office of the American Friends Service Committee, to try to fill the gap...

...Mostly they do their stuff as far removed from the eyes of the people as they can manage...

...Woodmansee and his colleagues devoted two years of study to GE that included prodigious research into the available primary and secondary sources—including interviews with GE officials...

...Although their presentation ranges briefly and perhaps fitfully over the wide spectrum of the giant corporations, Woodmansee and his colleagues wisely chose to concentrate much of their research on a single typical corporation, General Electric...

...And it is presented, with only occasional aberrations, with simplicity and clarity...

...MORRIS H. RUBIN Few institutions are so capable of fastening a stranglehold on our pluralistic society as the corporate leviathans that dominate our social and economic skyline...