Harry Glasbeek - Class Privilege: How Law Shelters Shareholders and Coddles Capitalism

With this extremely timely and immensely readable book, Harry Glasbeek does for the lay reader what he has done for generations of his law students. Deploying loads of fascinating cases from Canada and around the world with great felicity, profound insight, and charming wit, he lifts the veil of legal jargon to explain in the clearest terms how corporations and states intertwine through laws and regulations, courts and tribunals, to allow corporate executives and directors, shareholders and investors, to systematically screw workers, consumers, and citizens, and to accumulate wealth and power at the publics expense.

Leo Panitch, senior scholar and emeritus distinguished research professor, York University

Through his consistently forensic use of legal methodology, real conceptual sophistication, and via a wealth of data, Glasbeek comprehensivelywith fury, irony, disgust, and humourreveals how corporate capitalism is no more and no less than a system that privileges the shareholding class. Challenging the bases of toxic class privilegethe edifice that is the corporation, and the subservient complex of bourgeois lawthis majestic text reinvigorates the belief that a better world remains within our grasp.

Steve Tombs, professor of criminology, The Open University, UK

With deep insight and biting humour, Glasbeek exposes the ideological myths of corporate law, which allow flesh and blood capitalists to voraciously pursue profits without responsibility for the inevitable harms their activities impose on the rest of us. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how law belies its promise of equal justice for all and instead protects the interests of the few.

Eric Tucker, professor, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University

Class Privilege provides a stunning critique of corporate capitalism and the controlling shareholders hiding behind the bourgeois legal categories of corporate personhood and limited liability to reap massive financial rewards whilst routinely evading responsibility for the many and devastating harms generated by their corporation. Glasbeeks work is a much-needed corrective to the thinking capitalists and their state enablers who desperately plead their case for saving corporate capitalism and to the corporations many academic cheerleaders who naively cling to the belief that we can somehow rid the corporation of its predatory instincts so that it might finally realize its social and economic benefits. Class Privilege is a must-read for those who find themselves questioning the legitimacy of the modern corporation and for those currently struggling against the capitalist status quo in the hopes of realizing a better, more just alternative.

Steven Bittle, associate professor, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa

Harry Glasbeek has written an accessible guide to how the law creates and sustains class privilege through corporate capitalism. Shining a light on controlling shareholders, this book exposes how, through law, the real human beings behind the corporate veil are shielded from accountability for social and economic harms. In demystifying this technical knowledge, Glasbeek identifies practical points of leverage and legal principle that can be harnessed for real change.

Fay Faraday, social justice lawyer, visiting professor, Osgoode Hall Law School, and Packer Visiting Chair in Social Justice, York University

Harry Glasbeeks meticulously argued and supremely convincing book exposes one of the great political and economic deceptions of our time: that the corporation is somehow autonomous from the people who own and profit from it. Class Privilege literally tears away the corporate veil with finely crafted analytical precision that allows us to see exactly how shareholders hide behind a machinery of economic growth and human waste that is quickly pushing us to extinction. In demystifying this dehumanizing machine that we call the corporation, Glasbeek shows us how we can be truly human again: by taking back control of our lives and livelihoods from the wealthy minority who hide behind the corporation. This book does not trivialize or oversimplify the enormity of the task that confronts us in beginning to dismantle corporate power; by not shirking from a full exposition of what needs to be done, Glasbeek gifts us with a clear set of instructions that tell us where to start.

David Whyte, professor of socio-legal studies, University of Liverpool, UK and co-author of Corporate Human Rights Violations: Global Prospects for Legal Action

This book is a contemporary Mirror for Magistrates for all professionals and regulators who could expose the falsehoods, fictions, and fallacies of corporate law and regulation but choose not to. It is the current honest politicians and ethical citizens guide to corporate capitalism and the reform of its unethical and unsustainable values. It highlights the legal incentives for controlling shareholders to be careless with others lives and well-being. It illustrates how limited liability and separate legal personality confer immunity for their dishonest conduct. It illuminates how they lead to unfair inequalities in wealth. It sets out in plain and urgent language the necessary reforms to make controlling shareholders, like other citizens, responsible and accountable for their actions refuting the arguments that this is too hard.

Neil Andrews, professor of law, Victoria University, Australia and past editor of the Australian Journal of Corporate Law

Class Privilege: How Law Shelters Shareholders and Coddles Capitalism

2017 Harry Glasbeek

First published in 2017 by

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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Glasbeek, H. J., author

Class privilege: how law shelters shareholders and coddles capitalism / Harry Glasbeek.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77113-307-4 (softcover).ISBN 978-1-77113-308-1 (EPUB).ISBN 978-1-77113-309-8 (PDF)

1. CorporationsCorrupt practices. 2. Corporate power. 3. Social responsibility of business. 4. Capitalism. I. Title.

HV6768.G54 2017364.168C2016-907422-6

C2016-907423-4

Text and cover design by David Vereschagin, Quadrat Communications

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing activities the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.