Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston asks why the United States ranks forty-seventh out of 224 countries in infant mortality, forty-sixth in the share of our economy spent on public education, thirty-seventh in the quality of our health care (with approximately 50 million without insurance), and “dead last” in 2009 among 190 countries on our current account deficit that measures how much more we import than export.   He concludes that as a country we have been “letting big business damage and destroy competition, escape tax burdens and push down wages.”

For more than four years Johnston has researched appalling examples of corporate greed and government policy complicity that harms consumers and which he sets forth in his very fine book The Fine Print, How Big Companies Use “Plain English” To Rob You Blind.  The book treats the fine print at a macro level, with less about the actual fine print, though it does have a discussion of arbitration clauses and talks about the harmful line items on telephone and cable bills and footnotes in student loans.  Overall he diagnoses the “core problem is with oligopolies and monopolies and their excessive prices, lower quality services and reduced innovation.  They are the principal means, enabled by government, to redistribute income and wealth from the many to the politically connected few.” 

In doing so, Johnston gives specifics across numerous industries and he names names.  He has some unflattering things to say about Pfizer, Entergy, AT & T, Verizon, Goldman Sachs, Massey Energy Company, Walmart, Wells Fargo, Public Service Electric & Gas­­–a New Jersey utility, Alan Greenspan, Warren Buffett and BNSF Railroad, Judge Frank Easterbrook and the former dean of the University of Chicago Law School, Daniel Fischel, the Chicago School of Economics and the worship of antitax and deregulation, Chief Justice John Roberts and Citizens United, and the list goes on.  He discusses the vast corporate power of multinationals with treasuries larger than many countries and feckless government regulators, often industry born or on their way for a job, who are redistributing wealth upwards to ensure profits for corporate America rather than looking out for workers suffering from flat wages and consumers who pay for this abuse—to the estimated tune of $2,390 per year for an average family of four.   Johnston also criticizes the media for echoing rather than challenging pro-corporate, anti-tax group think and not asking the tough questions to act as a watchdog.

Perfectly Legal (on subsidies).  The book should galvanize consumers and fuel consumer advocates to continue to take on the rampant corporate crime, fraud and abuse.   To his credit, Johnston’s book has a solutions section, and they are tall orders that require substantial state and congressional action and vigorous agency regulation, if not constitutional amendments to get rid of corporate personhood and   This will require in turn grassroots and political organizing to provide some wind to the inert and failing status quo—to make Congress and state and federal regulators actually take some action on behalf of consumers.