Power to the People!: A Young People's Guide to Fighting for Our Rights as Citizens and Consumers

Synopsis: An important and empowering history of and guide to the battle for our right to safe products and conditions--for younger readers.

Corporations enter our daily lives from the moment we wake up until we turn off the lights at night. Large Internet companies, health insurance companies, fuel and transportation companies--all play a role in our lives every moment of every single day. And yet what power do we have over their actions or intentions? None, except through redress in a court of law for any harm they may have done. This area of the law is known as torts, from the French word for wrongs.

Power to the People! offers a deep understanding of how civil actions work, through many examples and straightforward language for the middle-grade student reader. From Ralph Nader's 1966 law-changing address to Congress on automobile safety (it's thanks to Nader that we wear seat belts) to the decades-long battle to raise awareness of the risks of smoking (cigarette and cigar smoke contains over 7,000 chemicals, and has caused the deaths of more than 2.5 million nonsmokers in the last half-century), readers will learn how we must fight to protect ourselves from corporations that are more concerned with profit than our safety. Corporate America will listen, Panchyk argues, but only if we make ourselves heard. Power to the People! explores all the ways we the people can be powerful, too.