We are hypocrites, too, he says.

One of the book’s examples of consumers’ hypocrisy has to do with canned tuna. J. W. Connolly, former president of Heinz U.S.A., which was the parent company of StarKist, explains that “consumers wanted a dolphin-safe product,” but “if there was a dolphin-safe can of tuna next to a regular can, people chose the cheaper product. Even if the difference was a penny.”

Image Robert B. Reich Credit... Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

With such vignettes culled from the news media, Mr. Reich disembowels proponents of corporate “social responsibility.” He shows that companies like Wal-Mart are operating legally yet being shamed into incurring social costs that their competitors are not. Critics’ campaigns are a misleading diversion, he argues, because they confuse businesses with what they can never be: public interest bodies.

Public-relations skirmishes are no substitute for democracy. The ritual scolding of corporations in front of Congressional committees, Mr. Reich says, goes hand in hand with Congress’s failure to pass follow-up laws that reward businesses for safeguarding the environment or walking away from deals with serial human rights abusers.

Washington is all about the money, he writes. In 2005, the Census Bureau listed seven suburban counties around the capital as among the 20 richest in the country. And it’s not just Republicans cashing in on their service. “Upon leaving office,” he notes, “more than half of the senior officials in the Clinton administration became corporate lobbyists.”

Would-be analysts of this trend, Mr. Reich says, have it backward; government is not historically bigger now, relative to gross domestic product, and politicians are not more corrupt. Rather, market competition is greater, which means that public policy contests — over organic labeling, for example — have more than ever become just brawls among business rivals.

Here, however, we arrive at a cul-de-sac. Mr. Reich argues that the “most effective thing reformers could do is to reduce the effects of corporate money on politics and enhance the voices of citizens.” But he also writes of the lock that corporations have and how “the system cannot repair itself from the inside.”

So he opts for consciousness-raising. The public and the media, he writes, must understand the obscured truths laid bare in his book and demand change. In passing, Mr. Reich comes out in favor of decoupling health insurance from employers and raising the minimum wage to about half the average worker’s wage. He mentions runaway C.E.O. pay but offers no prescriptions.