HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of dollars of the nation's wealth – the people's resources – are being openly confiscated by corporations. Government, the presumed protector of the public's property, has become, instead, the enabler of this plunder and theft. The media, the nation's self-professed watchdogs, are apathetic at best in sounding the alarm about the people's loss of control over resources they have paid for or inherited from previous generations.

As a result, corporations have found it easy to lay claim to a wide range of public resources: publicly funded medical advances, national forests, public spaces in cities, the Internet, software innovations, the airwaves, and the DNA of animals, plants, and humans. Surprisingly, corporate appropriation, or privatization, of public resources has proceeded quietly with only sporadic public outcries against the most blatant thefts. One public interest activist and author, David Bollier, is making a valiant effort to change that. As Bollier argues, the abuses go unnoticed because the thefts are generally seen "only in glimpses, not in panorama, when [they are] visible at all." Bollier's new book, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth (Routledge), is a loud wake-up call for citizens interested in halting the steady exploitation and erosion of the nation's resources and values for short-term gains by the few.

"We have become a nation of eager consumers – and disengaged citizens – and so are ill-equipped to perceive how our common resources are being abused," Bollier writes. He moves quickly to specifics: our tax dollars helped develop breakthrough cancer drugs, but pharmaceutical companies acquired the rights to those drugs for a song – and the companies now charge exorbitant prices. An archaic 1872 law gives mining companies the lucrative right to mine valuable mineral resources on our public lands for $5 an acre – a right the mining industry preserves through what Bollier describes as "well-deployed campaign contributions."

Bollier is especially critical of the federal government's role in giving away its most promising drug research and development to the drug companies. "It is a sweet deal for drugmakers but an outrage for millions of American taxpayers and consumers," Bollier says. "It is a scandalous fact that the fruits of risky and expensive scientific work typically do not accrue to the sponsors/investors – the American people – until drug companies have extracted huge markups of their own. The American people pay twice, first as taxpayers, reaping a lower (or nonexistent) return on their investments, and second as consumers paying higher drug prices charged by pharmaceutical companies."

Bollier reminds the reader that Americans own collectively one-third of the surface area of the country and billions of acres of the outer continental shelf. The resources are extensive and valuable: huge supplies of oil, coal, natural gas, uranium, copper, gold, silver, timber grasslands, water, and geothermal energy. The nation's public land also consists of vast tracts of wilderness forests, unspoiled coastlines, sweeping prairies, the Rocky Mountains, and dozens of beautiful rivers and lakes.

"As the steward of these public resources, the government's job is to manage these lands responsibly for the long-term," Bollier argues. "The sad truth is that the government stewardship of this natural wealth represents one of the great scandals of the 20th Century. While the details vary from one resource to another, the general history is one of antiquated laws, poor enforcement, slipshod administration, environmental indifference and capitulation to industry's most aggressive demands."