Corporations and American Democracy
Corporations and American Democracy

Author: Naomi R. Lamoreaux

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-05-08

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0674977718

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Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and other high-profile cases have sparked passionate disagreement about the proper role of corporations in American democracy. Partisans on both sides have made bold claims, often with little basis in historical facts. Bringing together leading scholars of history, law, and political science, Corporations and American Democracy provides the historical and intellectual grounding necessary to put today’s corporate policy debates in proper context. From the nation’s founding to the present, Americans have regarded corporations with ambivalence—embracing their potential to revolutionize economic life and yet remaining wary of their capacity to undermine democratic institutions. Although corporations were originally created to give businesses and other associations special legal rights and privileges, historically they were denied many of the constitutional protections afforded flesh-and-blood citizens. This comprehensive volume covers a range of topics, including the origins of corporations in English and American law, the historical shift from special charters to general incorporation, the increased variety of corporations that this shift made possible, and the roots of modern corporate regulation in the Progressive Era and New Deal. It also covers the evolution of judicial views of corporate rights, particularly since corporations have become the form of choice for an increasing variety of nonbusiness organizations, including political advocacy groups. Ironically, in today’s global economy the decline of large, vertically integrated corporations—the type of corporation that past reform movements fought so hard to regulate—poses some of the newest challenges to effective government oversight of the economy.

Captured
Captured

Author: Sheldon Whitehouse

Publisher: New Press, The

Published: 2017-02-21

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1620972085

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A U.S. senator, leading the fight against money in politics, chronicles the long shadow corporate power has cast over our democracy In Captured, U.S. Senator and former federal prosecutor Sheldon Whitehouse offers an eye-opening take on what corporate influence looks like today from the Senate Floor, adding a first-hand perspective to Jane Mayer’s Dark Money. Americans know something is wrong in their government. Senator Whitehouse combines history, legal scholarship, and personal experiences to provide the first hands-on, comprehensive explanation of what's gone wrong, exposing multiple avenues through which our government has been infiltrated and disabled by corporate powers. Captured reveals an original oversight by the Founders, and shows how and why corporate power has exploited that vulnerability: to strike fear in elected representatives who don’t “get right” by threatening million-dollar "dark money" election attacks (a threat more effective and less expensive than the actual attack); to stack the judiciary—even the Supreme Court—in "business-friendly" ways; to "capture” the administrative agencies meant to regulate corporate behavior; to undermine the civil jury, the Constitution's last bastion for ordinary citizens; and to create a corporate "alternate reality" on public health and safety issues like climate change. Captured shows that in this centuries-long struggle between corporate power and individual liberty, we can and must take our American government back into our own hands.

Gangs of America
Gangs of America

Author: Ted Nace

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Published: 2005-09-11

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1576753190

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'Gangs of America' traces the evolution of the corporation, one of the core institutions of the modern world. It ties political debates about multi-national trade agreements, financial scandals and scores of other specific issues into the narrative account.

Managers Vs. Owners
Managers Vs. Owners

Author: Allen Kaufman

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9780195098600

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Managers vs. Owners: The Struggle for Corporate Control in American Democracy deals with a subject of profound importance: understanding the place of the modern corporation in a democratic society. This latest volume in the acclaimed Ruffin Series in Business Ethics describes how the balance between corporate power and government regulation has changed with the interests of society as a whole. The first section examines the debates over the rules that individuals or organized groups would agree to follow in their interactions to accrue social advantages. The second section looks at management's point of view and tells how law promotes the need for managerial collective action and provides a vocabulary for articulating management as a profession. The authors conclude by looking at the impact of collective investor action - especially institutional investors - on the efforts by managers to preserve their autonomy. This examination of the inherent conflicts between the interests of corporate owners, the interests of the larger society, and the interests of managers who run corporations will be essential reading for students, scholars, and professionals concerned with the place of the large corporation in a democratic society.

Democracy in America?
Democracy in America?

Author: Benjamin I. Page

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-04-02

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 022672493X

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America faces daunting problems—stagnant wages, high health care costs, neglected schools, deteriorating public services. How did we get here? Through decades of dysfunctional government. In Democracy in America? veteran political observers Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens marshal an unprecedented array of evidence to show that while other countries have responded to a rapidly changing economy by helping people who’ve been left behind, the United States has failed to do so. Instead, we have actually exacerbated inequality, enriching corporations and the wealthy while leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves. What’s the solution? More democracy. More opportunities for citizens to shape what their government does. To repair our democracy, Page and Gilens argue, we must change the way we choose candidates and conduct our elections, reform our governing institutions, and curb the power of money in politics. By doing so, we can reduce polarization and gridlock, address pressing challenges, and enact policies that truly reflect the interests of average Americans. Updated with new information, this book lays out a set of proposals that would boost citizen participation, curb the power of money, and democratize the House and Senate.

Corporate Dreams
Corporate Dreams

Author: James Hoopes

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2011-09-30

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0813552044

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Public trust in corporations plummeted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, when “Lehman Brothers” and “General Motors” became dirty words for many Americans. In Corporate Dreams, James Hoopes argues that Americans still place too much faith in corporations and, especially, in the idea of “values-based leadership” favored by most CEOs. The danger of corporations, he suggests, lies not just in their economic power, but also in how their confused and undemocratic values are infecting Americans’ visions of good governance. Corporate Dreams proposes that Americans need to radically rethink their relationships with big business and the government. Rather than buying into the corporate notion of “values-based leadership,” we should view corporate leaders with the same healthy suspicion that our democratic political tradition teaches us to view our political leaders. Unfortunately, the trend is moving the other way. Corporate notions of leadership are invading our democratic political culture when it should be the reverse. To diagnose the cause and find a cure for our toxic attachment to corporate models of leadership, Hoopes goes back to the root of the problem, offering a comprehensive history of corporate culture in America, from the Great Depression to today’s Great Recession. Combining a historian’s careful eye with an insider’s perspective on the business world, this provocative volume tracks changes in government economic policy, changes in public attitudes toward big business, and changes in how corporate executives view themselves. Whether examining the rise of Leadership Development programs or recounting JFK’s Pyrrhic victory over U.S. Steel, Hoopes tells a compelling story of how America lost its way, ceding authority to the policies and values of corporate culture. But he also shows us how it’s not too late to return to our democratic ideals—and that it’s not too late to restore the American dream.

New Democracy
New Democracy

Author: William J. Novak

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2022-03-29

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0674260449

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The activist state of the New Deal started forming decades before the FDR administration, demonstrating the deep roots of energetic government in America. In the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, American governance was transformed, with momentous implications for social and economic life. A series of legal reforms gradually brought an end to nineteenth-century traditions of local self-government and associative citizenship, replacing them with positive statecraft: governmental activism intended to change how Americans lived and worked through legislation, regulation, and public administration. The last time American public life had been so thoroughly altered was in the late eighteenth century, at the founding and in the years immediately following. William J. Novak shows how Americans translated new conceptions of citizenship, social welfare, and economic democracy into demands for law and policy that delivered public services and vindicated peopleÕs rights. Over the course of decades, Americans progressively discarded earlier understandings of the reach and responsibilities of government and embraced the idea that legislators and administrators in Washington could tackle economic regulation and social-welfare problems. As citizens witnessed the successes of an energetic, interventionist state, they demanded more of the same, calling on politicians and civil servants to address unfair competition and labor exploitation, form public utilities, and reform police power. Arguing against the myth that America was a weak state until the New Deal, New Democracy traces a steadily aggrandizing authority well before the Roosevelt years. The United States was flexing power domestically and intervening on behalf of redistributive goals for far longer than is commonly recognized, putting the lie to libertarian claims that the New Deal was an aberration in American history.

Corporate Citizen?
Corporate Citizen?

Author: Ciara Torres-Spelliscy

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781632847263

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Over time, corporations have engaged in an aggressive campaign to dramatically enlarge their political and commercial speech and religious rights through strategic litigation and extensive lobbying. At the same time, many large firms have sought to limit their social responsibilities. For the most part, courts have willingly followed corporations down this path. But interestingly, corporations are meeting resistance from many quarters including from customers, investors, and lawmakers. Corporate Citizen? explores this resistance and offers reforms to support these new understandings of the corporation in contemporary society.

Captured
Captured

Author: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2019-05-21

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1620974924

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A leading member of the Senate Judiciary Committee "spells out, in considerable detail, the extent of corporate influence over a variety of issues" in national politics (The New Yorker) As a U.S. senator and former federal prosecutor, Sheldon Whitehouse has had a front-row seat for the spectacle of dark money in government. In his widely praised book Captured, he describes how corporations buy influence over our government— not only over representatives and senators, but over the very regulators directly responsible for enforcing the laws under which these corporations operate, and over the judges and prosecutors who are supposed to be vigilant about protecting the public interest. In a case study that shows these operations at work, Whitehouse reveals how fossil fuel companies have held any regulation related to climate change at bay. The problem is structural: as Kirkus Reviews wrote, "many of the ills it illuminates are bipartisan." This paperback edition features a new preface by the author that reveals how corporate influence has taken advantage of Donald Trump's presidency to advance its agenda—and what we can do about it.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights

Author: Adam Winkler

Publisher: Liveright Publishing

Published: 2018-02-27

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 0871403846

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National Book Award for Nonfiction Finalist National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Finalist A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A PBS “Now Read This” Book Club Selection Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Economist and the Boston Globe A landmark exposé and “deeply engaging legal history” of one of the most successful, yet least known, civil rights movements in American history (Washington Post). In a revelatory work praised as “excellent and timely” (New York Times Book Review, front page), Adam Winkler, author of Gunfight, once again makes sense of our fraught constitutional history in this incisive portrait of how American businesses seized political power, won “equal rights,” and transformed the Constitution to serve big business. Uncovering the deep roots of Citizens United, he repositions that controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision as the capstone of a centuries-old battle for corporate personhood. “Tackling a topic that ought to be at the heart of political debate” (Economist), Winkler surveys more than four hundred years of diverse cases—and the contributions of such legendary legal figures as Daniel Webster, Roger Taney, Lewis Powell, and even Thurgood Marshall—to reveal that “the history of corporate rights is replete with ironies” (Wall Street Journal). We the Corporations is an uncompromising work of history to be read for years to come.