The American Experiment
The American Experiment

Author: David M. Rubenstein

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-09-07

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1982165804

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THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER The capstone book in a trilogy from the New York Times bestselling author of How to Lead and The American Story and host of Bloomberg TV’s The David Rubenstein Show—American icons and historians on the ever-evolving American experiment, featuring Ken Burns, Madeleine Albright, Wynton Marsalis, Billie Jean King, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and many more. In this lively collection of conversations—the third in a series from David Rubenstein—some of our nations’ greatest minds explore the inspiring story of America as a grand experiment in democracy, culture, innovation, and ideas. -Jill Lepore on the promise of America -Madeleine Albright on the American immigrant -Ken Burns on war -Henry Louis Gates Jr. on reconstruction -Elaine Weiss on suffrage -John Meacham on civil rights -Walter Isaacson on innovation -David McCullough on the Wright Brothers -John Barry on pandemics and public health -Wynton Marsalis on music -Billie Jean King on sports -Rita Moreno on film Exploring the diverse make-up of our country’s DNA through interviews with Pulitzer Prize–winning historians, diplomats, music legends, and sports giants, The American Experiment captures the dynamic arc of a young country reinventing itself in real-time. Through these enlightening conversations, the American spirit comes alive, revealing the setbacks, suffering, invention, ingenuity, and social movements that continue to shape our vision of what America is—and what it can be.

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.

The American Experiment with Government Corporations
The American Experiment with Government Corporations

Author: Jerry Mitchell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-06-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1317458729

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This assessment of government corporations examines their records and identifies advantages and failures. The author challenges the reader to think creatively about the government corporate form and ways to reinvent it, capitalizing on its strengths and compensating for its shortcomings.

America's Failing Experiment
America's Failing Experiment

Author: Robert K. Goidel

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781442226500

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In this book, author Kirby Goidel makes the controversial case that the American political system suffers from too much democracy and that the trend toward greater democratization has led to greater citizen frustration, increasing distrust of government, and institutional gridlock.

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.

The Rise of the Public Authority
The Rise of the Public Authority

Author: Gail Radford

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-07-19

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 022603786X

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In the late nineteenth century, public officials throughout the United States began to experiment with new methods of managing their local economies and meeting the infrastructure needs of a newly urban, industrial nation. Stymied by legal and financial barriers, they created a new class of quasi-public agencies called public authorities. Today these entities operate at all levels of government, and range from tiny operations like the Springfield Parking Authority in Massachusetts, which runs thirteen parking lots and garages, to mammoth enterprises like the Tennessee Valley Authority, with nearly twelve billion dollars in revenues each year. In The Rise of the Public Authority, Gail Radford recounts the history of these inscrutable agencies, examining how and why they were established, the varied forms they have taken, and how these pervasive but elusive mechanisms have molded our economy and politics over the past hundred years.

Moving to Opportunity
Moving to Opportunity

Author: Xavier de Souza Briggs

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-03-31

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0199889430

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Moving to Opportunity tackles one of America's most enduring dilemmas: the great, unresolved question of how to overcome persistent ghetto poverty. Launched in 1994, the MTO program took a largely untested approach: helping families move from high-poverty, inner-city public housing to low-poverty neighborhoods, some in the suburbs. The book's innovative methodology emphasizes the voices and choices of the program's participants but also rigorously analyzes the changing structures of regional opportunity and constraint that shaped the fortunes of those who "signed up." It shines a light on the hopes, surprises, achievements, and limitations of a major social experiment. As the authors make clear, for all its ambition, MTO is a uniquely American experiment, and this book brings home its powerful lessons for policymakers and advocates, scholars, students, journalists, and all who share a deep concern for opportunity and inequality in our country.

The Submerged State
The Submerged State

Author: Suzanne Mettler

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-08-31

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 0226521664

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“Keep your government hands off my Medicare!” Such comments spotlight a central question animating Suzanne Mettler’s provocative and timely book: why are many Americans unaware of government social benefits and so hostile to them in principle, even though they receive them? The Obama administration has been roundly criticized for its inability to convey how much it has accomplished for ordinary citizens. Mettler argues that this difficulty is not merely a failure of communication; rather it is endemic to the formidable presence of the “submerged state.” In recent decades, federal policymakers have increasingly shunned the outright disbursing of benefits to individuals and families and favored instead less visible and more indirect incentives and subsidies, from tax breaks to payments for services to private companies. These submerged policies, Mettler shows, obscure the role of government and exaggerate that of the market. As a result, citizens are unaware not only of the benefits they receive, but of the massive advantages given to powerful interests, such as insurance companies and the financial industry. Neither do they realize that the policies of the submerged state shower their largest benefits on the most affluent Americans, exacerbating inequality. Mettler analyzes three Obama reforms—student aid, tax relief, and health care—to reveal the submerged state and its consequences, demonstrating how structurally difficult it is to enact policy reforms and even to obtain public recognition for achieving them. She concludes with recommendations for reform to help make hidden policies more visible and governance more comprehensible to all Americans. The sad truth is that many American citizens do not know how major social programs work—or even whether they benefit from them. Suzanne Mettler’s important new book will bring government policies back to the surface and encourage citizens to reclaim their voice in the political process.

The Political Theory of a Compound Republic
The Political Theory of a Compound Republic

Author: Vincent Ostrom

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780739121207

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The Political Theory of a Compound Republic presents the essential logic of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton's design of limited, distributed, constitutional authority proposed inThe Federalist. Two revised and expanded ensuing chapters show how the idea of constitutional choice has been employed since the adoption of the 1789 Constitution of the United States. A new concluding chapter questions commonly accepted beliefs about sovereign nation-states and considers governance from the perspective of twenty-first century 'citizen-sovereigns.'