Corporations and American Democracy

Corporations and American Democracy PDF Author: Naomi R. Lamoreaux
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674977718
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
Recent Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and other high-profile cases have sparked disagreement about the role of corporations in American democracy. Bringing together scholars of history, law, and political science, Corporations and American Democracy provides essential grounding for today’s policy debates.

Corporations and American Democracy

Corporations and American Democracy PDF Author: Naomi R. Lamoreaux
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674977718
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Get Book

Book Description
Recent Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and other high-profile cases have sparked disagreement about the role of corporations in American democracy. Bringing together scholars of history, law, and political science, Corporations and American Democracy provides essential grounding for today’s policy debates.

Corporate Dreams

Corporate Dreams PDF Author: James Hoopes
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813552044
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
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.

Captured

Captured PDF Author: Sheldon Whitehouse
Publisher: New Press, The
ISBN: 1620972085
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
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.

The New Corporation

The New Corporation PDF Author: Joel Bakan
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1984899732
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
A deeply informed and unflinching look at the way corporations have slyly rebranded themselves as socially conscious entities ready to tackle society's problems, while CEO compensation soars, income inequality is at all-time highs, and democracy sits in a precarious situation. “A very important book, an arresting study directed to a central issue of the times” (Noam Chomsky), from the author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. Over the last decade and a half, business leaders have been calling for a new kind of capitalism. With income inequality soaring, wages stagnating, and a climate crisis escalating, they realized that they had to make social and environmental values the very core of their messaging. The problem is corporations are still, first and foremost, concerned with their bottom line. In lucid and engaging prose, Joel Bakan documents how increasing corporate freedom encroaches on individual liberty and democracy. Through deep research and interviews with both top executives and their sharpest critics, he exposes the inhumanity and destructive force of the current order--profit-driven privatization subverting the public good, governments neglecting duties to protect the environment, the increasing alienation we experience as every aspect of life is economized, and how the Covid-19 pandemic lays bare the unjust fault lines of our corporate-led society. Beyond diagnosing major problems, in The New Corporation Bakan narrates a hopeful path forward. He reveals how citizens around the world are fighting back and making gains in ways that bolster democracy and benefit ordinary citizens rather than the corporate elite.

New Democracy

New Democracy PDF Author: William J. Novak
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674260449
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
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 Media and the Threat to Democracy

Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy PDF Author: Robert W. McChesney
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609801172
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
"In this passionate and strikingly lucid essay, Robert McChesney makes clear why all of us should be alarmed about the effects of media mergers on the future of American democracy. This is a must reading for anyone who wants to get a quick understanding of this troubling trend."—Susan J. Douglas, author of Growing Up Female with the Mass Media

Corporations Are Not People

Corporations Are Not People PDF Author: Jeffrey D. Clements
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 1609941071
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision marked a culminating victory for the bizarre doctrine that corporations are people with free speech and other rights. Now, Americans cannot stop corporations from spending billions of dollars to dominate elections and keep our elected representatives on a tight leash. Jeffrey Clements reveals the far-reaching effects of this strange and destructive idea, which flies in the face of not only all common sense but most of American legal history as well. Most importantly, he offers solutions—including a constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United—and tools to help readers join a grassroots drive to implement them. Ending corporate control of our Constitution and government is not about a triumph of one political ideology over another—it’s about restoring the republican principles of American democracy.

Democracy in America?

Democracy in America? PDF Author: Benjamin I. Page
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022672994X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
“Important and riveting . . . The solution isn’t to redistribute wealth from the have-mores to the have-lesses. It’s to redistribute political power to everyone.” —Robert B. Reich 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. “Brilliant, indispensable, and highly accessible.” —New York Journal of Books

Corporations Are People Too

Corporations Are People Too PDF Author: Kent Greenfield
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300240805
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Why we’re better off treating corporations as people under the law—and making them behave like citizens Are corporations people? The U.S. Supreme Court launched a heated debate when it ruled in Citizens United that corporations can claim the same free speech rights as humans. Should corporations be able to claim rights of free speech, religious conscience, and due process? Kent Greenfield provides an answer: Sometimes. With an analysis sure to challenge the assumptions of both progressives and conservatives, Greenfield explores corporations' claims to constitutional rights and the foundational conflicts about their obligations in society. He argues that a blanket opposition to corporate personhood is misguided, since it is consistent with both the purpose of corporations and the Constitution itself that corporations can claim rights at least some of the time. The problem with Citizens United is not that corporations have a right to speak, but for whom they speak. The solution is not to end corporate personhood but to require corporations to act more like citizens.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights PDF Author: Adam Winkler
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 0871403846
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
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.