[.ca] Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the ... (ISBN 1576752607)

Smart White Men:
If the hijacking of the 2000 presidential election by Stupid White Men incensed you, then take heed of the Smart White Men who have dealt a thousand blows to democracy over the past century. Ted Nace's "Gangs of America" is an intense history of corporate America's deliberate and relentless effort to empower itself aided by congressmen and judges entrenched in a sea of vested interests. In a Matrix-like prequel, Nace carefully chronologizes the efforts of corporations to gain freedoms and protections as "persons" at the very expense of the people the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect. Even the self-serving ACLU cannot see the "real slippery slope is the ever-increasing tendency to treat corporations as though they were human beings." Nace's witty and engaging tale compels the reader to follow the roller-coaster ride of corporate dominance which begins by going down the murky path by which the courts came to treat corporations as "persons." As the author of "Be Careful Who You SLAPP" I especially enjoyed Nace's treatment of corporate Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs). Nace points the reader to the success of this concerted corporate effort to dominate as measured by the public image of the CEO who is once seen as the dutiful bureaucrat and is now transformed into the swashbuckling dot-com "hero" in the likes of Bill Gates. But as the corporate juggernaut rolls forward we find this local boy does good is soon testifying at his company's anti-trust hearing, one of the most egregious examples of corporate abuse of power of the 20th century. Are we doomed to an Orwellian future where a large unaccountable "modern" entity enjoys more rights and freedom than the citizens who work its factories and offices? Can the same legal system that allowed corporations to add "field to field, and power to power" now check its unfettered growth? Can we as citizens tap into our human propensity for creativity and utilize the restraints that will morph the corporations into welcomed tools of society? Or is our future to be trapped in "The Matrix" where corporations and machines now control our reality? Nace's answer is practical and inspiring. Just as corporations have bit by bit turned the tables on us, we citizens can take back our liberties by chipping away at the same old block - the legal institutions that have empowered them. One beginning is for each State to simply enact charter revocation by which modern day corporations can be tamed with the threat of dissolution as they once were. Nace's "Gangs of America" is an insightful view of the basis for the sense of invincible arrogance that fueled Enron, WorldCom and others yet to appear on the public radar. Thanks to Nace, we know the trajectory of corporate America. It's not too late to redirect the flight plan.

enjoyable, readable history:
I was expecting this to be a fairly dry read, given the subject, but I was so pleasantly surprised. As the New York Times said review put it, Gangs of America is a "entertaining examination of the rise of corporate power in America" (note the "entertaining"). The book starts on a very personal note about how businessman Nace came to write a book examining the roots of the system he founded, built, and finally sold his own publishing firm. Then jump back 700 to 200 years to look at the british corporate charters and their antecedents (most notably the East India Company). The story then moves to America with the corporate side of Jamestown, and later with the anti-corporate component of the American revolution (in which the Boston Tea Party is seen as sort of a revolt by local merchants against the nationwide chain trying to set up shop in town), and finally how the founding fathers sought to keep corporate power in check. Next the story moves to the characters of the nineteenth century who one by one undid the restraints on corporations (including chapters titled The Genius, The Judge, The Court Reporter, and The Lavender-Vested Turkey Gobbler). The story continues in the twentieth century with the new deal reforms and then jumps to the seventies where some fairly recent decisions have expanded coporate rights. Then it is on to the corporate scandals of 2002 and how trade agreements are the latest tactic for adding corporate rights and defeating democracy. Finally, there is a summary of the movements springing up to redress the radical changes that have given us corporations with more rights than people, and then a look back on just what is so worrisome about about where we find ourselves (the chapter titled "Intelligent, Amoral, Evolving"). The book is filled with useful tables and appendices summarizing court decisions and other relevant events, and the quotations throughout the book are thought-provoking. All and all a good read.

Tracing the roots of this phenomenon:
Gangs Of America: The Rise Of Corporate Power And The Disabling Of Democracy by Ted Nace is an expert and sharp drawn scrutiny of just how contemporary corporations have amassed more political and economic rights than ordinary citizens within America's legal system. Tracing the roots of this phenomenon, and warning of the dangers such preferential treatment could have upon American society as a whole if continued unchecked, Gangs Of America is an informed and informative analytical history of the origins and implications of a very real imbalance of political and economic power upon our judicial and legislative systems.

Putting the Dog to Sleep:
GANGS OF AMERICA is a penetrating account of how the corporation came to claim the same rights and freedoms as citizens. In retelling the history of this slow-motion grab for power -- it takes place over a hundred and fifty years through a variety of decisions and (mis)interpretations of the 14th amendment (among others) -- Nace shows how the corporation grew from a mistrusted, highly regulated entity into a virtually unregulated shape-shifting bacteria which, claiming to be human, has now subsumed many of the civil rights of Americans, and, further, through international agencies such as the IMF and WTO, the rights of citizens around the world. Two insights Nace offers are particularly noteworthy. The first is the rise of the counterrevolutionary corporation in the 1970s. According to Nace, corporations in late 60s early 70s were caught "flat-footed" by rise of environmental and consumer movements, both outgrowths of the 60s social justice movements. Bending to the popular will, government legislation like the Clear Air and Water Acts, the establishment of oversight agencies like the EPA, limits on tax shelters, and strengthened occupational safety and health bills were passed. The "revolt of the bosses" was activated by Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer whose memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System" laid out the reactionary agenda for business. In a key passage he wrote, "The day is long past when the chief executive of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits.... If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself." Powell, who later served on Supreme Court, planted with this memo a seed that sprouted into right wing think tanks, massive corporate political lobbying, and the became battle plan of the Business Roundtable and Conference Board. CEOs, who before had only defended the"rights" of business in a piecemeal, industry by industry fashion, now signed on to long-term commitments through these umbrella organizations. Powell's memo, Nace notes (along with other recent historical accounts), was a key turning point in recent political and social history. A second related insight he offers is in a comment made describing the recent change in the conception of corporate actors -- from bureaucrats in the 1940s through the 1970s to entrepreneurs in the 80s and since. Taking up the laissez faire rhetoric of the Chicago School, preening themselves in the din of cheerleaders Reagan and Thatcher, CEOs in the 1980s began to step onto the national stage and tout the glories of capitalism as the purest expression of democracy. They eschewed their previous role as one of three legs of the post WWII liberal business, labor, government consensus, an agreement designed to answer to the threat to capitalism posed by the governments of the Soviets and Chinese Communists. This agreement was born in the long shadow of possible alternative political and economic arrangements, served to provide a fair and living wage to employees and reasonable profits to shareholders during the long post-war boom. Moving away from this cooperative bureaucratic model of governance to the entrepreneurial model (which students of history will recognize as a version of Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth" and the myth of the Rugged Individualist), Nace suggests that Lee Iacocca was the avatar of the new CEO. So thoroughly has this reconceptualization of the CEO taken hold 20 years later that half of the shelf space in airport bookstores is now packed with triumphalist B-School cant from "dynamic" CEOs and their consultants. Not uncoincidentally, the other shelves are stuffed with the vociferous defenders of the conservative political order. During the Reagan revolution the notion of the entrepreneur was buffed to a high gloss. Its was burnished to a blinding sheen in the dot com era when entrepreneurs were hailed as heroes and an overwhelmed public was fed a high-fat media diet of swashbuckling venture capitalists, code jockeys, and those fabulous rule-breaking, hyper-innovative MBAs. The shift from bureaucrat to entrepreneur ran parallel to the shift in America from the bureaucratic state with its small safety net to the new night watchman state where business prerogatives became the only prerogatives and profit the only possible goal. Despite their recent bad behavior in the business scandals of 2001-2002 we remain enthralled to these super-empowered, and loudly trumpeted individuals. Our ever compliant media continue to fail us in their fawning coverage of the business elite, an elite who manage economies that are larger than most nations, who unlike nations are not accountable to citizens, who play governments off one another for better tax breaks, who lay off middle managers at home to the cheers of Wall Street, and sell manufacturing jobs off to the highest overseas bidder when no one is looking. Other interesting insights along the way: the wrong-headed ACLU defending corporations "right" to speech, erroneously accepting the definition of the corporation as a "person" with the same rights as persons. Nace also suggests that the American Revolution was not so much a revolution against the English government as an anti-corporate revolution against the British East India Company's monopoly on tea in the U.S. colonies. In other words, not a political revolt so much as an economic revolt which finally gained traction when the merchant class began to find that their pecuniary interests were being trampled upon. Nace suggests the legal fiction of the corporation can be undone through citizen action, that the corporation can be housebroken and that if certain corporate actors continue to terrorize their neighborhoods that they should be put down by their true owners: the citizenry. His last chapter, which narrates the actions of people who are attempting to do so may give some hope to a population who has all but given up on putting this power-mad conjuration back into its once solid, and now almost non-existent legal vessel. A helpful summary of key Supreme Court decisions included.

Highly Recommended!:
This interesting book traces the history and development of corporations from the time of Queen Elizabeth I to the present day. Much of the book focuses on little-known episodes in the corporate chronicle - the cruel Jamestown settlement in Virginia, for example, or the British East India Company's depredations in India. About midway through, the book shifts from such tales to a close examination of Supreme Court justices who tilted the playing field in favor of corporate power. Breezily written and accessible, this book puts a lengthy and complicated history easily within reach of ordinary readers. Its bias is clear - the subtitle leaves no doubt that author Ted Nace is a foe of corporate power - and the closer to the present the story comes, the more accusatory the author's conclusions may seem. Nonetheless, We find this is a worthwhile read for those who seek background information on the dark side of the American corporate success story.