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.

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

Get Book Here

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.

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 : 485

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Book Description
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.

Business Persons

Business Persons PDF Author: Eric W. Orts
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199670919
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Business firms are ubiquitous in modern society, but an appreciation of how they are formed and for what purposes requires an understanding of their legal foundations. This book provides a scholarly and yet accessible introduction to the legal framework of modern business enterprises. It explains how the legal ideas allow for the construction and recognition of business firms as persons having rights and responsibilities. It also shows how law sets the boundariesof firms. Specific applications include contributions to debates about executive compensation and political free-speech rights of corporations. Anyone who wishes to have a deeper understanding of thenature of business firms and their role in modern society will benefit from reading this book.

The Political Power of Global Corporations

The Political Power of Global Corporations PDF Author: John Mikler
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745698492
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
We have long been told that corporations rule the world, their interests seemingly taking precedence over states and their citizens. Yet, while states, civil society, and international organizations are well drawn in terms of their institutions, ideologies, and functions, the world's global corporations are often more simply sketched as mechanisms of profit maximization. In this book, John Mikler re-casts global corporations as political actors with complex identities and strategies. Debunking the idea of global corporations as exclusively profit-driven entities, he shows how they seek not only to drive or modify the agendas of states but to govern in their own right. He also explains why we need to re-territorialize global corporations as political actors that reflect and project the political power of the states and regions from which they hail. We know the global corporations' names, we know where they are headquartered, and we know where they invest and operate. Economic processes are increasingly produced by the control they possess, the relationships they have, the leverage they employ, the strategic decisions they make, and the discourses they create to enhance acceptance of their interests. This book represents a call to study how they do so, rather than making assumptions based on theoretical abstractions.

The New Corporation

The New Corporation PDF Author: Joel Bakan
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1984899724
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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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.

When Corporations Rule the World

When Corporations Rule the World PDF Author: David C. Korten
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 9781887208017
Category : Big business
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Addresses the issue of modern corporate power, exposing the harmful effects gobalization is having not only on economics, but also on politics, society and the environment

A Country is Not a Company

A Country is Not a Company PDF Author: Paul R. Krugman
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 1422133400
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argues that business leaders need to understand the differences between economic policy on the national and international scale and business strategy on the organizational scale. Economists deal with the closed system of a national economy, whereas executives live in the open-system world of business. Moreover, economists know that an economy must be run on the basis of general principles, but businesspeople are forever in search of the particular brilliant strategy. Krugman's article serves to elucidate the world of economics for businesspeople who are so close to it and yet are continually frustrated by what they see. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough management ideas-many of which still speak to and influence us today. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers readers the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world-and will have a direct impact on you today and for years to come.

Corporations and American Democracy

Corporations and American Democracy PDF Author: Naomi R. Lamoreaux
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674977718
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
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.

Unequal Protection

Unequal Protection PDF Author: Thom Hartmann
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 1605098396
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 585

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Book Description
“This is a seminal work, a godsend really, a clear message to every citizen about the need to reform our country, laws, and companies.” —Paul Hawken, New York Times-bestselling author NEW EDITION, REVISED AND UPDATED Unequal taxes, unequal accountability for crime, unequal influence, unequal control of the media, unequal access to natural resources—corporations have gained these privileges and more by exploiting their legal status as persons. How did something so illogical and unjust become the law of the land? Americans have been struggling with the role of corporations since before the birth of the republic. As Thom Hartmann shows, the Boston Tea Party was actually a protest against the British East India Company—the first modern corporation. Unequal Protection tells the astonishing story of how, after decades of sensible limits on corporate power, an offhand, off-the-record comment by a Supreme Court justice led to the Fourteenth Amendment—originally passed to grant basic rights to freed slaves—becoming the justification for granting corporations the same rights as human beings. And Hartmann proposes specific legal remedies that will finally put an end to the bizarre farce of corporate personhood. This new edition has been thoroughly updated and features Hartmann’s analysis of two recent Supreme Court cases, including Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which tossed out corporate campaign finance limits. “If you wonder why and when giant corporations got the power to reign supreme over us, here’s the story.” —Jim Hightower, national radio commentator and New York Times-bestselling author “Tell[s] the grand story of corporate corruption and its consequences for society with the force and readability of a great novel. ”—David C. Korten, bestselling author of When Corporations Rule the World