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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.
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.
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.
American icons and historians explore the grand American experiment in democracy, culture, innovation, and ideas, the capstone book in a trilogy from David Rubenstein.
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.
[This book] offers students a thorough, detailed look at American history ... Using an expansive definition of political history, the text explores the evolution of a distinctive American culture in a transnational context. [This] edition features ... greater attention to colonial America's place in the Atlantic World, and to the nation's role as a member of a global community from the Early Republic to the Presidency of George W. Bush. A new essay feature, "Competing Interpretations," exposes students to debates among historians, encouraging them to think critically about how and why historians have disagreed.-Back cover.
Overview: America's Failing Experiment: How We the People Have Become the Problem, makes the controversial claim that the American political system suffers from too much democracy. An accomplished public policy expert co-editor of the Journal Survey Practice, Kirby Goidel makes the provocative claim that our elected officials are overly responsive to public opinion which is often poorly informed, incoherent, and uncertain. The result is a more polarized political system, rising inequality, and institutional gridlock. These concerns are not new but take on deeper political significance in a digital age where information flows more quickly and opportunities for feedback are virtually unlimited. If the diagnosis is too much democracy, the counterintuitive solution runs against our cultural norms-less citizen involvement, greater discretion for political elites, and greater collective responsibility.
Alexander Hamilton wrote that “the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution.” If only that were true. The Founding Fathers wanted the judicial branch to serve as a check on the power of the legislative and executive, and gave the Supreme Court the responsibility of interpreting the Constitution in a way that would safeguard individual freedoms. In some cases, like Brown V. Board of Education and United States V. Lopez, the Court fulfilled its role, protecting us from racial discrimination and the heavy hand of the federal government. But sadly, the Supreme Court has also handed down many destructive decisions on cases you probably never learned about in school. In The Dirty Dozen, two distinguished legal scholars shed light on the twelve worst cases, which allowed government to interfere in your private contractual agreements; curtail your rights to criticize or support political candidates; arrest and imprison you indefinitely, without filing charges; and seize your private property, without compensation, when someone uses the property for criminal activity—even if you don’t know about it! This is not a book just for lawyers. It’s for all Americans who want to understand how the Supreme Court can affect our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This paperback edition includes a new preface, “Guns, Bailouts, and Empathetic Judges,” which highlights new and critical issues that have arisen since the book’s initial edition was published in 2008.
