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The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
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Kevin's review
bookshelves: econ-corporations, 1-how-the-world-works, 2-brilliant-intros-101, econ-state-law
Jun 22, 2019
bookshelves: econ-corporations, 1-how-the-world-works, 2-brilliant-intros-101, econ-state-law
Corporations 101...
Preamble:
--Let's start with the mainstream confusion over “capitalism�, where everyone from outright pro-capitalists to even progressive reformers (I recently watched ) still assume a distinction between:
a) “Free market�:
--Assumed as what “capitalism� should be.
...In reality, this is an ivory tower utopia where a society of shopkeepers (coincidentally, owning their means of production, so where's the labour market?) barter their goods on the market.
b) “Cǰǰپ�:
--Since we don't live in the harmonious utopia, it's because “government interference� corrupts “the market's� perfect pricing mechanism (supply meets demand), leading to monopolies, etc.
...Curiously, this seems rather inevitable if we elevate profit-seeking to be the bottom line of social values, where money can buy anything (money-power;lobbying bribery)....
...This distinction conveniently flips upside-down the real-world history of capitalism, where European monopolist merchants merged with State violence tooutcompete destroy:
i) domestic “golden age of the European proletariat�:
-Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
-The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation
ii) foreign Asiatic regulated markets and non-market societies:
-Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital
-Debt: The First 5,000 Years
--Thus, real-world capitalism, with its endless profit-seeking and masses of dispossessed (conveniently dependent on wage labour for survival), has always relied on state violence (from the original “Enclosures�/“Bloody Laws�/“workhouses� that disciplined the European proletariat to today's prison-industrial complex; from the colonial gunboats/slave ships to today's military-industrial-complex).
--From Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present [emphases added]:
--A good example of ivory tower capitalist utopia of shopkeepers; Adam Smith's celebrated quote from his 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations on self-interest producing social good: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
...This gets lumped together with the "Invisible Hand" quote: "By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, [the merchant] intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."
[2] "moral sentiments":
--Smith's conveniently-forgotten book prior to Wealth of Nations, the 1758 The Theory of Moral Sentiments sets out how society requires many more moral values than just self-interest; of course vulgar economists erase the fact that Smith was a moral philosopher! For more, see: The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values
[3] "anonymous shareholders":
--The stock market is a key capitalist market. Markets for goods (real commodities, i.e. Smith's butches/bakers/brewers) have long existed before capitalism. Capitalism innovated peculiar markets: labour/land/money, which feature "fictitious commodities" (humans/nature/purchasing power are not "produced" like real commodities just for buying/selling on markets): Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
...Now, onto Bakan's book:
The Good:
--The version is useful intro to watch in a group. I decided to review the book version for more details and a different pace/presentation style.
Ch.1 “The Corporation’s Rise to Dominance�:
--Most people are uncomfortable with corporations but cannot imagine alternatives. That's why we start with history, to examine how we got here. As the author is a law professor, this first chapter sets the stage: the history of the corporation (focusing on the large Anglo-American publicly-traded business that now dominates the modern economy):
1) Emerging in the late 16th century, joint-stock companies drew concerns over Ponzi scheme speculation. Classical economists worried about the separation of management (directors, managers) from ownership (shareholders), which differed from business partnerships (where few wealthy owners pool resources and also manage).
...for a deeper history of corporations, see Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years
2) Joint-stock companies gained acceptance from being able to pool the resources required for increasingly large-scale projects during steam-powered industrialization. (Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming)
3) 19th century US railway construction by the robber barons established a national market for company securities that included middle class investors.
4) Mid-19th century saw enactment of Limited Liability to protect investors from the risk of company debt. However, publicly-traded corporations were still rare.
5) 1890s saw a drastic transformation: New Jersey and Delaware changed state laws to attract corporations. Corporations no longer needed narrowly defined purposes + limited duration + operate in particular locations + controls on mergers/acquisitions.
6) End of 19th century, with growing (diluted) shareholders, corporations were granted the status of legal personhood. 1886 Supreme Court ruling confirmed 14th Amendment rights for corporate personhood under the Equal Protection Clause (originally an anti-discrimination clause for post-Civil War freed slaves).
7) Early 20th century mergers led to a public legitimacy crisis. The corporate response was public relations (i.e. capitalist propaganda; see Chomsky's Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies), to create the image of corporate human values. Similarly, the Great Depression prompted the image of corporate responsibility.
8) The 1973 OPEC oil shock and stagflation led to the response of Neoliberalism: laws (GATT, WTO) and technology (transportation, communication) allowed corporate globalization to smash domestic labour.
-Note: technology is not neutral in its application (see Noble's America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism)
-Note: connecting Neoliberalism with Wall Street financialization and the collapse of Third World industrialization is crucial:
-Varoufakis' The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
-Hudson's Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance
-Prashad's The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
Ch.2 “Business as Usual�:
--Useful examples of the consequences of the corporate bottom line, the “best interest of the corporation principle� where the shareholders are legally entitled to have their corporation run on maximizing profits at any costs (psychopathic self-interest).
--Thus, Enron’s Ponzi scheme is hardly the exception ("bad apples" myth). Also, unpacking corporate “philanthropy� (ex. Pfizer), the use of compartmentalization by human participants, etc.
Ch.3 (“The Externalizing Machine�):
--You cannot comprehend the totality of capitalism without understanding “eٱԲپ� (costs not paid by externalizing from the market), from polluting the environment (Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World) to unpaid reproductive labour (The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values) to exploiting the cheapest labour globally to precarious domestic labour.
--Capitalism is run on profit. Thus, to survive and succeed, you must cut costs. The Neoclassical economics propagandized assumption is progressive innovations in technology and organization cut costs. However, in the real world, it is often easiest to simply move the costs off your plate, to make it “external�. Given the power imbalance, regulators and consumers will always be many steps behind in catching these hidden costs, let alone addressing them.
--Given the corporation’s legal mandate to profit, they are compelled to break regulatory laws because it is often more cost-effective (the profits outweigh the risk of trivial fines)! For capitalism’s assault on the planet, see Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System.
--Furthermore, corporations can collect extensive criminal records without scrutiny, while shareholders and managers are protected from legal liability.
Ch.4 (“Democracy Ltd.�):
--One-dollar-one-vote is not one-person-one-vote, and will silently suffocate the latter with liberal privatization or, during crises, smash the latter with fascism. Thus, we read about capitalism’s connections with fascism, from doing business with fascists to America’s very own fascist corporate coup plot against FDR (“Business Plot�).
--Not detailed here, but fascism is the attempt by State Capitalism to blame its own socioeconomic contradictions onto vulnerable groups:
-Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
-And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future
-fascism as colonial practices returning home: Discourse on Colonialism
Ch.5 (“Corporations Unlimited�): the spread of corporate psychopathy via privatization and marketing.
Ch.6 (“Reckoning�): protests against the corporate takeover.
-The State has not lost power; the power has been redistributed to favour corporations. Since the State still grants the following to corporations, they can be challenged/revoked.
i) Legal personhood
ii) Limited Liability
iii) Legal mandate for profit
iv) Protection + property rights
The Missing:
--The author makes it clear that non-Government reforms are often a gift for corporations, as they are non-binding by law, thus the enforcement is even weaker than legal regulations. While the author does not say it, a Marxist proletariat takeover of the State is an obvious theoretical route.
--Follow-up topics not discussed:
1) Economic Rent: Finance/Insurance/Real Estate (FIRE) sectors extract rent/unearned income/passive income via usurious interest payments, landlords with land rents, monopolists with extortionary fees... this was the rentier feudalism that Classical economists wanted to "free the market" from. The vested interests reversed this with Neoclassical economics, which avoids economic rent.
-Why Can't You Afford a Home?
-The Bubble and Beyond
-Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy
-The Public Bank Solution: From Austerity to Prosperity
2) Economic democracy: even when workers take control of the State, how does the proletariat State wither away? We need to talk about worker co-operatives, owned-and-operated, to re-envision the labour market, automation, and democracy at the workplace.
-micro and macro: Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
-micro: Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism
3) Global division of labour, Imperialism: this book focuses on the Anglo-American sphere, as the history of “the corporation� details. Much more can be written about the pillaging and rent-seeking of global division of labour. China plays a curious role in its State planning and control over its own Finance while being a crucial part in global capitalism. How does the rest of the world envision the future?
-The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
-Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital
-Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
Preamble:
--Let's start with the mainstream confusion over “capitalism�, where everyone from outright pro-capitalists to even progressive reformers (I recently watched ) still assume a distinction between:
a) “Free market�:
--Assumed as what “capitalism� should be.
...In reality, this is an ivory tower utopia where a society of shopkeepers (coincidentally, owning their means of production, so where's the labour market?) barter their goods on the market.
b) “Cǰǰپ�:
--Since we don't live in the harmonious utopia, it's because “government interference� corrupts “the market's� perfect pricing mechanism (supply meets demand), leading to monopolies, etc.
...Curiously, this seems rather inevitable if we elevate profit-seeking to be the bottom line of social values, where money can buy anything (money-power;
...This distinction conveniently flips upside-down the real-world history of capitalism, where European monopolist merchants merged with State violence to
i) domestic “golden age of the European proletariat�:
-Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
-The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation
ii) foreign Asiatic regulated markets and non-market societies:
-Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital
-Debt: The First 5,000 Years
--Thus, real-world capitalism, with its endless profit-seeking and masses of dispossessed (conveniently dependent on wage labour for survival), has always relied on state violence (from the original “Enclosures�/“Bloody Laws�/“workhouses� that disciplined the European proletariat to today's prison-industrial complex; from the colonial gunboats/slave ships to today's military-industrial-complex).
--From Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present [emphases added]:
Liberalism’s fatal hypocrisy [...] was to rejoice in the virtuous Jills and Jacks, the neighbourhood butchers, bakers and brewers [1], so as to defend the vile East India Companies, the Facebooks and the Amazons, which know no neighbours, have no partners, respect no moral sentiments [2] and stop at nothing to destroy their competitors. By replacing partnerships with anonymous shareholders [3], we created Leviathans that end up undermining and defying all the values that liberals [...] claim to cherish.[1] "butchers, bakers and brewers":
--A good example of ivory tower capitalist utopia of shopkeepers; Adam Smith's celebrated quote from his 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations on self-interest producing social good: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
...This gets lumped together with the "Invisible Hand" quote: "By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, [the merchant] intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."
[2] "moral sentiments":
--Smith's conveniently-forgotten book prior to Wealth of Nations, the 1758 The Theory of Moral Sentiments sets out how society requires many more moral values than just self-interest; of course vulgar economists erase the fact that Smith was a moral philosopher! For more, see: The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values
[3] "anonymous shareholders":
--The stock market is a key capitalist market. Markets for goods (real commodities, i.e. Smith's butches/bakers/brewers) have long existed before capitalism. Capitalism innovated peculiar markets: labour/land/money, which feature "fictitious commodities" (humans/nature/purchasing power are not "produced" like real commodities just for buying/selling on markets): Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
...Now, onto Bakan's book:
The Good:
--The version is useful intro to watch in a group. I decided to review the book version for more details and a different pace/presentation style.
Ch.1 “The Corporation’s Rise to Dominance�:
--Most people are uncomfortable with corporations but cannot imagine alternatives. That's why we start with history, to examine how we got here. As the author is a law professor, this first chapter sets the stage: the history of the corporation (focusing on the large Anglo-American publicly-traded business that now dominates the modern economy):
1) Emerging in the late 16th century, joint-stock companies drew concerns over Ponzi scheme speculation. Classical economists worried about the separation of management (directors, managers) from ownership (shareholders), which differed from business partnerships (where few wealthy owners pool resources and also manage).
...for a deeper history of corporations, see Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years
2) Joint-stock companies gained acceptance from being able to pool the resources required for increasingly large-scale projects during steam-powered industrialization. (Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming)
3) 19th century US railway construction by the robber barons established a national market for company securities that included middle class investors.
4) Mid-19th century saw enactment of Limited Liability to protect investors from the risk of company debt. However, publicly-traded corporations were still rare.
5) 1890s saw a drastic transformation: New Jersey and Delaware changed state laws to attract corporations. Corporations no longer needed narrowly defined purposes + limited duration + operate in particular locations + controls on mergers/acquisitions.
6) End of 19th century, with growing (diluted) shareholders, corporations were granted the status of legal personhood. 1886 Supreme Court ruling confirmed 14th Amendment rights for corporate personhood under the Equal Protection Clause (originally an anti-discrimination clause for post-Civil War freed slaves).
7) Early 20th century mergers led to a public legitimacy crisis. The corporate response was public relations (i.e. capitalist propaganda; see Chomsky's Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies), to create the image of corporate human values. Similarly, the Great Depression prompted the image of corporate responsibility.
8) The 1973 OPEC oil shock and stagflation led to the response of Neoliberalism: laws (GATT, WTO) and technology (transportation, communication) allowed corporate globalization to smash domestic labour.
-Note: technology is not neutral in its application (see Noble's America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism)
-Note: connecting Neoliberalism with Wall Street financialization and the collapse of Third World industrialization is crucial:
-Varoufakis' The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
-Hudson's Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance
-Prashad's The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
Ch.2 “Business as Usual�:
--Useful examples of the consequences of the corporate bottom line, the “best interest of the corporation principle� where the shareholders are legally entitled to have their corporation run on maximizing profits at any costs (psychopathic self-interest).
--Thus, Enron’s Ponzi scheme is hardly the exception ("bad apples" myth). Also, unpacking corporate “philanthropy� (ex. Pfizer), the use of compartmentalization by human participants, etc.
Ch.3 (“The Externalizing Machine�):
--You cannot comprehend the totality of capitalism without understanding “eٱԲپ� (costs not paid by externalizing from the market), from polluting the environment (Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World) to unpaid reproductive labour (The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values) to exploiting the cheapest labour globally to precarious domestic labour.
--Capitalism is run on profit. Thus, to survive and succeed, you must cut costs. The Neoclassical economics propagandized assumption is progressive innovations in technology and organization cut costs. However, in the real world, it is often easiest to simply move the costs off your plate, to make it “external�. Given the power imbalance, regulators and consumers will always be many steps behind in catching these hidden costs, let alone addressing them.
--Given the corporation’s legal mandate to profit, they are compelled to break regulatory laws because it is often more cost-effective (the profits outweigh the risk of trivial fines)! For capitalism’s assault on the planet, see Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System.
--Furthermore, corporations can collect extensive criminal records without scrutiny, while shareholders and managers are protected from legal liability.
Ch.4 (“Democracy Ltd.�):
--One-dollar-one-vote is not one-person-one-vote, and will silently suffocate the latter with liberal privatization or, during crises, smash the latter with fascism. Thus, we read about capitalism’s connections with fascism, from doing business with fascists to America’s very own fascist corporate coup plot against FDR (“Business Plot�).
--Not detailed here, but fascism is the attempt by State Capitalism to blame its own socioeconomic contradictions onto vulnerable groups:
-Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
-And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future
-fascism as colonial practices returning home: Discourse on Colonialism
Ch.5 (“Corporations Unlimited�): the spread of corporate psychopathy via privatization and marketing.
Ch.6 (“Reckoning�): protests against the corporate takeover.
-The State has not lost power; the power has been redistributed to favour corporations. Since the State still grants the following to corporations, they can be challenged/revoked.
i) Legal personhood
ii) Limited Liability
iii) Legal mandate for profit
iv) Protection + property rights
The Missing:
--The author makes it clear that non-Government reforms are often a gift for corporations, as they are non-binding by law, thus the enforcement is even weaker than legal regulations. While the author does not say it, a Marxist proletariat takeover of the State is an obvious theoretical route.
--Follow-up topics not discussed:
1) Economic Rent: Finance/Insurance/Real Estate (FIRE) sectors extract rent/unearned income/passive income via usurious interest payments, landlords with land rents, monopolists with extortionary fees... this was the rentier feudalism that Classical economists wanted to "free the market" from. The vested interests reversed this with Neoclassical economics, which avoids economic rent.
-Why Can't You Afford a Home?
-The Bubble and Beyond
-Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy
-The Public Bank Solution: From Austerity to Prosperity
2) Economic democracy: even when workers take control of the State, how does the proletariat State wither away? We need to talk about worker co-operatives, owned-and-operated, to re-envision the labour market, automation, and democracy at the workplace.
-micro and macro: Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
-micro: Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism
3) Global division of labour, Imperialism: this book focuses on the Anglo-American sphere, as the history of “the corporation� details. Much more can be written about the pillaging and rent-seeking of global division of labour. China plays a curious role in its State planning and control over its own Finance while being a crucial part in global capitalism. How does the rest of the world envision the future?
-The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
-Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital
-Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
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Jul 13, 2019 03:02AM
Fantastic review, Kevin. Thanks for the work you put into these, I really appreciate it.
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Fantastic review, Kevin. Thanks for the work you put into these, I really appreciate it.
Varun wrote: "Fantastic review, Kevin. Thanks for the work you put into these, I really appreciate it."Cheers Varun, I really hope more people can find a variety of ways to spread these ideas because reading books is quite a time commitment.
On a personal note, writing reviews forces me to actually stop and collect my thoughts instead of rushing to the next book ;)
Kevin wrote: "Varun wrote: "Fantastic review, Kevin. Thanks for the work you put into these, I really appreciate it."Cheers Varun, I really hope more people can find a variety of ways to spread these ideas bec..."
Completely agree, Kevin. I'm very grateful for ŷ reviewers like yourself for sharing these summaries of difficult fact-heavy books for free on this site. A large number of my to-reads are from your lists and reviews! Chomsky, Prashad, Varoufakis etc.
Following your example, I think I'll force myself to review/summarise books I read as well. I always plan to do it when I'm in the middle of a book, but when I'm finally done I get extremely impatient and rush to the next book.
Varun wrote: "Kevin wrote: "Varun wrote: "Fantastic review, Kevin. Thanks for the work you put into these, I really appreciate it."Cheers Varun, I really hope more people can find a variety of ways to spread t..."
Ah, that makes me very happy. You know, when I research alone, I find I shuffle around methodically, but I can remember the people and even the specific conversations that challenged me to make the leaps. I remember when I was first learning economics, how lost I was, starting off with "free market" zealots like Mises and Hayek. I was still wading through mainstream pseudo-Left establishment liberals like Paul Krugmanand Thomas Piketty, and reformists like Ha-Joon Changand Joseph E. Stiglitz, when a reviewer in a library catalog dismantled these and challenged me with Michael Hudson.
Related topics:
1) Social labor - this is something Prashad highlights. The Left should not internalize capitalism by only focusing on wage labor compensation. After all, activism is social labor, it is our gift to each other. We need wages to survive capitalism, but we should not like wages restrict our social imagination, especially in an age where corporations are the most visible sponsors of supposed social events.
2) Intellectual property - the new battleground for the internalization of capitalism. I am careful to provide references so claims are verifiable and for further exploration, but at the heart of it I think these scientists appreciate the socialism of information:
"If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" -Newton
"Who owns the patent on this vaccine?"
"Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" -Jonas Salk
Kevin wrote: "Varun wrote: "Kevin wrote: "Varun wrote: "Fantastic review, Kevin. Thanks for the work you put into these, I really appreciate it."Cheers Varun, I really hope more people can find a variety of wa..."
Thanks so much for all of this, i greatly appreciate it! Understood, i really would like to read Hudson and Prashad next. Have set aside Piketty for unrelated reasons; very glad i didn't spend too much time on it yet.
What are examples of successful pushback, the New Deal?
John wrote: "What are examples of successful pushback, the New Deal?"Definitely important to unpack how much each of the following weighed into the New Deal:
1) US labour movement militancy:
--I assume Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States would highlight the increased “wildcat� strikes (i.e. bottom-up labour action).
--dz’s Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies mentions how the First Red Scare (post-WWI) died down by the Great Depression, with the National Association of Manufacturers being concerned by public power in 1938.
--New Deal’s Wagner Act (“National Labor Relations Act�) legalized unions/collective bargaining.
2) “Enlightened� capitalists:
--When Varoufakis compares the Great Depression with 2008 Financial Crisis, he always mentions how in an economic crash the workers� bargaining power also crashes as they become desperate to just get any job. Thus, he credits the New Deal more to enlightened elites, i.e. FDR (patrician), Keynes (looked down on working class), etc.
…The weaponization of recessions to destroy workers� bargaining power (in the context of the prior period of post-WWI) is explored in The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism.
--ұ’s Drums of War, Drums of Development: The Formation of a Pacific Ruling Class and Industrial Transformation in East and Southeast Asia, 1945�1980 uses a geo-political economy lens, showing how the New Deal was indeed supported by a certain fraction of capitalists, i.e. “liberal internationalists�:
i) capital-intensive: as opposed to labour-intensive (which would be directly harmed by the Wagner Act’s higher wages)
ii) internationalist: seek foreign markets for “free trade� liberalism, i.e. financial capital + leading manufacturing exporters
…The fraction of capitalists opposed to the New Deal is the “conservative nationalists�, i.e. labour-intensive industries focused on the domestic market/Republican Party antagonistic to Democrat Party’s Rockefeller-Eastern banking Wall Street fraction. Glassman presents a geo-political economy synthesis of:
-Thomas Ferguson’s Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (identifies “liberal internationalist�; labour union militancy not enough)
-Kees van der Pijl’s The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (including how “liberal internationalists� like Dean Acheson won over skeptics like Michigan senator Arthur Vandenberg representing the automobile industry which had a huge and militant labour force)
-Bruce Cuming’s The Origins of the Korean War, Volume II (on how “liberal internationalists� won over enough “conservative nationalists� using anti-communism via “containment� Truman Doctrine).
