Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy

A Book Review by Riki Ott

Gangs of America starts where my book, Not One Drop, ends. I felt so excited to have discovered it I think it should be required reading by every adult in America! If we are to resolve the climate crisis in time to give the young heirs a chance to thrive and survive, then we must first resolve the democracy crisis. Gangs of America clearly lays out what the democracy crisis is and how to resolve it.

Author Ted Nace starts by asking the same question that we asked in Cordova, Alaska, as our lawsuit against Exxon for damages from the 1989 oil spill dragged on for, literally, decades: How did corporations get so much power that they can manipulate our legal system, our political system, our very governance and trump human rights? What happened in America?

Nace answers this question very methodically, thoroughly, and refreshingly with a great cast of characters and a series of fascinating stories. He starts with the British roots of the American corporation, relays a fresh version of colonists and Founders attempts to restrain corporate power, and shows how restraints were thwarted by willful corporations and power brokers in key places as lobbyists, lawyers, politicians, and judges.

Nace explains the evolution of corporations into their modern form during the last half of the 19^th century, a period that laid the groundwork for growth of corporate superpowers. No longer constrained by classic restrictions to term, function, size, activity, newly minted corporate persons ordained by US Supreme Court judges began to flex their freshly acquired Constitutional rights.

The rest, as they say, is history. Nace shows how, during the 1970s, corporations further refined their deft influence of elections and elected officials through usurpation of First Amendment rights. This gets us to where we are today where all three branches of government are heavily manipulated through corporate persons using constitutional rights and protections intended only for humans.

Still not satisfied, corporate persons are now using global trade agreements to create new corporate rights to further erode environmental regulations and human rights.

The final chapters of Gangs of America explore practical and hopeful ways of once again restraining corporate hegemony. I was delighted to discover that Nace and others came to the same conclusion that I did in Not One Drop: We need to pass the 28^th Amendment to the US Constitution to strip corporations of rights intended only for human persons.

As Americans, we have a duty to understand the threat to and to act to preserve the Republic. The first place to start is to read this book and join the discussion and the movement (www.ultimatecivics.com)!