Business By The Book: Complete Guide of Biblical Principles for the Workplace
Now readers can approach the new millennium by incorporating Burkett’s tried and true advice into their business world with this updated edition of the best-selling classic containing some of the
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Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People” – And How You Can Fight Back
- ISBN13: 9781605095592
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Was the Boston Tea Party the first WTO-style protest against transnational corporations? Did Supreme Court sell out America’s citizens in the nineteenth century, with consequences lasting to this day? Is there a way for American citizens to recover democracy of, by, and for the people?
Thom Hartmann takes on these most difficult questions and tells a startling story that will forever change your understanding of American history. Amongst a deep historical context, Hartmann describes the history of the Fourteenth Amendment–created at the end of the Civil War to grant basic rights to freed slaves–and how it has been used by lawyers representing corporate interests to extend additional rights to businesses far more frequently than to freed slaves. Prior to 1886, corporations were referred to in U.S. law as “artificial persons.” But in 1886, after a series of cases brought by lawyers representing the expanding railroad interests, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations were “persons” and entitled to the same rights granted to people under the Bill of Rights. Since this ruling, America has lost the legal structures that allowed for people to control corporate behavior.
It’s time for “we, the people” to take back our lives. In this revised and expanded second edition, Hartmann incorporates specific examples from today’s headlines, and proposes specific legal remedies that could truly save the world from political, economic, and ecological disaster.
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Excellent Practical Advice for the Business Person,
Business By the Book is an excellent reference not only for the self-employed, but anyone engaged in business.
The book is divided into 3 main sections: Conducting Business by the Bible, Critical Policy Decisions, and Your Business and Your Life.
Some of the more helpful chapters for me were:
1. Personal Lifestyle Goals.
2. Biblical Business Goals.
3. Your Business and Your Spouse.
4. Hiring and Firing Decisions.
5. Management Selection Decisions.
6. Business Tithing.
7. Retirement.
8. Implementing God’s Plan.
Whether self-employed, a manager, church or ministry staff person, or engaged in business, you will benefit from Burkett’s sound biblical wisdom.
Highly recommended!
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|Every Self Employed Person Should Read This Book!!,
Although it is written from a Biblical perspective, EVERY self employed person needs to read this book. It is packed with common sense business principles which, in this world-gone-mad with secular humanism, most of us have lost sight of. It doesn’t matter what your faith is… even an athiest would greatly benefit from the business principles taught in this book. It turned my little mom-and-pop business, and my life, around to the direction it should have taken in the first place.
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|Small businesses take note: Corporate personhood hurts you as well,
Thom Hartmann has, once again, provided an informative, rational and readable view of our world, its problems and what to do about them. This time its an update of his previous work on the domination of large corporations by virtue of “corporate personhood.” He steps through the principles of the founders of our nation and then through Supreme Court decisions, or lack thereof, bringing history alive by quotes, photos and anecdotes about the people involved and why they acted as they did. He factually documents the negative impact corporate personhood has had on real persons and the society in which we live. Readers should sit up and take notice, however, that Hartmann reveals herein that it is not just ordinary humans who now have unequal protection under the law. Small and local businesses too have been trampled under the feet of the “big boys” of the economy. Those who advocate free market capitalism and who endorse corporate personhood often claim the purpose of helping small businesses or strengthening local economies. Just the opposite is the actual impact of these economic policies, as he clearly and amply demonstrates. Finally, he pulls in the comments of modern-day capitalists who have learned that removing the standing of corporations as persons under the law will not destroy big business either. In fact, in the long-run, it will ensure broad-based growth of the economy, as the capitalism without regulation that results from corporate personhood is not sustainable.
This can be the reference book for a new movement, a truly “populist” movement to place “We, the People” back in charge. Let’s go for it! Yes, we need to return to the principles upon which our country was founded. Corporations are NOT people!
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|Readable, entertaining and definitely eye-opening,
In 2009, “the transnational pharmaceutical giant Pfizer pled guilty to multiple criminal felonies. It had been marketing drugs in a way that may well have led to the deaths of people … [Pfizer] paid a $1.2 billion ‘criminal’ fine to the U.S. government … as well as an additional $1 billion in civil penalties… None of its executives… saw even five minutes of the inside of a police station or jail cell … in the autumn of 2004, Martha Stewart was convicted of lying to investigators about her sale of stock in another pharmaceutical company. Her crime cost nobody their life, but she famously was escorted off to a women’s prison. Had she been a corporation instead of a human being, odds are there never would have been an investigation.”
This punchy opening of this surreal book by Thom Hartmann gets you hooked from the very first line. It’s true. What are corporations if not the actions of the people who work in and for them? If a corporation does wrong, simply writing a check to the government doesn’t seem to cut it when the people responsible for the wrong-doing retain their jobs, pay-checks, privileges, and avoid punishment under the law. Hartmann explains, in great historical detail, how corporations became “persons” under US national law with rights equivalent to those of “natural persons” (you and me, flesh and blood, individuals); including the First Amendment right of all persons to free speech, the Fourth Amendment right to privacy, the Fifth Amendment protection against double jeopardy and self-incrimination and the Fourteenth Amendment right to non-discrimination. Moreover, Thom Hartmann, blow by blow, explains how corporations have exploited these rights to advance their own interests, or at least, those of the “persons” who stood to benefit, at the expense of the common good and the people of the United States.
It all began, apparently, in 1886 when the Supreme Court Justice Morrison Waite pronounced judgment in a case of the Southern Pacific Railroad versus Santa Clara country, about the taxation levied on this corporation by the County. The lawyers claimed that the railroad corporation was entitled to the same rights as a “person”. The court reporter noted in the written record of the case that, “The defendant corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This written record, Thom Hartmann goes on to show, was actually an error and not the explicit intention of Justice Waite. Nonetheless, this record set the tone and served to legitimize all subsequent claims to corporate personhood for the rest of history until the present day. Further, Hartman postulates that this was all a big conspiracy engineered by the railroad lawyers who stood to make significant financial gain through defending more corporations in this way. The story is as incredible as it is outrageous and has the reader in a state of both disbelief and indignation. Surely the whole basis of corporate law in the US couldn’t have been derived from little more than a mistake? This is quite fascinating and the arguments are succinctly articulated with references to original documents and records of the time. If we are to believe this author, the entire legal infrastructure governing corporations may well have been a complete farce, opening the floodgates for unchecked corporate abuse of the law as it was originally intended.
Hartmann deals with many controversial and poorly understood issues relating to the power of corporations over the human rights of individuals, providing detailed case studies of an array of events and actions in relation to corporations. The reading is riveting, and even though we have heard many of these stories before, the “get to the real truth” approach of the author makes this compelling reading. We read about the events leading to the Boston Tea Party, which was a protest against the power of the East India Company, who had successfully lobbied to support the Tea Act which gave the East India Company full and unlimited access to the American tea trade as well as tax exemptions, thus helping to drive other tea-traders out of business. Hartmann recounts the astounding story of why the Marc Kasky case against Nike’s “right to lie” in their marketing materials in the name of freedom of speech was never tried in court. Other chapters include the exposure of issues such as the lawsuit by the Texas beef barons against Oprah Winfrey for commenting that she would avoid eating hamburgers after an outbreak of mad-cow disease, the concentrated corporate ownership of the not-so-free press, corporate support for political campaigns, the limitations of federal authorities to carry out spot checks on businesses to assess health and safety compliance, comparisons of US versus European law and the…
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|A fine survey suitable for debate,
The second updated edition of UNEQUAL PROTECTION: HOW CORPORATIONS BECAME “PEOPLE” – AND HOW YOU CAN FIGHT BACK updates and features Hartmann’s analysis of two recent Supreme Court cases which tossed out corporate campaign finance limits. While this analysis deserves a spot in any business library, it also is recommended for social issues collections considering the legal and social remedies possible to end corporate ‘rights’ entitling them to the same rights as human beings. A fine survey suitable for debate.
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