David Rothkopf - Power, Inc.: The Epic Rivalry between Big Business and Government--and the Reckoning That Lies Ahead

 96 kbps, Read by William Hughes, Unabridged
 
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/power-inc-david-rothkopf/1104154809

Overview
The world’s largest company, Wal-Mart Stores, has revenues higher than the GDP of all but twenty-five of the world’s countries. Its employees outnumber the populations of almost a hundred nations. The world’s largest asset manager, a secretive New York company called Black Rock, controls assets greater than the national reserves of any country on the planet. A private philanthropy, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, spends as much worldwide on health care as the World Health Organization. 

The rise of private power may be the most important and least understood trend of our time. David Rothkopf provides a fresh, timely look at how we have reached a point where thousands of companies have greater power than all but a handful of states. Beginning with the story of an inquisitive Swedish goat wandering off from his master and inadvertently triggering the birth of the oldest company still in existence, Power, Inc. follows the rise and fall of kings and empires, the making of great fortunes, and the chaos of bloody revolutions. A fast-paced tale in which champions of liberty are revealed to be paid pamphleteers of moneyed interests and greedy scoundrels trigger changes that lift billions from deprivation, Power, Inc. traces the bruising jockeying for influence right up to today’s financial crises, growing inequality, broken international system, and battles over the proper role of government and markets.

Rothkopf argues that these recent developments, coupled with the rise of powers like China and India, may not lead to the triumph of American capitalism that was celebrated just a few years ago. Instead, he considers an unexpected scenario, a contest among competing capitalisms offering different visions for how the world should work, a global ideological struggle in which European and Asian models may have advantages. An important look at the power struggle that is defining our times, Power, Inc. also offers critical insights into how to navigate the tumultuous years ahead.

Publishers Weekly
The antagonism between the state and overweening corporations brewed for centuries before coming to a head in this unfocused historical study. Rothkopf (Superclass), a former U.S. trade official, surveys the business corporation from medieval Sweden’s Stora Kopparberg mine through the private empire of the British East India Company to today’s giant multinationals. It’s too broad a canvas; much of the meandering narrative rehashes the emergence of the modern state out of conflicts with church and aristocracy before finally reaching the main topic—the modern, American-style corporation, à la Wal-Mart and Goldman Sachs, with global reach and arrogant political sway. Working from misleading comparisons of corporate sales and workforces to national GDP and populations, Rothkopf overhypes the degree to which corporations have supplanted the “post-sovereign” state. His rather crude analysis of corporations’ legal status as “artificial persons” and “supercitizens” with constitutional rights overlooks crucial distinctions and treats businesses as autonomous monoliths, rather than as companies run by real people to further the interests of their wealthy owners and managers. Though Rothkopf has cogent things to say about the balance between private and public power, his unrealistic model of corporate power obscures more than it reveals.