Can you believe that a publishing company is giving away a free book? How un-American! (At least from the perspective of post-Civil War America.) The book's author, Ted Nace, was a successful publisher of computer books, so he may not need the royalties. Perhaps the publisher, Berrett-Koehler, has done well enough from the success of John Perkin's Confessions of an Economic Hit Man to make this title available for free electronically.
The download page is: http://www.gangsofamerica.com/read.html The PDF file is: http://www.gangsofamerica.com/gangsofamerica.pdf
Below are the contents of the book as listed on the download page and as forwarded via the Hope Dance mailing list. The original email message appears to have come from "SOME OF THE ABOVE NEWS" which might have a website here: http://walterkarp.tripod.com/jamescurtis/
Sincerely,
Michael Hirohama
Forwarded Message:
>From: "SOME OF THE ABOVE NEWS" noneoftheabovenews AT yahoo.com
Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2005 8:54 P
Some of The Above News supports a constitutional amendment for SEPARATION OF CORPORATION AND STATE.
Read online or print out FREE book on corporations: GANGS OF AMERICA by Ted Nace
The author and publisher have made the entire book freely downloadable so you can read the book on your computer.
Download the book in Acrobat PDF format.
INTRODUCTION (sample chapters in HTML format)
one: How Did Corporations Get So Much Power? In which the author reads a poll, feels provoked and befuddled, and organizes his investigation
two: From Street Fight To Empire The British roots of the American corporation (1267-1773)
three: The Ultimate Reality Show The brutal history of the Virginia Company (1607-1624)
four: Why The Colonists Feared Corporations… In which the citizens of Boston demonstrate the use of the hatchet as an anti-monopoly device (1607-1773)
five ...And What They Did About It How the framers of the American political system restrained corporate power (1787–1850)
six: The Genuis The man who reinvented the corporation (1850–1880)
seven: Super Powers The corporation acquires nine powerful attributes (1860-1900)
eight: The Judge Stephen Field and the politics of personhood (18681885)
nine: The Court Reporter Who really decided the Supreme Court's most important corporate case?(1886)
ten: The Lavender-Vested Turkey Gobbler How a "majestic, super-eminent" lawyer deceived the Supreme Court (1883)
eleven: Survival Of The Fittest How the Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to advance a Social Darwinist agenda, and how "people power" toppled that agenda (1886–1937)
twelve: The Revolt Of The Bosses The new mobilization of corporate political power (1971-2003)
thirteen: Speech=Money Using the First Amendment to block campaign finance reform
fourteen: Judicial Yoga The tangled logic of corporate rights
fifteen: Crime Wave The roots of the scandals of 2002
sixteen: Global Rule How international trade agreements are creating new corporate rights
seventeen: Fighting Back A movement emerges to challenge corporate hegemony
eighteen: Intelligent, Amoral, Evolving The hazards of persistent, dynamic entities
NOTES
SOURCES