Goodwin has done the seemingly impossible-he has made economics comprehensible and funny.

As the corporation's size and power grew, so did the need to assuage people's fears of it. The corporation suffered its first full-blown legitimacy crisis in the wake of the early-twentieth-century merger movement, when, for the first time, many Americans realized that corporations, now turned behemoths, threatened to overwhelm their social institutions and governments.

The corporation was originally conceived as a public institution whose purpose was to serve national interests and advance the public good.

Corporations now govern society, perhaps more than governments themselves do; yet ironically, it is their very power, much of which they have gained through economic globalization, that makes them vulnerable.

Dodge v. Ford still stands for the legal principal that managers and directors have a legal duty to put the shareholders' interests above all others and no legal authority to serve any other interests - what has come to be known as "the best interests of the corporation" principal.

Quotes from the Underground is a remarkable resource and must-read for writers, researchers, activists and indeed anyone who embraces progressive values and hopes to rescue politics from corporate control.

The corporation is not an independent "person" with its own rights, needs, and desires that regulators must respect. It is a state created tool for advancing social and economic policy.