MAIN IDEA:

The main idea is to use the author’s own experience to demonstrate the nature of Wokeism the danger it presents to American democracy and way of life. Another idea presented in the book relates to the novel use of legal doctrines limiting actions of top corporate management and enforcement of their fiduciary responsibilities

DETAILS:

INTRODUCTION The Woke-industrial Complex
This chapter presents the key point of Wokeism: “Basically, being woke means obsessing about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Maybe climate change too.”

However, it is even more important to explain this phenomenon’s real objectives – power and wealth. Therefore, the author demonstrates how it works based on his own experience as CEO.

CHAPTER 1 The Goldman Rule
In this chapter, the author discusses the main rule of the American business he learned working at Goldman: “He who has the gold makes the rules.”. The author then tells the story of how it works at the top corporate levels using the Woke ideology: anti-white racism, BLM, stakeholder movement to transfer wealth from shareholders to management, and whoever woke ideologists designate as recipients. The author defines it as crony capitalism 2.0. Finally, he retells some stories of his interactions with top-level business leaders promoting Wokeism, stressing that some are pretty sincere.

CHAPTER 2 How I Became a Capitalist
This chapter retells the author’s story: the child of immigrants growing in the USA with regular visits to the old country who eventually achieved the top of American corporate leadership via education and entrepreneurship rather than by climbing the corporate ladder.

CHAPTER 3 What’s the Purpose of a Corporation?
This chapter initially retells the author’s being pushed out from the company he had founded because of his refusal to submit to Wokeism. Then it discusses the nature of corporate ownership and the purpose of the corporation how it was developed throughout history. The author also discusses how limited liability corporations are used to protect social activism. Finally, he also proposes a solution:” For those like me who believe the rise of Wokenomics represents a problem for democracy, the simple answer is to limit the scope of limited liability of the corporation to cover only the set of activities it was intended to cover. A corporation ought to be free to pursue activities that go beyond the pursuit of profit—America is a free country, after all—but to the extent that it does, its social-activist shareholders shouldn’t receive any special protection from direct liability. There is no government regulatory action needed here. Just a simple legal fix—arguably a form of deregulation—that clarifies that the construct of limited liability is… well, limited”.

CHAPTER 4 The Rise of the Managerial Class
This chapter discusses how big business management captured nearly complete control and often enriched themselves at the expense of shareholders. The author demonstrates how technocrats use stakeholder capitalism to expand their power into areas they could not invade before and how it hurt shareholders and consumers.  Once again, the author makes a suggestion:” HOW DO WE end the tyranny of the corporate managerial class? Here’s a thought: limit the scope of the business judgment rule (or the BJR, as it’s often called). In practice, most examples of stakeholder capitalism in the real world start with a CEO who decides to use the company’s corporate platform to solve a social problem. This often results in the CEO making bad business decisions that have negative externalities for democracy. Yet they are aided by the BJR, a corporate privilege that is designed to protect CEOs and corporate directors from being sued for bad business decisions that they make. There are good reasons for this legal doctrine, but today it applies far too broadly in a way that is toxic both for companies and for democracy.”

CHAPTER 5 The ESG Bubble
ESG stands for “environmental, social, and governance,” and the author testified as an expert in Congress during hearings about this.  The author makes a case that ESG would lead to asset bubbles as it already happened in 2008. It is also less profitable because it puts other objectives at par or even above profits. He also tells an interesting story of how government regulations of the pharmaceutical industry created business opportunities for him to start up a multi-billion business, which as a non-public entity could work outside of these regulations. The author also looks at reports that ESG businesses outperform others. As one could expect, these non-commonsensical claims do not stand to scrutiny, even if politically motivated institutional investors prop up ESG companies.   

CHAPTER 6 An Arranged Marriage
This chapter begins with the story of the successful matchmaking of the author’s parents. It then proceeds to use the analogy of marriage for an alliance of top corporate management with the “Occupy Wall Street” woke mob against the middle class. Finally, the author points out that this marriage will probably not be very successful due to incompatibility of interest.

CHAPTER 7 Henchmen of the Woke-Industrial Complex
This chapter looks at another exciting part of the woke/capitalist alliance: money flow. It works pretty much this way: big business pays money to woke non-profits either directly or via settlements with the government, so wokes do not attack this business, but do attack their competitors. This deal would not be possible without the massive support of government bureaucracy, especially the DOJ that became a subsidiary of DNC for all practical purposes. The author provides a few examples of how it works in real life.

CHAPTER 8 When Dictators Become Stakeholders
In this chapter, the author documents the alliance of big business and woke non-profits expanded to the international scene to include the Chinese communist party, which became the big player in this game. They have a lot of gold, so they can extensively use Goldman’s rule. The author strays a bit into his company’s story to provide an example of how a billion dollars investment made all the difference needed for huge success after the failure of the original plan.

CHAPTER 9 The Silicon Leviathan
This chapter discusses the monopolistic nature of Silicon value big businesses such as Google and Facebook and their attempt to suppress the free flow of information and provide massive financial support to the Democratic party. The author reviews the constitutional and legal sides of this massive intervention and expresses great concern that his children may not live in the free country that America used to be.

CHAPTER 10 Wokeness Is Like a Religion; CHAPTER 11 Actually, Wokeness Is Literally a Religion

In these two chapters, the author looks at the psychological and behavioral aspects of the wokeness and concludes that it has all indicators of religion.CHAPTER 12 Critical Diversity Theory
In this chapter, the author discusses the case of wokes attacking their own Larry Summers and similar occurrences and present his own suggestion: Critical diversity Theory, which seeks intellectual diversity, rather than biological diversity:

CHAPTER 13 Woke Consumerism and the Big Sort
This chapter discusses the Big Sort of Americans by political affiliation and attitudes that are happening over recent years. The author refers here all the way back to the struggle between federalists and anti-federalists and their different attitudes to diversity. Finally, the author concludes that Americans should promote their identity as first and foremost Americans, and race and political identities should be demoted, or the country would see a big fight between races and other identities.

CHAPTER 14 The Bastardization of Service
Here the author uses his own experience as upward mobile youth acquiring all kinds of formal qualifications necessary to get into the top college: volunteer work, social justice activism, and all other BS forms that substituted something that used to be internally driven service to others into self-serving activity. The author promotes the idea of mandatory civil service as a tool to establish and maintain the universal American identity.

CHAPTER 15 Who Are We?

This chapter discusses the meaning of America and the need to bring back the idea of E Pluribus Unum and live up to this idea.

MY TAKE ON IT:

This book presents a realistic picture of the current American malaise of wokeness from the point of view of the person who was extremely successful in using opportunities of education and entrepreneurship open for intelligent people capable of being effective in the environment of big government, big education, and other forms of massive corruption that constitute contemporary American society. It is also fascinating in the description of the author’s intellectual and psychological development that eventually put him at odds with other establishment members and changed the direction of his life. The most interesting thing here is the author’s ideas about legal options that could be used against woke members of the establishment that abuse their positions at the top of public entities, either corporations or government or non-profits, to use government or shareholders resources to promote their ideology of wokeness and even suppress other people’s constitutional rights. In my opinion, the last few years removed the veil of hypocrisy that covered the existing and constantly growing gap between interests of government-dependent, prospering, and often parasitic elite and lower classes and interests of the middle class who usually pays for this prosperity with the decrease in quality of their life.

Typically these interests would be reconciled via election process when members of elite supporting competing sides find some accommodation more or less acceptable for everybody while interchanging place in power. However, the last few years saw the united front of the elite against the middle class represented by rich non-elite Trump who unexpectedly jumped at the top of the governmental machinery. The panicked elite responded by completely destroying any semblance of normalcy via massive bureaucracy resistance, media hostility, opportunistic pandemic use, and eventually rigged elections. I am afraid that the successful removal of Trump could be a pyrrhic victory for the elite with a high price to be paid and maybe even soon.