by Garrett Sutton ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 26, 2022
A systematically organized and expert legal primer.
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A concise but thorough introduction to strategically protecting personal assets from corporate liability.
According to attorney Sutton, even a business organization that’s incorporated for limited liability protections can be vulnerable to litigation that attacks its owners’ assets. This is called “piercing the corporate veil,” he says, noting that it’s a strategy that meets with success approximately 50% of the time. Furthermore, he asserts, smaller corporations—and especially single-member and small LLCs—are particularly vulnerable, as they’re not typically covered by various versions of blanket protection: “Your business has a bull’s-eye on it. As we’ve learned, that bull’s-eye never goes away. It remains on every business and asset holding entity as a target for anyone suing to hit and perforate into your personal asset column.” The author explains the core of a defensive posture that observes all the necessary “corporate formalities,” or business requirements, in order to survive in a litigious society. In order to demonstrate the fundamental aspects of that plan, he furnishes an impressively comprehensive tour of the relevant legal landscape, including the nature of the aforementioned formalities, the various kinds of protective entities, and the ways in which corporate veils can be pierced. He even provides a consideration of “reverse piercing,” in which a creditor seeks to satisfy the debt of a private individual by suing a corporation that the individual owns. Finally, the book supplies a series of brief synopses of the relevant legal landscapes in other countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan.
Sutton’s meticulousness is impressive; despite the brevity of this book, he covers a dizzying expanse of juridical territory. His expertise is inarguable; he’s also the personal asset protection attorney for noted business-book author Robert Kiyosaki, who contributes a foreword. (The book is part of the Rich Dad Advisor series.) The author’s counsel will be particularly important for those who are associated with smaller companies, which are both more vulnerable legally and more inclined to ignore practices that protect them: “it can be tempting to dispense with the formalities, failing to designat[e] officers (or managers) and a board of directors, have regular meetings, or keep written records….But without the formalities, it’s hard to prove that you’re operating the way a corporation should and thus would be entitled to its benefits.” And although the topic is somewhat less than seductive, Sutton admirably attempts—mostly with success—to give his discussions a lighthearted touch. He draws examples from popular culture (Superman, the Wizard of Oz) as well as history; for example, he cheekily interprets the American Revolution as a case of the Colonies piercing the veil of King George III. Much more importantly, the author conveys a technically formidable subject in prose that’s always clear and accessible and mostly shorn of legalistic jargon. Moreover, Sutton analyzes more than a dozen real cases, offering concrete illustrations of legal principles that might otherwise seem abstract to the uninitiated. Overall, it’s a rigorous and wonderfully synoptic introduction to a prohibitive but important topic.
A systematically organized and expert legal primer.Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-947588-16-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: BZK Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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by Matthew Desmond ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 21, 2023
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
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New York Times Bestseller
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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