Primarily, radicals now are dreaming of ways for citizens to stand up to corporate power. T hey are out there. Each year brings a spate of books sounding alarms about the state of American democracy. To begin with, he wants us to democratize our finan-cial system. He's not talking about a little regulation here and a little legislation there.
Gates proposes widespread ownership and participation in American business by citizens.
And that's not the half of it. He envisions America healing the world. Gates worked for seven years as a lawyer with the Senate Finance Committee, led at the time by Louisiana Senator Russell Long. He helped craft legislation promoting employee stock ownership plans, and he expanded on such proposals in his 1998 book, The Ownership Solution . He now runs an outfit called the Shared Capitalism Institute, based in Atlanta.