MD,
Found this on http://www.adbusters.org - Pirsig's giants just keep getting
bigger and more powerful ...
----------------------
Corporations are in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the land we
walk on. They are in the food, the clothes, the cars, the speed, the news,
the music, the cool, the hype, the sex.
But who are these legal fictions that we ourselves created? How did they
get to be omnipotent? Do corporations serve us, or do we serve them?
To understand the nature of the beast, we must look to a time when
corporations were not the all-powerful entities they are today. The first
corporations, given license to operate in the 1600s, were strictly limited
in scope and power by their charters. Corporations were kept on a very
short leash right through the American Revolution and the early years of
the new republic. When a corporation exceeded its powers or ceased to serve
the public interest, its charter was revoked and its very right to exist
was nullified. The people -- not the corporations -- were in control.
Well before the advent of "personhood," corporations had already been
granted the privilege of limited liability -- a key component of their
immense legal power. What cemented the corporate position more than
anything else, however, was the 1886 US Supreme Court ruling in a railbed
dispute titled Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad. The ruling
held that a private corporation was a "natural person" entitled to all the
rights and privileges of a human being. It was one of the greatest blunders
in legal history, and it triggered the corporations' 100-year march to
global power.
Between 1890 and 1930, America was transformed, at lightning speed, by a
corporate invasion of everyday life. Giant companies like DuPont, US Steel
and Standard Oil grew to dominate commerce. Factories, hotels, department
stores and amusement parks began to dot the landscape. Streetlights,
electric signs, the telegraph, mail-order catalogs, fashion shows -- all
celebrated the new industrial message.
By the 1930s, corporations employed more than 80 percent of the people and
produced most of America's wealth. The large corporations were now too big
and powerful to challenge in the courts. During this period, many of the
original ideals of the American Revolution were forgotten or watered down,
and America was increasingly a corporate state, governed by a coalition of
government and business interests.
In the post World War II years, corporations merged, consolidated,
restructured and metamorphosed into ever larger and more complex units of
resource extraction, production, distribution and marketing. In the 1990s,
corporations put aside their traditional competitive feelings toward each
other and forged tens of thousands of co-branding deals, marketing
alliances, co-manufacturing projects and R&D agreements, and created a
global network of common interests.
By 1997, 51 of the world's largest economies were not countries but
corporations. Today, the top 100 companies control 33 percent of the
world's assets, but employ only one percent of the world's workforce.
General Motors is larger than Denmark; Wal-Mart bigger than South Africa.
The mega-corporations roam freely around the globe, lobbying legislators,
bankrolling elections and playing governments off against each other to get
the best deals. Their private hands control the bulk of the world's news
and information flows.
This new species has a number of capacities and powers that we mortal
humans can only dream of. For one thing, it can "live" in many places
simultaneously. It can change its body at will -- shed an arm or a leg or
even a head without harm. It can morph into a variety of new forms, absorb
other members of its species, or be absorbed itself. Most astoundingly, it
can live forever. To remain alive, it only needs to meet one condition: its
income must exceed its expenditures over the long run.
The rest of it is here:
http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/corporate/tour/1.html
Diana
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