Jeremy Bentham,
The Principles of Morals and Legislation
Chapter 17, section 1.4, note.
Traditional slogan of the business community.
"I know this is kinda hard for contemporary people to get their heads around, but Jesus Christ used to beat people up with a whip for being capitalists. He chased the moneylenders out of the sacred precincts. They were extremely alarmed by this. They were screaming stuff, like 'Hey wow! The Prince of Peace is beating the living crap out of us!' He didn't even claim that they were crooked moneylenders in the temple, it's not like they were Enron or anything. ...
.
William Gates? ... He's obviously a very smart man. And he's a nicer guy, as a human being, than a lot of his competitors. But I have to pick on Bill, instead of Bill's competitors. Because Bill physically killed and ate all his competitors. ... The older Bill gets, the uglier he gets. He's a guy riding a white horse, that turned into a runaway bronco bull, that turned into a scaly crocodile, and now, it is turning into some kind of diseased revenant. It's like the Steed of the Nazgul, those black, flying zombie horses that explode when exposed to fresh water. That's what Microsoft is like now. These guys, these Nazgul... They used to be kings. They were originally human beings, they had wives and children and futures, they had their own little nations to govern and manage. But then there was the One Ring – One Ring to Rule Them All. One. And they couldn't resist. And they gave in. ...
The result is 95% market domination by Microsoft. But that's not a market economy. That's not even capitalism. That is a state-capitalist, state-sanctioned monopoly that Mussolini would have smiled on. Mussolini used to give the people of Italy free radios. But they would only tune in to the fascist station. "
Open Source Speech
Bruce Sterling.
Presentation at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference / OSCon
26 JUL 2002
"It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war."
Abraham Lincoln,
letter to William F. Elkins
21 NOV 1864
American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed.
"A corporation is a legal entity which, while being composed of natural persons, exists completely separately from them. This separation gives the corporation unique powers which other legal entities lack.
... the term corporation is often used to refer specifically to ... business corporations. Corporations may also be formed for political, religious or charitable purposes (not-for-profit corporations), or as government or quasi-governmental entities (public corporations)."
Corporation - entry in the Wikipedia
This page is one of the oldest on this site -- circa 1998.
I readily acknowledge the many past and current valuable contributions of corporations to society, and I am not particularly opposed to the corporate form of ownership per se, but I strongly believe that the power of business corporations compared with other societal institutions has become seriously unbalanced, resulting in serious social problems.
The philosophers tell us that the primary responsibility of every human being is to try to lead a life of virtue -- which I will schematize here as "the desire and capacity to be helpful to others, to be a good neighbor". (AKA YETZER HA TOV). As various people from Max Weber to Joel Bakan have pointed out, corporations are legally defined as "persons", yet are also legally restricted to a set of behaviors which in other persons is defined as "psychopathic": egotistical and lacking in empathy for others. Insofar as corporations are legally restricted to selfish behaviors, they are incapable of being virtuous or good neighbors.
It's a common theme of modern vampire fiction that vampires might tend to amass great personal fortunes and power over the centuries. We might reflect that our contemporary society, largely run by business corporations -- "persons" possessing immortality, superhuman powers, and psychopathic personalities -- is not too dissimilar to one controlled by vampires.
We might tentatively define corporatism as "placing undue importance on the interests of the corporation as against other societal goods"; and "crony capitalism" as "placing undue importance on the interests of corporate officers, as against the other interests of the corporation and economy".
"Large corporations are autonomous technical structures (machines) that follow the logic inherent in their design.... These machines have no innate morals to keep them from seducing our politicians, subverting our democratic processes or lying in order to maximize profit. Moreover, they are only nominally controlled by laws, because the people who make our laws are in turn controlled by these same machines. Today in America, we live under the de facto plutocracy of the corporate machines..."
"A corporation has no soul, no morals. It cannot feel love or pain or remorse. You cannot argue with it. A corporation is nothing but a process - an efficient way of generating revenue.
We demonize corporations for their unwavering pursuit of growth, power and wealth. Yet let's face it: they are simply carrying out genetic orders. This is exactly what corporations were designed - by us - to do."
"The lesson that emerges from our 100-year-plus experience in treating corporations as persons for constitutional purposes is this: If corporations -- all of which are chartered by the government -- are given the same rights as human beings, human beings will not have the same effective rights as corporations."
"Better than any other it describes the organization of modern society. Corporatism is the persistent rival school of representative government. In place of the democratic idea of individual citizens who vote, confer legitimacy and participate to the best of their ability, individuals in the corporatist state are reduced to the role of secondary participants. They belong to their professional or expert groups -- their corporations -- and the state is run by ongoing negotiations between those various interests. This is the natural way of organizing things in a civilization based on expertise and devoted to the exercise of power through bureaucratic structures....
(Corporations and interest groups) are taken by many to be more disinterested then the people's elected representatives, yet all they have done is develop policies which serve their interests, dress them up in disinterested arguments, then use their money and their access to public authorities to press their agenda. The force of their arguments is so great that elected officials who oppose them have often ended up sounding interested. More precisely, the interests of the citizenry have come to be treated as if they were romantic self-interest. The interests of the corporatist groups are now reported as if they were the measure of effective social action....
Corporatism has been for some time the only real threat to democracy. That explains why our corporatist elites never discuss it."
Update, 09 MAY 00:
In
Voltaire's Bastards : The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
,
Saul savages such "technocracy" or "corporatism" (his terms).
A page on this site on
/ "Controllism" / (my term)
.
"The main problem with Enron is that it has never produced much of anything in the way of either goods or services; it has not added a single widget to the world widget supply. Enron is in the business of "financializing," making markets, trading in wholesale electricity, water, data storage, fiber-optics, just about anything. One Enron executive told The New York Times the company's achievement was to create "a regulatory black hole" to suit its "core management philosophy, which was to be the first mover into a market and to make money in the initial chaos and lack of transparency. ...
The company seemed to spend more time influencing government than doing business *. Like Long Term Capital Management, the hedge fund that went awry, it seemed to have only a parasitic relationship to actual economic activity. The problem with deregulating utilities is the reason they were regulated in the first place -- monopoly power and the threat of market manipulation are a set-up for unholy price-gouging. How many times do we have to re-learn that lesson?"
. . * -- arguably the salient characteristic of a decadent (i.e., declining) society.
"Barsamian: You view corporations as being incompatible with democracy, and you say that if we apply the concepts that are used in political analysis, corporations are fascist. That's a highly charged term. What do you mean?
Chomsky: I mean fascism pretty much in the traditional sense. So when a rather mainstream person like Robert Skidelsky, the biographer of [British economist John Maynard] Keynes, describes the early postwar systems as modeled on fascism, he simply means a system in which the state integrates labor and capital under the control of the corporate structure.
That's what a fascist system traditionally was. It can vary in the way it works, but the ideal state that it aims at is absolutist -- top-down control with the public essentially following orders.
Fascism is a term from the political domain, so it doesn't apply strictly to corporations, but if you look at them, power goes strictly top-down, from the board of directors to managers to lower managers and ultimately to the people on the shop floor, typists, etc. There's no flow of power or planning from the bottom up. Ultimate power resides in the hands of investors, owners, banks, etc.
People can disrupt, make suggestions, but the same is true of a slave society. People who aren't owners and investors have nothing much to say about it. They can choose to rent their labor to the corporation, or to purchase the commodities or services that it produces, or to find a place in the chain of command, but that's it. That's the totality of their control over the corporation.
That's something of an exaggeration, because corporations are subject to some legal requirements and there is some limited degree of public control. There are taxes and so on. But corporations are more totalitarian than most institutions we call totalitarian in the political arena.
Barsamian: Is there anything large corporate conglomerates do that has beneficial effects?
Chomsky: A lot of what's done by corporations will happen to have, by accident, beneficial effects for the population. The same is true of the government or anything else. But what are they trying to achieve? Not a better life for workers and the firms in which they work, but profits and market share.
That's not a big secret -- it's the kind of thing people should learn in third grade. Businesses try to maximize profit, power, market share and control over the state. Sometimes what they do helps other people, but that's just by chance."
"The universe is apparently unfolding just the way the corporate elite has told its government puppets it should."
"With one simple observation he disables the argument that equates free-market economics with democracy: 'In a political democracy, each person gets the vote. In the market, one dollar is one vote, and you get as many votes as you have dollars. No dollar, no vote.'
Korten is not a left-winger backed by a radical tradition. He is very much a product of the establishment -- Harvard Graduate Business School, the Ford Foundation, USAID."
"In the West, crony capitalism is not so obvious. I might add that the US Savings & Loan débacle of the 1970s was a form of crony capitalism resulting in poor credit controls. Poor controls stems from a lack of transparency, that is blockages to information flows about the real value of collateral and of the robustness of the debtor's ability to service loans."
"Big brand-name sportswear, cheap computers and fresh prawns in the supermarket are great news if you're a rich consumer. But for people working in the Tiger economies of southeast Asia, they probably mean forced overtime in hazardous factories for a bare minimum wage and careless destruction of the environment."
search keywords ratical rat haus rathaus rat house rathouse . . . .
"Once corporations were legally defined as "natural persons" (technically, "as equivalent to natural persons"), they automatically were endowed with the same "Bill of Rights" as human beings, and so came to possess and then exploit with devastating consequences, the same "rights" of the freedom of speech, and the ability to participate in elections and lobby elected officials.
It is essential to understand how corporations prior to the Civil War were legislatively defined, so we may better appreciate what we can discover and make use of today, using the sections still present in our state constitutions -- as well as reinstating and strengthening in favor of nature, citizens, and communities, many sections that have been repealed by corporate groups seeking to make incorporation laws more "corporate friendly" -- to overthrow corporate authority, and reinstate the authority of we the sovereign people.
Up to the mid-1800s,
- Corporations had limited duration, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years -- they were not given forever, like corporate charters are given today.
- The amount of land a corporation could own was limited.
- The amount of capitalization a corporation could have was limited.
- The corporation had to be chartered for a specific purpose -- not for everything, or anything.
- The internal governance was very different --
shareholders had a lot more rights than they have today, for major decisions such as mergers; sometimes they had to have unanimous shareholder consent.
- There were no limitations protections on liability -- managers, directors, and shareholders were liable for all debts and harms and in some states, doubly or triply liable.
- The states reserved the right to amend the charters, or to revoke them -- even for no reason at all.
[ref. Revoking The Corporation, a discussion with Richard Grossman & Ward Morehouse, transcribed by rat haus reality press, 1996.]
"Monsanto has other problems. One is a culture of power, common throughout the corporate world -- a habit of imposing the company's will on others and on nature, a habit of not listening to people and/or not respecting them. Of assuming, for instance, that if people don't want to eat genetically engineered food, they must be ignorant. Assuming that a few million bucks' worth of reassuring ads will bring them around."
"The civil rights of corporations are so strong that the entities are now the major political players in this country. Almost two-thirds of the money that puts people into office today comes from corporations. They effectively elect our government -- certainly more effectively than the people do. And as a consequence, the corporations now have more power than the people of this country.
... None of this is to say that corporations are intrinsically evil. They are simply legal entities to create profits, and they are genetically programmed, as it were, to increase profits .... This is neither good nor evil -- it simply is."
"How Do Corporations Fit Into America's Public Life?"
by Molly Ivins
Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 15 Dec 1996
included in the book
You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You