I view the continuing growth of corporate power and its despotic control of governments throughout the world, including our own, as a socio-economic disease. While Mussolini and others named it "Fascism," I call it "Corporism" because that name better reveals its underlying institutional structure. I would define Corporism as the domination of government and society by the emergence and power of the giant publicly-traded multinational corporations and financial institutions, organized in totalitarian hierarchies, which singly and in combinations buy or destroy their competitors, corrupt the politics of nations, and seize, hoard, and wield for themselves most of the wealth of the human race.
We must recognize that we do have this cancerous disease, what it is doing to us and the world we live in, how it came about historically, and how and why it continues to be generated and sustained now in our society. Just as computer viruses find their ways into the software of our computers and destroy their operation, Corporism, promulgating itself by financial, legal, and technological means, has infected society in ways that lead to the hoarding of human resources, increasing insecurity and misery for the bulk of the world's population, perhaps even to worldwide holocaust. We must conquer this disease if we are to survive.
Long before the birth of the American Republic, the British crown adapted the corporation that was the form of ancient universities into a device to dominate British colonies throughout the world, including those on this continent. Through their "crown corporations" the Kings of England and their designated agents governed, taxed, and controlled the production and trade and skimmed off the profits of their colonial lands and subjects, enforcing their reign by military means. When our forebears revolted, defeated the British, and formed the United States, we also wiped out the King's corporations. They ceased to exist here. That was part of what independence meant to our founding fathers.
By the time of our civil war, however, the "robber barons," those famous, greedy, wealthy, ruthless American industrialists, had again found ways to establish device of British kings to their own aggrandizement. In court case after court case for almost a century and a half, corporation lawyers have refined and perfected the legal immunities and powers of these artificial, state-created, wealth-hoarding, irresponsible entities. Beginning in 1886, they prevailed upon the U.S. Supreme Court to grant them virtually all of the constitutional rights of citizens. This in effect allowed them to resume the role of their royal predecessors in ruling the country. In cahoots with their banks, huge corporations now control America's body politic by reason of their bald-faced purchases of the three branches of the American government and America's major media.
In consequence, by the beginning of the 21st Century the United States had ceased to function as a republic, much less as a democracy. These giant corporations, headed in most instances by members of an extremely wealthy elite group of multimillionaires and even billionaires, subvert healthy enterprise and true entrepreneurship. One percent of those at the top of the economic scale now have as much wealth as the bottom 95%, and the ratio keeps worsening. We humans, reduced to being "the non-corporate citizens" of the United States, retain only those rights and benefits that Corporate America allows us. Corporations in essence now elect and control our government, write virtually all its laws, and have control of the police, the courts, and the military.
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