The unofficial history of America (tm)

The unofficial history of America (tm), which continues to be written, 
is not a story of rugged individualism and heroic personal sacrifice 
in the pursuit of a dream. It is a story of democracy derailed, of a 
revolutionary spirit suppressed, and of a once-proud people reduced 
to servitude.  

By Kalle Lasn

The history of America is the one story every kid knows. It's a story of 
fierce individualism and heroic personal sacrifice in the service of a 
dream. A story of early settlers hungry and cold, carving a home out of 
the wilderness. Of visionary leaders fighting for democracy and justice, 
and never wavering. Of a populace prepared to defend those ideals to 
the death. It's the story of a revolution (an American art form as endemic 
as baseball or jazz) beating back British Imperialism and launching a 
new colony into the industrial age on its own terms.  

It's a story of America triumphant. A story of its rise after World War 
II to become the richest and most powerful country in the history of the 
world, "the land of the free and home of the brave," an inspiring model 
for the whole world to emulate.  

That's the official history, the one that is taught in school and the one 
our media and culture reinforce in myriad ways every day.  

The unofficial history of the United States is quite different. It begins 
the same way -- in the revolutionary cauldron of colonial America -- but 
then it takes a turn. A bitplayer in the official history becomes critically 
important to the way the unofficial history unfolds. This player turns out 
to be not only the provocateur of the revolution, but in the end its 
saboteur. This player lies at the heart of America's defining theme: the 
difference between a country that pretends to be free and a country that 
truly is free.  

That player is the corporation.  

The United States of America was born of a revolt not just against 
British monarchs and the British parliament but against British 
corporations.  

We tend to think of corporations as fairly recent phenomena, the legacy 
of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. In fact, the corporate presence in 
prerevolutionary America was almost as conspicuous as it is today. 
There were far fewer corporations then, but they were enormously 
powerful: the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, 
the British East India Company. Colonials feared these chartered entities. 
They recognized the way British kings and their cronies used them as 
robotic arms to control the affairs of the colonies, to pinch staples 
from remote breadbaskets and bring them home to the motherland.  

The colonials resisted. When the British East India Company imposed 
duties on its incoming tea (telling the locals they could buy the tea 
or lump it, because the company had a virtual monopoly on tea distribution 
in the colonies), radical patriots demonstrated. Colonial merchants 
agreed not to sell East India Company tea. Many East India Company 
ships were turned back at port. And, on one fateful day in Boston, 
342 chests of tea ended up in the salt chuck.  

The Boston Tea Party was one of young America's finest hours. 
It sparked enormous revolutionary excitement. The people were 
beginning to understand their own strength, and to see their 
own self-determination not just as possible but inevitable.  

The Declaration of Independence, in 1776, freed Americans not only 
from Britain but also from the tyranny of British corporations, and 
for a hundred years after the document's signing, Americans remained 
deeply suspicious of corporate power. They were careful about the way 
they granted corporate charters, and about the powers granted therein.  

Early American charters were created literally by the people, for the 
people as a legal convenience. Corporations were "artificial, invisible, 
intangible," mere financial tools. They were chartered by individual 
states, not the federal government, which meant they could be kept 
under close local scrutiny. They were automatically dissolved if they 
engaged in activities that violated their charter. Limits were placed 
on how big and powerful companies could become. Even railroad magnate 
J. P. Morgan, the consummate capitalist, understood that corporations 
must never become so big that they "inhibit freedom to the point where 
efficiency [is] endangered."  

The two hundred or so corporations operating in the US by the year 
1800 were each kept on fairly short leashes. They weren't allowed to 
participate in the political process. They couldn't buy stock in other 
corporations. And if one of them acted improperly, the consequences 
were severe. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed a motion to 
extend the charter of the corrupt and tyrannical Second Bank of the 
United States, and was widely applauded for doing so. That same year 
the state of Pennsylvania revoked the charters of ten banks for operating 
contrary to the public interest. Even the enormous industry trusts, 
formed to protect member corporations from external competitors and 
provide barriers to entry, eventually proved no match for the state. 
By the mid-1800s, antitrust legislation was widely in place.  

In the early history of America, the corporation played an important but 
subordinate role. The people -- not the corporations -- were in control. 
So what happened? How did corporations gain power and eventually 
start exercising more control than the individuals who created them?  

The shift began in the last third of the nineteenth century -- the start 
of a great period of struggle between corporations and civil society. 
The turning point was the Civil War. Corporations made huge profits from 
procurement contracts and took advantage of the disorder and corruption 
of the times to buy legislatures, judges and even presidents. 
Corporations became the masters and keepers of business. President 
Abraham Lincoln foresaw terrible trouble. Shortly before his death, 
he warned that "corporations have been enthroned . . . . An era of 
corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor 
to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people . . . until 
wealth is aggregated in a few hands . . . and the republic is destroyed."  

President Lincoln's warning went unheeded. Corporations continued to 
gain power and influence. They had the laws governing their creation 
amended. State charters could no longer be revoked. Corporate profits 
could no longer be limited. Corporate economic activity could be 
restrained only by the courts, and in hundreds of cases judges granted 
corporations minor legal victories, conceding rights and privileges 
they did not have before.  

Then came a legal event that would not be understood for decades (and 
remains baffling even today), an event that would change the course of 
American history. In Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, 
a dispute over a railbed route, the US Supreme Court deemed that a 
private corporation was a "natural person" under the US Constitution 
and therefore entitled to protection under the Bill of Rights. Suddenly, 
corporations enjoyed all the rights and sovereignty previously enjoyed 
only by the people, including the right to free speech.  

This 1886 decision ostensibly gave corporations the same powers as 
private citizens. But considering their vast financial resources, 
corporations thereafter actually had far more power than any private 
citizen. They could defend and exploit their rights and freedoms more 
vigorously than any individual and therefore they were more free. In a 
single legal stroke, the whole intent of the American Constitution -- that 
all citizens have one vote, and exercise an equal voice in public debates 
-- had been undermined. Sixty years after it was inked, Supreme Court 
Justice William O. Douglas concluded of Santa Clara that it "could not 
be supported by history, logic or reason." One of the great legal 
blunders of the nineteenth century changed the whole idea of 
democratic government.  

Post-Santa Clara America became a very different place. By 1919, 
corporations employed more than 80 percent of the workforce and 
produced most of America's wealth. Corporate trusts had become too 
powerful to legally challenge. The courts consistently favored their 
interests. Employees found themselves without recourse if, for example, 
they were injured on the job (if you worked for a corporation, you 
voluntarily assumed the risk, was the courts' position). Railroad and 
mining companies were enabled to annex vast tracts of land at minimal 
expense.  

Gradually, many of the original ideals of the American Revolution were 
simply quashed. Both during and after the Civil War, America was 
increasingly being ruled by a coalition of government and business 
interests. The shift amounted to a kind of coup d'?tat -- not a sudden 
military takeover but a gradual subversion and takeover of the 
institutions of state power. Except for a temporary setback during 
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal (the 1930s), the US has since been 
governed as a corporate state.  

In the post-World War II era, corporations continued to gain power. 
They merged, consolidated, restructured and metamorphosed into ever 
larger and more complex units of resource extraction, production, 
distribution and marketing, to the point where many of them became 
economically more powerful than many countries. In 1997, fifty-one 
of the world's hundred largest economies were corporations, not countries. 
The top five hundred corporations controlled forty-two percent of the 
world's wealth. Today corporations freely buy each other's stocks and 
shares. They lobby legislators and bankroll elections. They manage our 
broadcast airwaves, set our industrial, economic and cultural agendas, 
and grow as big and powerful as they damn well please.  

Every day, scenes that would have seemed surreal, impossible, 
undemocratic twenty years ago play out with nary a squeak of dissent 
from a stunned and inured populace.  

At Morain Valley Community College in Palos Hills, Illinois, a student 
named Jennifer Beatty stages a protest against corporate sponsorship 
in her school by locking herself to the metal mesh curtains of the 
multimillion-dollar "McDonald's Student Center" that serves as the 
physical and nutritional focal point of her college. She is arrested 
and expelled.  

At Greenbrier High School in Evans, Georgia, a student named Mike 
Cameron wears a Pepsi T-shirt on the day -- dubbed "Coke Day" -- 
when corporate flacks from Coca-Cola jet in from Atlanta to visit 
the school their company has sponsored and subsidized. Mike Cameron 
is suspended for his insolence.  

In suburban shopping malls across North America, moms and dads 
push shopping carts down the aisle of Toys "R" Us. Trailing them and 
imitating their gestures, their kids push pint-size carts of their 
own. The carts say, "Toys 'R' Us Shopper in Training."  

In St. Louis, Missouri, chemical giant Monsanto sics its legal team on 
anyone even considering spreading dirty lies -- or dirty truths -- about 
the company. A Fox TV affiliate that has prepared a major investigative 
story on the use and misuse of synthetic bovine growth hormone (a 
Monsanto product) pulls the piece after Monsanto attorneys threaten 
the network with "dire consequences" if the story airs. Later, a planned 
book on the dangers of genetic agricultural technologies is temporarily 
shelved after the publisher, fearing a lawsuit from Monsanto, gets cold 
feet.  

In boardrooms in all the major global capitals, CEOs of the world's 
biggest corporations imagine a world where they are protected by what 
is effectively their own global charter of rights and freedoms -- the 
Multinational Agreement on Investment (MAI). They are supported in 
this vision by the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, the 
International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Chamber of 
Commerce (ICC), the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), the 
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and 
other organizations representing twenty-nine of the world's richest 
economies. The MAI would effectively create a single global economy 
allowing corporations the unrestricted right to buy, sell and move 
their businesses, resources and other assets wherever and whenever 
they want. It's a corporate bill of rights designed to override all 
"nonconforming" local, state and national laws and regulations and 
allow them to sue cities, states and national governments for alleged 
noncompliance. Sold to the world's citizens as inevitable and necessary 
in an age of free trade, these MAI negotiations met with considerable 
grassroots opposition and were temporarily suspended in April 1998. 
Nevertheless, no one believes this initiative will remain suspended 
for long.  

We, the people, have lost control. Corporations, these legal fictions 
that we ourselves created two centuries ago, now have more rights, 
freedoms and powers than we do. And we accept this as the normal 
state of affairs. We go to corporations on our knees. Please do the 
right thing, we plead. Please don't cut down any more ancient forests. 
Please don't pollute any more lakes and rivers (but please don't move 
your factories and jobs offshore either). Please don't use pornographic 
images to sell fashion to my kids. Please don't play governments off 
against each other to get a better deal. We've spent so much time 
bowed down in deference, we've forgotten how to stand up straight.  

The unofficial history of America (tm), which continues to be written, is 
not a story of rugged individualism and heroic personal sacrifice in the 
pursuit of a dream. It is a story of democracy derailed, of a revolutionary 
spirit suppressed, and of a once-proud people reduced to servitude.  

Excerpted from Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America (tm) (Kalle Lasn,  
William Morrow / Eaglebrook, 1999). 

                             -==-

Source: Information Clearinghouse ...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3925.htm


Cheers, Steve..

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