Us, Inc.

The founders of the U.S. guaranteed citizens certain protections against the most powerful institutions of their time. It was an afterthought, but it was a valuable one. And while they prevented governments and religious institutions from colluding with one another, and forbade governments from violating certain, basic, rights, they neglected to address an institution that, currently, has more influence and control over almost every aspect of our lives than anything else: the corporation.

How could they forget about something that is commonly larger than governments, something that has de-facto control over how we spend our time, what we eat, where we live, the ways we travel, and how we communicate? They didn't forget. Five decades before the constitution was written, the laws that allowed for-profit corporations to form had been repealed and stockbroking had been banned after riots in Great Britain had prompted a trade commission to look into the matter. The commissioners were so appalled at the extent of corporate misdeeds in the century since the institution had been created that they called the corporation the most "wholly perverted" legal structure they had ever investigated. The authors of our constitution didn't forget about corporations, they just figured no one would be foolish enough to unleash them again.

But we were. In less than a decade, the beginnings of the industrial revolution not only convinced us to resurrect a dangerous institution, it led us to allow corporations to exist indefinitely, engage in more than one activity, own stock in other corporations, and lobby governments to create and repeal laws and regulations. But corporations aren't citizens. They're not even human. They are legal structures committed to increasing stock prices. They are not responsible to, nor do they feel empathy for, their employees, their customers, or the society that created them. And when the horrors of the industrial revolution became so blatant that lawmakers could no longer ignore them, legislators finally realized that, even if they were too frightened to ban corporations, they would, at least, have to regulate them. However, in the 1970s, an economic philosophy called neo-liberalism asserted that corporations were so flawless that, not only should they not be regulated, but every aspect of our society should be turned over to them through economic privatization. The process of doing this is going on right now.

Corporations are allowed to sell and hire across national borders, but are, by policy, exempt from any nation's criminal justice system. After all, you can't imprison a corporation, you can only sue it. Governments have been signing agreements with organizations like the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund, which are clearly more concerned with the interests of multi-national corporations than the interests of any country's citizens.

In fact, the meetings of these organizations are the only meetings that governments routinely assign riot police to. Of course, they are also the only meetings that routinely attract thousands of protesters. What is it that these protesters are trying to tell their governments? It might be that they don't aspire to live out their lives in concrete wastelands, spending 10 hours a day sitting behind a computer screen in an office cubicle, or standing on their feet in a three-acre retail outlet, only to spend the next couple of hours stuck in a car in a traffic jam listening to corporate advertising on the radio just so they can get home and fall asleep in front of their TVs, which are broadcasting even more advertising, and then do it again, and again, year after year. Or, maybe, they realize that this is the best that corporations have to offer us, and the most likely scenario is the one being played out in third-world countries around the globe, where people are given starvation-wages for working 80-hour, 7-day work-weeks inside factories with armed guards that make sure they don't drink water during their shifts because that might make them go the restroom more often.

Why would any government tolerate, let alone support, an institution that does these things to us? Because the "invisible hand" of market economics tells governments and corporations what is really best for us. This invisible hand will lift the stock prices of beneficial corporations higher while pushing down the stock prices of harmful corporations. You see, no matter what we think we want, the hand tells us that we actually want full-time retail employees to be paid so little that many of them must use food stamps to feed their families. The hand tells us that we want food companies to lace foods with so many additives that our bellies bloat and we're likely to spend the last few years of our lives in a cardiac or cancer ward of a hospital that we can't afford. The hand tells us that we want corporations to demand that potential and current employees give them their user-profiles on Internet discussion groups so corporations know who to hire, and who to fire, based on what we say, and think, when we're not on the job. The hand reminds us that we want to pay $150 billion a year in taxpayer subsidies to corporations that lay-off workers, refuse to pay off pensions, "outsource" jobs elsewhere, and keep increasing prices, so we can become indebted to rotating-credit companies, who charge 20% interest rates, because we can no longer afford to not be in debt to them.

If you're like me, and think the invisible hand is lying, then it might be time to start using your voice to tell lawmakers what we really want. The longer you remain silent about the problems caused by corporations controlling our lives, the longer lawmakers can say, "no one told me anything was wrong." The more often you complain about corporate power and greed harming us and the society we live in, the more obvious it becomes that legislators and administrators are not looking after our best interests. The more obvious it becomes that government officials are more interested in corporate stock prices than in the lives of their constituents, the more tenuous their position becomes. Say something.