[wordup] The History of America ...

[Adam Shand]

... this is great.  While I don't always agree with Kalle Lasn or
Adbusters I think this is right on the money.  It's longish but it's a
fast read.  Even if you don't have time to read it properly skim through
it, it's pretty interesting.

Adam.

From: http://adbusters.org/magazine/28/usa.html

The History of America ...
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'e'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).