On 01/05/2011 12:32 AM, D Peter Maus wrote:


Submission to tyranny as inevitable is as much a crime as the tyranny,
itself.

Citadel Broadcasting has shrunk your brain to the size of a walnut.

The only tyranny threatening the USA is the unregulated corporation
nonster tyranny.

"The other part of the story is the development of corporations, which
is an interesting story in itself. Adam Smith didn't say much about
them, but he did criticize the early stages of them. Jefferson lived
long enough to see the beginnings, and he was very strongly opposed to
them. But the development of corporations really took place in the early
twentieth century and very late in the nineteenth century. Originally,
corporations existed as a public service. People would get together to
build a bridge and they would be incorporated for that purpose by the
state. They built the bridge and that's it. They were supposed to have a
public interest function. Well into the 1870s, states were removing
corporate charters. They were granted by the state. They didn't have any
other authority. They were fictions. They were removing corporate
charters because they weren't serving a public function. But then you
get into the period of the trusts and various efforts to consolidate
power that were beginning to be made in the late nineteenth century.
It's interesting to look at the literature. The courts didn't really
accept it. There were some hints about it. It wasn't until the early
twentieth century that courts and lawyers designed a new socioeconomic
system. It was never done by legislation. It was done mostly by courts
and lawyers and the power they could exercise over individual states.
New Jersey was the first state to offer corporations any right they
wanted. Of course, all the capital in the country suddenly started to
flow to New Jersey, for obvious reasons. Then the other states had to do
the same thing just to defend themselves or be wiped out. It's kind of a
small-scale globalization. Then the courts and the corporate lawyers
came along and created a whole new body of doctrine which gave
corporations authority and power that they never had before. If you look
at the background of it, it's the same background that led to fascism
and Bolshevism. A lot of it was supported by people called progressives,
for these reasons: They said, individual rights are gone. We are in a
period of corporatization of power, consolidation of power,
centralization. That's supposed to be good if you're a progressive, like
a Marxist-Leninist. Out of that same background came three major things:
fascism, Bolshevism, and corporate tyranny. They all grew out of the
same more or less Hegelian roots. It's fairly recent. We think of
corporations as immutable, but they were designed. It was a conscious
design which worked as Adam Smith said: the principal architects of
policy consolidate state power and use it for their interests. It was
certainly not popular will. It's basically court decisions and lawyers'
decisions, which created a form of private tyranny which is now more
massive in many ways than even state tyranny was. These are major parts
of modern twentieth century history. The classical liberals would be
horrified. They didn't even imagine this. But the smaller things that
they saw, they were already horrified about. This would have totally
scandalized Adam Smith or Jefferson or anyone like that...."
-noam chomsky