----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter K." <peterk at enteract.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2002 8:58 PM Subject: Re: Economist hit on Naomi Klein
> >The Economist - November 7, 2002
> >
> >Face value
> >Why Naomi Klein needs to grow up
> >
> >In praise of justice, democracy and autonomous space
>
> >Ms Klein's oddest assertion is that multinational companies are more
> >powerful than governments and consumers. Plainly, they are not.
> >Governments regulate business as they choose, and have far more power
> >over their citizens' lives than even the biggest multinational does.
>
> Yeah, the American government chose to regulate the accounting
> industry in a rather lax manner. Wonder why.
> Her popularity must be getting under their skin. Good for her.
>
> Peter
=====================
Gee the colonies that became the US were only chartered corporations. Perhaps the morons at the E need to sit down with Charles Tilly's "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime" and the first two editions of Morton Horwitz' work on the evolution of US so they can recover from their self induced amnesia. Any older folks remember how Scoop Jackson used to be called Senator Boeing?
Go Naomi! :-)
[snip]
The United States of America started when the previously-warlord-ruled kingdom of England had drifted into a new form of feudalism: in the 1700s it came under the sway of one of the world's first transnational corporations, the East India Company. The newly invented corporate form made it possible for a single company to amass extraordinary wealth and influence, which it then turned on the government which had authorized its existence.
When Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin met to edit the Declaration of Independence, they knew there had been these three historic tyrannies of religion, violence, and wealth so massive and concentrated as to produce a feudal-like state (what Jefferson called "commercial monopolies" when he strongly argued for an Eleventh Amendment to ban them as part of the Bill of Rights).
Three years before the Declaration of Independence, in 1773, the East India Company had lobbied (it was then called "bribery and influencing") the King and Parliament into reducing the Company's tax on tea and giving them an Enron-style multi-million-dollar tax rebate (in 4 out of the 5 years before their collapse, Enron paid no federal taxes and even received money from the federal government; the East India Company cut a similar deal with England in 1773 with the Tea Act). Thus the East India Company could sell their tea and other products in the Americas at prices that undercut and threatened to drive out of business tens of thousands of colonial entrepreneurs.
But America's Founders would have no part of it.
They rose up against the world's largest and most powerful multinational corporation and ejected it from the Americas at the Boston Tea Party; the British Parliament reacted with the Boston Port Act, which taxed the citizens of Boston more than a million dollars (in today's money) to repay the East India Company. That a single corporation could change a nation's tax laws to its benefit without the people having had a say in the matter ("taxation without representation") set the stage for the American Revolution.
To America's Founders, democracy meant that a government drew its power and legitimacy from its citizens, and must be responsive solely to its citizens, and not to any other institution.
[snip] http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1106-07.htm