Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close------Episode 4

             Corporations Are A Burden Under Which The People 
                                       Groan In Misery 

The fact that the interests of corporations and people of wealth are closely intertwined tends to obscure the significance of the corporation as an institution in its own right.  On the more positive side, the corporate charter is a social invention created originally to aggregate financial resources in the service of a public purpose. ( Some omnipotent power did not create corporations.) On the negative side, it allows one or more individuals to leverage massive economic and political resources behind narrowly focused private agendas while protecting themselves from legal liability for the public consequences. 
  Less widely recognized is the tendency of individual corporations, as they grow in size and power, to develop their own institutional agendas aligned with imperatives inherent in their nature and structure that are not wholly under the control even of the people who own and manage them. These agendas center on increasing their own profits and protecting themselves from the uncertainty of the market. They arise from a combination of market competition, the demands of the financial markets, and efforts by individuals within them to advance their careers and increase their personal income. 
 Large corporations commonly join forces to advance shared political and economic agendas.  In the United States, they have been engaged for more than 150 years in restructuring the rules and institutions of governance to suit their interests. Once created corporations tend to take on a life of their own beyond the intentions of their human participants.
   Corporations have emerged as the dominant governance institutions on the planet, with the largest among them reaching into virtually every country of the world and exceeding most governments in size and power. Increasingly, it is the corporate interest rather than the human interest that defines the policy agendas of states and international bodies. 

    Corporations Were The Instruments of Colonial Extraction 

 It is instructive to recall that the modern corporation is a direct descendant of the great merchant companies of fifteenth and sixteenth-century England and Holland. These were limited liability, joint stock companies to which the crown granted charters that conferred on them the power to act as virtual states in dealing with vast foreign territories.
   For example, in 1602 the Dutch Crown chartered the United East India Company, giving it a monopoly over Dutch trade in the lands and waters between the Cape of Good Hope at the Southern tip of Africa and the Strait of Magellan at the tip of South America. Its charter vested it with sovereign powers to conclude treaties and alliances, maintain armed forces, conquer territory, and build forts. It subsequently defeated the British fleet and established sovereignty over the East Indies (now Indonesia)after displacing the Portuguese. Early on it acquired large tracts of land in Eastern Indonesia through a system of loans to cultivators that lead to their eventual dispossession. It prohibited the growing of cloves on lands not in Dutch hands. Unable to produce sufficient food to sustain themselves on the remaining infertile land of their islands, the local people were obliged to buy rice from the company at inflated prices, eventually ruining the local economy and reducing the population to poverty. 
   The British East India Company was the primary instrument of Britain's colonization of India, a country it ruled until 1784 much as if it were a private estate. The company continued to administer India under British supervision until 1858 when the British government assumed direct control. 
   In th early 1800s, the British East India Company established a thriving business exporting tea from China and paying for its purchases with illegal opium. China responded to the resulting social and economic disruption by confiscating the opium warehoused in Canton by the British merchants. This precipitated the Opium War of 1839 to 1842---which Britain won. As tribute, the British pressed a settlement on China that included the payment of a large indemnity to Britain, granted Britain free access to five Chinese ports for trade, and secured the right of British citizens accused of crimes in China to be tried by British courts. This settlement was a precursor to modern "FREE TRADE" agreements imposed by powerful Northern nations on weaker Southern nations. 
   British crown corporations also played an important role in the 
colonization of North America. The London Company founded the Virginia colony and for a time ruled it as company property. The Massachusetts Bay Company held rights to trade and colonization in the New England region. The Hudson's Bay Company, which was founded to establish British control over the fur trade in the Hudson's Bay watershed area of North America, was an important player in the British colonization of what is now Canada. 
   The corporate charter represented a grant from the crown that limited an investor's liability for losses of the corporation to the amount of his or her investment in it---a right not extended to individual citizens. Each charter set forth the specific rights and obligations of a particular corporation, including the share of profits  that would go to the crown in return for the special privileges extended. Such charters were bestowed at the pleasure of the crown and could be withdrawn at any time. Not surprisingly, the history of corporate-government relations since that day has been one of continuing pressure by corporate interests to expand corporate rights and to limit corporate obligations. (Sounds like a typical spoiled brat.)