Corporate dream Corporations were once useful conglomerates of businesses brought together to take on major projects that could not be carried out by a single entity. Like building railroads, and projects that needed mass labour and organisation. Once a project was completed the corporation would be disbanded.

In the US where most big corporations were created, before the 70s if corporations carried on the way they do now their company executives would have ended up in jail. Then businesses couldn’t just buy up other businesses wily nilly. Because then there was an element of fair competition – you had to compete in the market not just buy up the competition and absorb it into one business interest. To a certain extent then was a time when ordinary folk could enjoy the “American dream” and compete in the marketplace.

All that changed around and after the Vietnam war. The American government realised whilst they were busy blowing up Vietnamese, ridding the world of communism, losing the support of their young people, proliferating the production of arms to the detriment of other kinds of manufacturing in the country – The Japanese and others meanwhile where supplying a sizable chunk of the US market in domestic appliances. Bombs didn’t wash clothes. Business interests in the States, having taken their eye of the domestic ball where unable to compete in the level playing field of free competition that their rivals were taking advantage of.

Then the movement of money was controlled by the Bretton Woods System, which: “The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the world’s major industrial states in the mid 20th century. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent nation-states.” Wikipedia.

This system which helped to maintain a “competitive market” was abandoned by the US. This is when “capital flight” raised its head. No more were businesses restrained by rules of fair competition, they could buy out what they wanted and move their money anywhere in the world they wanted – which is why now everything we buy is made in China, the cheapest labour corporations can find.

Not only do corporations remove jobs from their countries of origin, to increase profits, but are also the main recipients of the “welfare state for the rich”, of tax evasion and corruption. In the US, they even have person rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Corporate personhood “As a matter of interpretation of the word “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment, U.S. courts have extended certain constitutional protections to corporations.” Wikipedia.

Unregulated corporations destroying everything that does not have a market value, are a law unto themselves, rob our taxes, take our jobs and according to their reason for existence, if left to their own devices, will consume even themselves. Yet there is absolutely no need for them.