Question

What are the principal sources of corporate power, and what are the principal differences between the nature of contemporary and early capitalist corporations?

Answer 1

principal sources of corporate power:
“If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”
The words are those of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in last week’s landmark Supreme Court decision marking some sort of culmination in the long corporate trek to personhood. It’s the word “simply” that gets to me: Exxon-Pinocchio is a real boy now, and has his opinions, and the government has no right to stop him from “simply engaging in political speech.”
What a cheap cover story; it’s up there with “bringing democracy to Iraq” in its tawdry manipulation of iconic national values to justify a raw power grab. The 5-4 decision in the long-awaited Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission case overturns restrictions on corporate spending to influence election results, giving entities with millions (in some cases, billions) of dollars at their disposal unlimited license to electioneer for the candidate with the friendliest attitude toward their interests.
The tendency of money and power is to concentrate, of course. The big trick, from a human perspective, is to make sure our core values remain pre-eminent, that they are served by the ways in which we concentrate power. Democracy is the great mechanism for doing so, the hope of the world, or so we are told, but the wakeup message in this nakedly cynical ruling by the Roberts Court, with its slim (but sufficient) right-wing majority, is that the concept of democracy is mortally wounded.
As former Sen. Bob Kerrey wrote recently on Huffington Post: “Instead of doing the nation’s business, elected officials are spending a third of their time or more dialing for special interest dollars in never-ending campaigns for re-election.
“Industry lobbyists,” he goes on, “are helping to write the very bills in Congress that affect their bottom line, placing private profit ahead of the public good. Billions of taxpayer dollars are going to benefit big contributors through earmarks, subsidies, and special regulations.”
And as Chris Hedges explains on TruthDig: “Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation.”
The interests of Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Coal, agribusiness, the financial sector, the insurance sector and, of course, the military-industrial complex, have infinitely more clout in government than the collective popular will and the voices calling for eco-sanity, universal health care and an end to war. Note: This is already the case.
Corporate entities have thoroughly gamed the system, leaving us with little more than a textbook-democracy façade. What the latest Supreme Court decision does is legitimize all this, shoving the corruption in our faces by declaring the absurd: Corporations are people too! They have a right to weigh in on the candidates just like the rest of us — to get their billion-dollar opinions out to the public throughout the election campaign.
This is an “activist” judicial decision, that is to say, a decision that serves a prior agenda, with any principles cited (e.g., the sanctity of free speech) sheer window dressing in service to a larger, and covert, cause.
As a New York Times story points out, the case itself — involving a conservative, not-for-profit corporation called Citizens United, which was restricted in its ability to distribute an attack film about Hillary Clinton, “Hillary: The Movie,” during the 2008 presidential primary elections — could have been decided on narrow grounds. The court chose instead to expand the scope of the case, making it into a challenge of existing laws that regulate corporate election spending, most notably the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, a.k.a. McCain-Feingold, which prohibits corporate electioneering within 60 days of an election. This is what we’ve lost.
The good news is that the decision has generated a huge outouring of anger around the country. Within a day of the ruling, the website MoveToAmend.org had garnered some 40,000 signatures (it’s now close to 50,000) in support of a constitutional amendment to establish that money is not speech and only human beings have constitutional rights. The amendment would also guarantee our right to vote and participate in elections, and to have our votes count.
A number of bills and legislative actions are also in the works, attempting to circumvent the Supremes. The proposals range from patch jobs to cries for profound change, both of which are necessary in the process of resuscitating democracy.
No matter what, though, the Roberts Court has hastened the propagandizing of the national discourse, mostly through the medium of television, as corporate interests amp up their thought-control machines in the name of free speech. I see little hope for a gullible nation that allows the tube to hemorrhage urgent inanities directly into its consciousness for 18 hours a day. This gullibility is the source of corporate power. Democracy can only thrive where people think for themselves.

Capitalism vs. Feudalism

In economics, there are two related models that have shaped standards of living and social classes today; these are Feudalism and Capitalism. In fact, renowned economists like Karl Marx would recognize some correlation between the two constitutions, such that in both structures, the power of the dominant class is based on the exploitation of the subordinate class. Despite the said similarity though, plenty of differences exist between Feudalism and Capitalism.

Feudalism is a political and military system between a feudal aristocracy (a lord or liege) and his vassals. In its most classic sense, feudalism refers to the Medieval European political system composed of a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the warrior nobility, revolving around the three key concepts of lords, vassals, and fiefs; the group of feudalism can be seen in how these three elements fit together. The obligations and relations between lord, vassal, and fief form the basis of feudalism. A lord granted land (a fief) to his vassals. In exchange for the fief, the vassal would provide military service to the lord. The land-holding relationships of feudalism revolved on the fief. There were thus different ‘levels’ of lordship and vassalage.

In a typical feudal society, the ownership of all land was vested in the king. Servicing him was a hierarchy of nobles, the most important of which held land directly from the king, and the lesser from them, down to the seigneur who held a single manor. The political economy of the system was local and agricultural, and at its base was the manorial system. In the manorial system, the peasants, laborers, or serfs held the land they worked from the seigneur, who granted them use of the land and his protection in return for personal services and dues. Throughout the medieval years, an increase in communication and the concentration of power in the hands of monarchs in France, Spain, and England broke down the structure and facilitated the emergence of the burgess class. The system broke down gradually and was eventually replaced by a more contemporary approach to resource management – Capitalism.

Capitalism is one of the most influential factors that define economic classes today. It is a structure in which the means of production and distribution are privately owned and operated for profit. Capitalists are conventionally composed of private entities that make and implement market decisions regarding supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments without much intervention on the part of the public or government bodies. Profit, the major goal of any capitalist, is distributed to shareholders who invest in businesses. Salaries and wages, on the other hand, are paid to workers employed by such businesses. Capitalism, being an influential and flexible system of a mixed economy, drove the main means of industrialization throughout most of the world.

There are different types of capitalism: anarcho-capitalism, corporate capitalism, crony capitalism, finance capitalism, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, neo-capitalism, post-capitalism, state capitalism, state monopoly capitalism, and technocapitalism. However varying, there is general agreement that capitalism encourages economic growth while further extending disparities in income and wealth. Capitalists believe that increasing GDP (per capita), the main unit in measuring wealth, is set to bring about improved standards of living, including better availability of food, housing, clothing, and health care. They deem that a capitalist economy holds better practical potentials for raising the income of the working class through new professions or business ventures, as compared to other types of economies. Unlike feudalism though, capitalism doesn’t maintain lords and serfs. Rather, it recognizes corporations and businesses to be the ruling body over the working class. What makes it distinct from feudalism is that the subordinate class has freedom to demand from its employer and that the employer holds limited authority, mostly professional in nature, over the subordinate.