George IN, Inc.
Rifkin, Jeremy
feorge 111, (3nc. JEREMY RIFKIN If Tom Paine were to visit America today, he would see a landscape dominated by giant bureaucratic fiefdoms bearing such names as Exxon, GM, and IT&T. He would...
...Paine had looked back into history and discovered that although people had originally created kings and the institution of monarchy to safeguard their interests, the people eventually came to serve the king's interests instead...
...He would hear a new breed of nobility—corporate executives— profess the strongest attachment to self-reliance while pocketing billions of dollars of tax money in the form of government grants and subsidies...
...Its legalization subverted a central principle for which the Revolution was fought: that the people have a right to alter or abolish any institution of their own creation...
...He would witness the systematic devastation of our natural environment even as corporate dictators profess their commitment to the country's future...
...However, in the early years of its development, the business corporation secured a special status in the eyes of the courts and the law: Its inventors asserted that the business corporation was really a "legal person" endowed with perpetual life...
...He was tracing the origin of monarchy, and concluded that "although kings are of our creation, they have become the gods of their creator...
...The threat he warned against is now reality...
...That is precisely how many Eighteenth Century British subjects felt about the monarchy...
...Today's giant business corporation challenges our principles of government and bids defiance to the laws of our country...
...He would observe what was once a proud and independent people transformed into an unthinking corporate mass...
...Paine realized, when he wrote Common Sense, that so long as people felt that monarchy was divinely inspired and that they were obligated to serve its ends, they would feel impotent to challenge it...
...He would see what was once a government of, by, and for the people transformed into a giant organizational arm of America's major financial institutions . . . and he would write of a chosen people fallen from grace, and of a society organized against the principles for which it stands...
...The monarchy was no longer more important than the people: It was merely a man-made institution whose organizing performance was open to criticism, judgment, alteration, or even eradication...
...Once chartered, it could live forever and escape any possible future demand on the part of the state for its abolition...
...He would listen to corporate executives herald the virtues of personal responsibility and accountability while engaging in crimes under the protection of the corporate charter...
...John Marshall, the first Chief Justice of the United States, validated this assertion, thus granting the corporation a status of divine life equal to that claimed by the monarchy that had just recently been overthrown...
...Many of the best known and most fervent leaders of the Revolution spoke against popular acceptance and legalization of the business corporation...
...It is by tracing things to their origin," Paine wrote, "that we learn to understand them, and it is by keeping that origin always in view that we never forget them...
...Although few of us believe that the business corporation is divinely inspired, we do ascribe to it a certain mystic, bigger-than-life quality...
...By giving the monarchy a human beginning, he revealed the posJeremy Rifkin, whose article, "The Red, White, and Blue Left," in the November 1971 issue of The Progressive attracted nationwide attention, is with the Peoples Bicentennial, a group promoting radical alternatives to government and corporate plans for marking the forthcoming bicentennial of the American Revolution, sibility of giving it a human ending...
...In principle, at least, the corporation derives its power from the state, which is supposed to represent the will of the citizens...
...Just after the American Revolution, states began granting "corporate charters" to a new class of financial speculators—and states continue to grant corporate charters today...
...Jefferson warned of the emergence of this new elite class of unprincipled and avaricious men and their new institution of tyranny called the business corporation: "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our Government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country...
...How could anyone imagine a workable alternative to the business corporation...
...This simple truth was awesome...
...To them the corporation was merely a new organizational tool to reinstate and perpetuate a wealthy aristocracy after the Revolution...
...The monarchy had no rights except those which people gave to it...
...Like them, we can only begin to free ourselves from our dependence on the corporation by following Tom Paine's advice and tracing this institution to its origin to ascertain the truth behind its existence...
Vol. 38 • July 1974 • No. 7
