Without unions, workers will lose many of the protections against abusive employers. Wages for all will be depressed, even as corporate profits soar. The American Dream will be destroyed for millions. And we will have a government of the corporations, by the already powerful, for the wealthy. Kenneth Bernstein, 2011
The only effective answer to corporate greed is organised labour. Thomas Donahue
The franchise operator in Guatemala in the 70s was John C Trotter, a Texan who believed that godless communism had infiltrated everywhere except the Coca-Cola Company. Guatemala has one of the worst records on human rights. Death squads murder with impunity while four out of five children suffer with malnutrition. Trotter paid his Coca-Cola workers less that two dollars a day. And when they began to unionise, three union officials were murdered and two union lawyers were kidnapped. John Pilger, Burp! Coke versus Pepsi, 1984
No religions, conquerors or empires have spread themselves so completely across the planet as these two superpowers with their rallying slogans of, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Thirst, and We are the Essence of Capitalism, and We Must Save the World; I refer to the bitter-sweet war between those giants of carbonation and regurgitation Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola. ibid.
The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies – socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor – and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonald’s is to food. John Pilger
The revolt in the Arab world is against not merely a resident dictator, but a worldwide economic tyranny, designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and the World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries such as Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with 40 per cent of the population earning less than $2 a day. The people’s triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism. John Pilger
Since 1980 eight Coca-Cola union factory workers have been murdered by paramilitaries in Colombia. Surviving members of the union SINALTRAINAL claim that Coca-Cola bottlers collaborated with the paramilitaries. Since the murders colleges and other schools around the world have kicked Coca-Cola off their campuses. The Cost of a Coke Revisited
Former union leaders now live in hiding. ibid.
The same night the union office was set on fire, and its leadership ordered to meet a paramilitary commander. ibid.
Killer Cola. The Drink That Represses. ibid.
Coca-Cola hired, contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary forces to murder, torture, illegally detain or otherwise silence trade union leaders. ibid.
Coca-Cola has come under intense scrutiny in India too. They were forced to shut down a plant in India after they had been found guilty of depleting and contaminating the water supply. ibid.
Even in Turkey they have denied workers their rights to unionise. ibid.
The cost of human life has now been calculated into the profits of the Coca-Cola company. ibid.
All the mega-corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labour and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. As with the banking sector, they play games with the lives of millions, hysterically reject any kind of government intervention when the profits are rolling in, but are quick to pass the bill for the cleanup and the far-reaching consequences of these avoidable tragedies to the public when things go wrong. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It’s that simple. Michael Hureaux-Perez
You can’t vote the rascals out because you never voted them in in the first place: the corporate executive and the corporate lawyers and so on who overwhelmingly staff the executive assisted increasingly by a university-based mandarin class – these people remain in power no matter whom you elect. Noam Chomsky, lecture Poetry Center of New York 1970, ‘Government in the Future’
Societies differ but in ours the major decisions over what happens in the society – decisions over investment and production and distribution and so on – are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations and conglomerates and investment firms and so on – they are also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government and they are the ones who own the media and they are the ones who have to be in a position to make the decisions. They have an overwhelmingly dominant role in the way life happens. Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent
What really matters is the fact that the major institutions in society are under totalitarian control. After all, what’s a corporation? A corporation is just a tyrannical system, one of the most tyrannical systems that humans have ever devised. They’ve been given extraordinary rights by the courts, not by legislation early in this century. Like the multilateral agreement. They’ve been given the rights of states. They’re basically unaccountable to the public ... They’ve been given the rights of free speech which is insane ... They control the information system. The media ... The major decisions that affect what happens in the economy and social life are made behind closed doors. Very little public accountability ... Alliance capitalism. Noam Chomsky
To an extraordinary extent by comparative standards the United States is a business-run society, which means that human rights are subordinated to the overwhelming, over-riding need of profit for investors. Decisions are placed in the hands of unaccountable private tyrannies, which means that even if formal democracy practices exist as they do, they’re of peripheral significance. The government is ... the shadow cast by business over society. Noam Chomsky, Class War: The Attack on Working People
If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving twenty hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different. Noam Chomsky
Somebody’s paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. They’re getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it. Those are gifts from US taxpayers to US corporations. Noam Chomsky
The rise of corporations in the nineteenth century, and the legal structures devised to grant them dominance over private and public life, established the victory of the federalist opponents of popular democracy in a new and powerful form. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy
Power in the United States primarily lies in the corporations and the corporate world … There’s a very close link between government power and corporate power. Noam Chomsky, compilation ‘War, State Power, and American Exceptionalism’, Youtube The Essentials 2.43.03
Actual decision-making power was being more and more concentrated … in corporate institutions that are totalitarian in essence and designed to protect power, protect the minority, the opulent, from market discipline. Noam Chomsky, lecture July 1995, ‘Protecting Corporate Power Against Democracy’, Youtube
‘The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.’ ibid. Alex Carey
The government has a defect: it’s potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they’re pure tyrannies. So therefore you want to keep corporations invisible and focus all anger on the government. Noam Chomsky
The Propaganda Model: a discussion of the institutional structure of the media … corporate media … They sell a product to the market … The product is people … Major corporations selling people to other corporations … The corporation system is very tightly linked to government … Noam Chomsky, In Conversation with Jonathan Freedland March 2013, Youtube 1.41.34
The idea of [Clinton] selecting Boeing Aircraft as a model for the free-market future does perhaps arouse a slight bit of puzzlement. Boeing as is well known is a publicly subsidized corporation: it is a private corporation meaning the profit is private but the public pays for it. Boeing wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for an enormous public subsidy that comes through the Pentagon and NASA and so forth. Noam Chomsky, lecture Washington 1 December 1993, ‘Clinton’s Vision’
How did a drug-taking college dropout create one of the most successful corporations in the world? Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy, BBC 2011
When someone comes to write a history of the Great Thatcher Decade (the 1980s), one of their basic texts should be a little book by a former City Editor of The Times, William Kay. Mr Kay called his book Tycoons, and based it on thirteen interviews with men who made millions in the early 1980s.
One of the self-made men was Gerald Ronson, whose Heron Corporation was unheard of when he launched his first ‘brilliant, daring’ takeover bid in 1981. Ronson told Kay that Heron was a ‘very conservative business.’ He said he didn’t take risks, he just bet on certainties. What’s more, he kept strictly within the law. ‘There are plenty of crooks in the petrol business,’ he told Kay, ‘but they don’t come to work for us.’