67% of Americans Are Dissatisfied With The Size And Influence Of Major Corporations

The American people are becoming increasingly angry about the extraordinary amount of power and influence that corporations have in the United States today. A new Gallup poll found that 67 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the size and influence of major corporations in the United States today. Not only that, the most recent Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index found that only 26 percent of Americans trust our financial system at this point. The mainstream media is acting as if this is a new phenomenon, but the truth is that a dislike of giant corporations goes all the way back to the founding of this nation. Our founders held a deep distrust for all big concentrations of power, and they intended to set up a nation where no one person or no one institution could become too powerful.

Unfortunately, we have very much strayed from those principles. In the United States today, the federal government completely dominates all other levels of government and mammoth international corporations completely dominate our economy.

If our founding fathers could see what is going on today they would probably roll over in their graves.

The history of the corporation can be traced back to the early part of the 17th century when Queen Elizabeth I established the East India Trading Company.

Our founders were not too fond of the East India Trading Company. In fact, it was their tea that was dumped into the harbor during the original Boston Tea Party.

In his book entitled "Unequal Protection", Thom Hartman described the great antipathy that our founders had for the East India Trading Company....

So a disgust for great concentrations of financial power is built into our national DNA.

Many people today think of giant international corporations as being synonymous with "capitalism", but that is just not the case.

Our founders envisioned a land where free enterprise could flourish in an environment where no institution held too much power.

So this false left/right debate about whether we should give more power to the government or more power to the corporations is largely a bunch of nonsense.

If the founders were around today they would say that we need to take a lot of power away from both of them.

Fortunately, it looks like the American people are starting to think the same thing. Not only are the American people dissatisfied with government, they are also becoming increasingly dissatisfied with big corporations.

As mentioned above, according to Gallup two-thirds of Americans are now dissatisfied with the size and influence of major corporations in America today....

As you can see, the gap between those in favor of the size and influence of major corporations and those not in favor has been significantly widening over the past decade.

Not only that, but the latest Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index shows that Americans have very little trust in the financial system at this point.

These numbers are staggering, but they should not be surprising. The American people were not pleased at all when the major banks and big financial institutions were showered with bailouts during the recent financial crisis. A lot of that anger is still simmering.

The recent housing collapse, which is still ongoing, was caused in great part by the behavior of the major banks and big financial institutions, but it is the American people which have suffered the most from it. The following very brief animation from Taiwan demonstrates this very humorously....

The American people are still wondering where their "bailouts" are. Most of the big banks and big corporations seem to be thriving even while the number of Americans slipping into poverty continues to grow.

According to Calculated Risk, approximately 15 million Americans are unemployed, about 9 million Americans are working part-time for "economic reasons" and approximately 4 million American workers have left the labor force since the beginning of the economic downturn.

When you total that all up, you get 28 million Americans that wish they had full-time jobs.

There are other numbers that are very disturbing as well. In the month of November, the number of people on food stamps set another new all-time record: 43.6 million Americans.

So we have tens of millions of Americans that can't get the jobs that they want and we have tens of millions of Americans that can't feed themselves without government assistance.

The U.S. government has showered the big corporations and the big banks with bailouts, tax breaks and cheap loans and yet the big corporations and the big banks are not coming through for the American people.

Meanwhile, food prices continue to go up. According to the United Nations food agency, global food prices set another new all-time record during the month of January, and they are expected to continue rising for months to come.

That certainly is not going to ease tensions in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. When people are not able to pay for the food that they need that tends to make them very, very angry.

For now we are not likely to see food riots in the United States, but as food prices rise all of those food stamp cards are not going to go as far as they used to. Average American families are going to feel more strain at the supermarket. There will be less money available for other things.

A key indicator to watch is the price of oil. The price of oil is one of the key components of the price of food, and if we see the price of oil go up to $120 or $150 a barrel that could mean really bad things for both the U.S. economy and the overall global economy.

If we do see another financial crisis like we did in 2008, is the U.S. government going to rush to bail out the big corporations and the big banks like they did the last time?

As we have seen from the numbers above, that certainly would not sit well with the American people.

Evil is not in corporations or government or religions or charities it is in the word BIG.

Once an entity gets big it attempts to exert more influence than it is entitled to have.

Millions of people have died because of big religion, big government, big corporations.

I am a dyed in the wool capitalist but everything has reasonable limits that when exceeded become evil.

Take anything to an extreme any you will find bad things happen.

Unions were needed but became too big.

Water is needed to survive but too much causes flooding.

Oxygen is need to breath but increase the percentage in the atmosphere and fires would be uncontrollable.

Religion should be good and benign yet left to grow into huge institutions the evil can be seen by everyone.

Even such noble organizations like the Foundation for the Deaf turned evil when they tried to stop children from receiving operations to restore their hearing less they be deprived of the their deaf heritage. WTF is deaf heritage?

The history of the corporation can be traced back to the early part of the 17th century when Queen Elizabeth I established the East India Trading Company.

Our founders were not too fond of the East India Trading Company. In fact, it was their tea that was dumped into the harbor during the original Boston Tea Party.

In his book entitled "Unequal Protection", Thom Hartman described the great antipathy that our founders had for the East India Trading Company....

The above represents an example of how the writers who tell numerous half truths tell numerous complete lies by doing so.

Actually the history of companies (organizations of individuals who got together to run a business, and were recognized as such a unit) goes back to ancient Rome and the Maurya Empire in ancient India. The alleged oldest commercial corporation in the world, the Stora Kopparberg mining community in Falun, Sweden, obtained a charter from King Magnus Eriksson in 1347. [All well before the 17th century and the East India Trading Company].

The East India Trading Company was not just any company, it was a particular corporation with a particular pedigree - "approved by the Crown" and founded for purposes that would not only suit its investors but would serve the Crown.

The founders did not reject the idea of "corporations", they rejected the Mercantile system of the crown heads of European, the system that Crown corporations like the East India Trading Company were very much a part of.

The modern corporation has a very different pedigree, which stems from that rejection of mercantilism and a succession of laws in the early 1800s, around the world, in which corporations transitioned from being government or guild affiliated entities to being public and private economic entities. "Incorporation" became less a specific grant of the rulers and more simply following the rules of incorporation established by legislation.

Regardless of the pedigree, the essentials of "incorporation" was to affect the continuation of the entity - the organized and recognized unit - without interruption, beyond the deaths of any of its several "owners", whether they be partners or shareholders.

"So a disgust for great concentrations of financial power is built into our national DNA.",

No. A "disgust for great concentrations of ~~financial power~~ [commercial enterprise in the hands of government] was "built into our DNA"

"These numbers are staggering, but they should not be surprising. The American people were not pleased at all when the major banks and big financial institutions were showered with bailouts during the recent financial crisis.

While the methods employed were seen as "bailing out the banks", which those methods did do, the purposes were much broader and more systemic to the financial system itself and the economy.

"Bailing out the banks",

(1)underwrote some base line of invested wealth that millions of shareholders held in financial corporations, as individuals, in mutual funds and pension funds and other corporations - which had individual and institutional shareholders as well;

(2)preserved the 'insured savings' of regular savings accounts held in those banks, without additional and separate FDIC "bail outs" to do the same;

(3)slowed the "mark to market" decline of many forms of invested wealth derived from mortgages, so that time and eventual market forces could sort the values out without immediate full scale collapse of all those values.

Yes, some banks were kept in existence by the "bailouts" and without those bailouts they and their shareholders could, possibly, have been wiped out - and maybe deservedly so - and taken allot more with them as well.

Most of the big banks and big corporations seem to be thriving even while the number of Americans slipping into poverty continues to grow.

So lets all hope and pray that "the big banks" NOT THRIVE, and all their employees and all their individual and institutional (mutual fund, pension fund) shareholders, and all the businesses who serve them ALSO NOT THRIVE as a result. /sarc

So: (a)NO ONE can buy a home (mortgages), (b)NO ONE is buying any cars (car loans), (c) NO NEW bank credit cards are being issued, (d) Macy's, Target, Sears, etc., etc. are not issuing any new credit cards (underwritten by banks), (e) NO business of any kind can borrow any money, (f) etc., etc. etc. All true? No, all NOT true.

While there are many reasons to fault many things that some banks, the bank regulators, the Congress and the Federal Reserve have done, leading into and since the "financial crisis", the authors of the screed that begins this thread simply perpetuate myths about this nation, capitalism, free enterprise and corporations.

That's easy to do when there is so much populist angst to be used to take off into those myths.

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