Corporate Rule: A Hidden History

Colonial Corporations
Corporations after the American Revolution
The Corporate Return to Power
Corporate Regulation
Corporations and Global Trade

Two years after the "Corporate Personhood" decision, President Grover Cleveland worried that, "Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."

President Cleveland should have kept more careful watch on his Attorney General if this was truly his concern. Just one year earlier, in 1887, Mr. Olney had quietly told railroad executives that the world's first regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), was to be, "a sort of barrier between the railroad corporations and the people..." To the public, the new ICC was justified as a way to protect people from railroad corporations such as Southern Pacific Railroad Corporation, which was accused of cheating farmers on land sales, making secret pacts with large businesses to drive out smaller ones, and even destroying the equipment of rival railroads. The large railroad companies used the ICC as a legal way of fixing prices so upstart railroads could not charge less than them. ICC Commissioner Charles Perkins of Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company said bluntly in 1888, "Let us ask the [ICC] Commissioners to enforce the law when its violation by others hurts us."

Since the creation of the first regulatory agency, an alphabet soup of agencies have been created by state and federal governments: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the California Department of Forestry (CDF), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and hundreds of others.

We, the citizens of each state, have been taught to think that these agencies exist to protect us. In fact, each has been modeled on the example of the Interstate Commerce Commission with bureaucrats taken directly from the ranks of the industry being regulated. This process has resulted in the development of regulatory agencies which merely manage - rather than prohibit - corporate harms and abuses of the public good.

Next Page