The Rising Challenge of Corporate Control of Our Lives

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The year is 2050. America has come a long way during the 21st Century. When I turned on the morning news today, there was a report on the latest Social Health Index followed by a panel discussion of local, national, and global initiatives intended to improve the indicators and how people can get involved. Yesterday, a similar report covered the Living Planet Index.

It now seems incredible that 50 years ago, this airtime was devoted to reporting on the day's stock market performance. The social fabric and the planetary life support systems were collapsing--but all the media seemed focused on was corporate profits and stock prices. Of course, those were the days when most of America's media were controlled by four massive corporate conglomerates: General Electric (NBC), Time Warner (CNN), Disney (ABC), and Westinghouse (CBS).

Seattle 1999--when protesters shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization--was a turning point. People still refer to it. People were waking up to the fact that the more rights and freedoms corporations have, the fewer rights and freedoms real people have. Following the protests in Seattle, more and more people took to the streets in protest. Eventually, the corporate elites found that they could meet only behind police barricades. This turned the abstraction of an elite-ruled corporate police state into a powerful visual image. Public pressures built to the point that the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the WTO were all dismantled, Third World debts were canceled, and rule-making responsibility for the global economy was assigned to the United Nations.

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