At the same time, people's protests and political activism were increasingly channeled into administrative and regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Environmental Protection Agency, and scores more. In fact, corporations helped design many of these agencies, starting with the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887, so that the most which We the People can accomplish via such agencies is to get corporate property owners to cause a little less harm. Today, global corporations define us as shareholders, consumers, or workers. Corporations possess, in many respect, greater rights than human beings. Unlike people, corporations can live forever, operate even after breaking laws, and write-off fines and penalties.
Corporate leaders are immune from liability and are free from public recall.
From the beginning, this country has been shaped by sustained contests between propertied minorities using corporations as their political vehicles and whole classes of people struggling for basic human and constitutional rights. But given the dominance by a corporate system over the past century, it is logical that the stories of the African American, Native People, women, the propertyless, workers, immigrants, gays and lesbians who peopled these struggles are still generally unknown. We also realized that the Populist Movement was the last American movement that drew upon the people's rights and sovereignty to challenge the very essence of corporate rule. And contrary to what most of us had been taught, the Progressives of the early 20th Century took a step backward when they gave up on rights and settled for regulating corporate behaviors. Like the Populist farmers, mechanics, small business people and intellectuals of the 1870s-1890s, we too can call upon the nation's founding ideals as we redesign our organizations to challenge the legitimacy of corporate rule.