Corporate ascendancy refers to the rise of a new weakened form of democracy in which the powers of average Americans are being transferred to vast institutions with diminishing public accountability. With the government increasingly unresponsive to popular opinion, and corporations almost entirely unaccountable to the public, corporations have begun acquiring new public powers and acting as unelected partners with governments. Our social landscape is now dominated by corporations that are bigger and more powerful than most countries. Two hundred corporations, led by giants such as GE, Time Warner, and Philip Morris, dominate America's economy-and much of the rest of the world. Their combined sales in 1996 were larger than the combined gross national product of all but the nine largest nations.
Historians speak of the twentieth century as the age of nations and nationalism.
Our end of century and the next century loom as the triumphal age of corporations. The relation between corporate power and democracy goes largely undiscussed in newspapers, schools, legislatures, and dinner conversations, as does the very nature of the corporation itself, a question that a hundred years ago was at the center of the national consciousness. It is a testament to the power of the corporate mystique that neither liberals nor conservatives have the vocabulary to raise these questions today. It's owned more and more by Disney, General Electric . You have two of the four major networks owned by people that have huge investments in nuclear power and nuclear weapons-both GE and Westinghouse.