Corporate-led Globalization
serves to maintain the global system. Particular emphasis is given to the state and corporation, which under capitalist culture have come to exhibit a close degree of integration.5 Increasingly, this is an association that has come to constitute a circumstance of codependency, in which each entity is virtually synonymous with the other.Yet, with this level of institutional intermingling comes the state’s inability to either challenge or adequately rectify the social embodiment of economic disasters intrinsic to the capitalist system. As a result, mounting social resentment to economic failures in the U.S. are displaced and brought to the political arena where they are pursued as failures within the structure of government. Subsequently, the economic forces that perpetuate an increasingly globalized socio-economic order, and the many abuses produced thereof, remain relatively protected from the potentiality of public castigation. Within this context, layers of complexity are added to a discussion which—through Jurgen Habermas’s theoretical framework—seeks to address how said U.S. organization came to exist, is reproduced, and might be altered.
Section I In many ways the origins of U.S. corporate power can be traced back to the 1886 Supreme Court ruling which entitled private corporations to all the rights and privileges afforded to a natural person under the Bill of Rights (Robbins 1999). Arguably, this provision resulted from the post-Civil War period, a time of rampant political corruption, in which corporations used massive war profits to buy legislation, providing them “charters in perpetuity” and enormous land and monetary grants, thereby, allowing for far greater capital accumulation and thus, the potential for further penetration into the political process (Robbins 1999).Through this ruling, which legitimized the uninhibited use of corporate finances in influencing state policy and public discourse alike, one 5. Throughout this paper the words “state” and “government” are used interchangeably.
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