As the corporation's size and power grew, so did the need to assuage people's fears of it. The corporation suffered its first full-blown legitimacy crisis in the wake of the early-twentieth-century merger movement, when, for the first time, many Americans realized that corporations, now turned behemoths, threatened to overwhelm their social institutions and governments.

As institutional psychopaths, corporations are wont to remove obstacles that get into their way.

Governments can can send inspectors to companies. Governments can put legal requirements in place to disclose information that consumers and workers and other interested people need. Non-governmental organizations don't have that legal power and to me, that's what imposes substantial limitiations on how far we can go with trying to keep corporations accountable though non-governmental measures.

The corporation was originally conceived as a public institution whose purpose was to serve national interests and advance the public good.

The notion that business and government are and should be partners is ubiquitous, unremarkable, and repeated like a mantra by leaders in both domains. It seems a compelling and innocuous idea - until you think about what it really means.

Corporations now govern society, perhaps more than governments themselves do; yet ironically, it is their very power, much of which they have gained through economic globalization, that makes them vulnerable.

Quotes from the Underground is a remarkable resource and must-read for writers, researchers, activists and indeed anyone who embraces progressive values and hopes to rescue politics from corporate control.