corporation

When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny are inherently monstrous.

The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can image. Benevolent, friendly, nice to the children, even nice to their slaves. Caring about other people. I mean, as individuals they may be anything, but in their insitutional role, they're monsters, because the institution is monstrous.

Baker Botts has been drawing up the oil companies' contract documents that are becoming nothing less than the new rules that will govern this country's future. Touching everything from land acquisition for military security actions, the contracts supersede all conflicting domestic legislation. On behalf of BP and its partners, Baker Botts is shaping the future of Azerbaijan...The agreements don't trump only current domestic laws, but also all future laws for up to 60 years.

Aegis Defence Services is the UK s biggest PMSC [private military security company] success story. The firm's 2003 turnover of £554,000 rose to £62 million in 2005, three quarters of which came from work in Iraq. It became one of the world s largest private armies with the awarding of a US$293 million contract by the CPA in Iraq in May 2004, at a time when the company was two years old and had no experience in that country. Aegis now coordinates the operations of all PMSCs working in Iraq, including handling security at prisons and oil fields. The company is run by Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Spicer, former chief executive of Sandline International of the 1998 Arms to Africa scandal.

Since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector (mostly coal, oil, gas and electricity) has given $418m to federal politicians in the US. Transport companies have given $355m... The big polluters favour the Republicans, but most of them also fund Democrats. During the 2000 presidential campaign, oil and gas companies lavished money on George Bush, but they also gave Al Gore $142,000, while transport companies gave him $347,000. The whole US political system is in hock to people who put their profits ahead of the biosphere.

According to the official case record, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite simply pronounced before the beginning of argument in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886) that:

The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.