Power and the Useful Economist (1973)
Context: When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error. The beneficiaries are the institutions whose power we so disguise. Let there be no question: economics, so long as it is thus taught, becomes, however unconsciously, a part of the arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he or she is, or will be, governed.
“The rise of the modern corporation has brought a concentration of economic power which can compete on equal terms with the modern state - economic power versus political power, each strong in its own field. The state seeks in some aspects to regulate the corporation, while the corporation, steadily becoming more powerful, makes every effort to avoid such regulation… The future may see the economic organism, now typified by the corporation, not only on an equal plane with the state, but possibly even superseding it as the dominant form of social organization. The law of corporations, accordingly, might well be considered as a potential constitutional law for the new economic state, while business practice is increasingly assuming the aspect of economic statesmanship.”
Source: The Modern Corporation and Private Property. 1932/1967, p. 357 (1967, p. 313)
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Adolf A. Berle 14
American diplomat 1895–1971Related quotes
Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 6, Reckoning, p. 158
Source: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition - (2003), Chapter 4, The World Bank and Woman's Rights, p. 67
Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, (2006) Metropolitan Books, pp. 28-29.
"Dreaming of War" http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011015/willis, The Nation (15 October 2001)
Veto Message Regarding the Bank of the United States http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ajveto01.asp (10 July 1832)
Often paraphrased as: If Congress has the right under the constitution to issue paper money, it was given them to be used by themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations.
1830s
Context: It is maintained by some that the bank is a means of executing the constitutional power “to coin money and regulate the value thereof.” Congress have established a mint to coin money and passed laws to regulate the value thereof. The money so coined, with its value so regulated, and such foreign coins as Congress may adopt are the only currency known to the Constitution. But if they have other power to regulate the currency, it was conferred to be exercised by themselves, and not to be transferred to a corporation. If the bank be established for that purpose, with a charter unalterable without its consent, Congress have parted with their power for a term of years, during which the Constitution is a dead letter. It is neither necessary nor proper to transfer its legislative power to such a bank, and therefore unconstitutional.
This quote spread rapidly in the United States after appearing in a column by Molly Ivins (24 November 2002). It is repeated often and sometimes attributed to the "Fascism" entry in the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana. However hard copies of the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana exist in numerous libraries and the alleged quote is not in the text, nor is there anything that would support the alleged quote. A vaguely similar statement does appear in Doctrine of Fascism.
We are, in other words, a state which controls all forces acting in nature. We control political forces, we control moral forces, we control economic forces, therefore we are a full-blown Corporative state.
The same document explains that the "corporations" (corporazioni) on which the Fascist state rested were its own creations, modeled on guild associations and not private companies, which Italian normally calls società. For details see "Mussolini on the Corporate State" http://www.publiceye.org/fascist/corporatism.html by Chip Berlet.
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