Corporate power

“ To effect this, corporations have been created in most of the states and granted such liberal corporate powers, without respect to the nature of the business to be conducted, and with terms and privileges so favorable, that private enterprise without large capital cannot compete with them. ”

“ Its other powers, which may be and often are possessed and exercised by natural persons, are not, strictly speaking, corporate powers, such, for instance, as making discounts, granting insurances, operating railroads; there is nothing in the nature of these powers which necessarily confines them to corporations. ”

“ One of the chief difficulties in the practical application of his policies has been that the Government cannot have the power to punish dishonest corporations without first being entrusted with a measure of control over all corporate operations, the concession of which control the honest corporations have felt compelled to resist. ”

“ Today's opinion then continues: "Although some closely held corporations, just as some publicly held ones, may not have accumulated significant amounts of wealth, they receive from the State the special benefits conferred by the corporate structure and present the potential for distorting the political process. ”

“ We are properly devising ways whereby the corporation holds its property or privileges in trust, returning to government (or to society) a fair rental; that is, we are regulating the corporation and making it responsible to the people. What shall we do with the unattached man, to make him also responsible? Shall we hold the corporate plunderer to strict account, and let the single separate plunderer go scot free? ”

“ In another State, a single corporation held it, and yet again, it was often held by a corporate group acting together. In many States one individual dominated public affairs and more often for good than for evil. ”

“ The typical business corporation of the last century, owned by a small group of individuals, managed by their owners, and limited in size by their personal wealth, is being supplanted by huge concerns in which the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of employees and the property of tens or hundreds of thousands of investors are subjected, through the corporate mechanism, to the control of a few men. ”

“ Government Regulation of Corporations.—The growth of the corporation as an industrial machine had in recent years been very rapid in the United States. The industrial and financial corporations had grown so powerful as to venture to contend for the first place with the authority of the government itself. As Mr Roosevelt often pointed out, no nation will live long in which the authority of government—especially in a democracy—is supplanted by the private interest of a real money power. ”

“ This general and indisputable principle, puts at once an end to the abstract question, Whether the United States have power to erect a corporation; that is to say, to give a legal or artificial capacity to one or more persons, distinct from the natural? ”

“ One has but to contemplate the varied and often antagonistic legislation promulgated by the several States, relating to corporation management, and the many rulings and decisions of the different courts and commissions on the subject of regulation, assessment, and adjudication of corporate rates, revenues, taxes, and tolls, to become convinced of the complicated and tangled condition of the situation, and to realize the necessity for the early establishment of some logical basis on which to establish the fabric of corporate control. ”

“ But organization by private hands,—the combination of industrial units into great trusts economizing management, production and distribution,—cannot safely be tolerated. It means the wielding of the chief power in the State by monopolists who will use their power for private ends. The era of private competition is closing. On every hand capital is combining with capital in restraint of competition. ”

“ So the greatest of all the National corporation problems we have now to deal with is how to curb and regulate, without injustice, the increasing political power and pernicious political activity of these and other corporations, and prevent them from accomplishing their great object, Government control, for this indeed would be a National calamity. ”

“ This is, that they practically do away with the whole law regulating corporations, with all the safeguards regulating their corporate management, the control of their stock, and the exercise of their franchises, besides evading all the laws regulating their capitalization and consolidations. ”

“ Enterprises requiring large aggregations of capital have become necessary to make the vast resources of the country available, to bring the producer and consumer together, and to create wealth by the employment of hired labor on a great scale, thus largely changing the relations which formerly existed between man and man. Great corporations have grown up, wielding a power which may challenge that of the Government itself. New interests have developed themselves, and with them new conflicts, some of them beyond the reach and control of local self-government. ”

“ It seems as though the representatives of corporate interests, in which large amounts of money are invested, are organizing to make a crusade against the present possessed rights of the producing classes, to the end that, by all corporate organizations combining and making their interests mutual, they may come into the position that shall give them supreme and lasting control over the destinies of the country. ”

“ It may surprise some to learn that the great power concentrated in the President’s hands by Congress has made the great corporations, including the railway companies and banking institutions, ambitious and eager to control the Federal Government itself, and they are resolutely working to control it as far as they can by the force of capital, but as unobtrusively as possible. ”

“ The corporation employing thousands of men and supplying millions of people with some necessary service or commodity may reduce the cost of production only for its own profit. The state may use its great authority chiefly for the benefit of special interests. ”

“ The "Boss" became the man who negotiated with the corporations, and through whom they obtained what they wanted. We have already seen that the large corporation, particularly those owning railroad and municipal franchises, have found that the purchase of a certain amount of political power was a necessary consequence of their dubious legal position. ”

“ If they act as a corporate body, then the whole law applies to them as to other corporate bodies. If they act as individuals, then we have a corporation which never acts in its corporate character, except in the instances of electing its directors, or instructing them. The corporation possesses many important powers, and is, as a corporation, to perform many important acts, scarcely one of which is to be performed in a corporate character. They are all to be performed by agents, acting as individuals, under general powers conferred by the charter. ”

“ Indeed, in many cases artificial whirlpools and abysses are stirred up for the express purposes of engulfing these little capitalists. The corporation also brings together the small sums invested in shares into a powerful property completely controlled by the masters of high finance who rule these corporations. The corporation finally makes it possible for great individual financiers, individual millionaires, and great banks, to bring numerous industries under their control much more quickly, and to unite them in a common organization before gaining complete possession. ”

“ Most of their interests are in public functions, railroads, pipe lines, telegraphs, postal contracts, steamers, municipal franchises, and the like; but it is impossible to know their full extent with our present crude means for enforcing the truth that property is power and that civilization endures no irresponsible anonymous power. The corporation is an agency by which the capitalist can do business in ambuscade. ”

“ The companies themselves, with their vast material plants, certainly are so. What we are talking about, however, is not the mere size of the companies, but the element of monopoly that is in them. Have they such a power that they can safely charge anything they please for their products? ”

“ Individual and corporate ownership continue, the wage system is not abolished, efficient administration is still to be obtained, but the body of control is not a board of directors responsible only to the stockholders of the corporation, and managing affairs primarily for their own gain, but it consists of representatives of those who contribute money, superintendence, and labor, together with or regulated by a group of government experts, all of whom are honestly seeking the good of all parties and enjoying their full confidence. ”

“ Corporate organization and management should be a department of the exposition. By the elimination of all the unnecessary risk in investments in corporation securities through effective governmental regulation and supervision the people may gain control and reap the large profits of capitalized industry. ”

“ The instruments for the exercise of modern industrial power are the great corporations which, though created by the individual States, have grown far beyond the control of those States and transact their business throughout large sections of the Union. ”

“ Each corporation had certain rights, privileges, and immunities, and used a corporate seal as a signature. All of the early corporations had some economic features that were incidental to the main purposes, which were political, ecclesiastical, educational, and fraternal. ”

“ The corporation aggregate, which is but a mode of substituted service, is one of the great forces of civilization. It is the prevailing form of the associated energies, the money, enterprise, and intelligence of society. It is particularly adapted to those branches of business like salvage and wrecking, which require a permanent organization, costly appliances, trained services, and considerable capital, which is content with slow or uncertain returns. ”

“ Why do stockholders in banks and large corporations meet once a year and elect high-salaried officials to conduct the business, and a board of directors to sit in oversight, then drop the matter, satisfied that they have done their best for good dividends? That is representative government. It is the only way in which the affairs of a corporation or a nation can be successfully conducted. ”

“ Your recognition, that is, must depend upon conformity to another set of conditions, imposed in the interest of efficiency and individual economic independence. In this respect you will be treated precisely as large corporations are treated. ”

“ Corporations.%—These measures were all good enough in their way; but they left untouched grievances which the workingmen and a great part of the people felt were unbearable. That the development of the wealth and resources of our country is chiefly due to great corporations and great capitalists is strictly true. But that many of them abused the power their wealth gave them cannot be denied. ”

“ As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters. ”

“ The American corporation problem will never be understood in its proper relations and full consequences until it is conceived as a sort of an advanced attack on the breastworks of our national economic system by this essential problem of the distribution of wealth. ”

“ On the contrary, the corporation not only makes the control of production by a few banks and industrial combines possible; it also furnishes a means by which the very smallest fortunes can be transformed into capital and thereby be made to contribute to the centralizing process on capitalism. ”

“ The power of creating a corporation, though appertaining to sovereignty, is not like the power of making war, or levying taxes, or of regulating commerce, a great substantive and independent power which cannot be implied as incidental to other powers, or used as a means of executing them. ”

“ The Consolidated Companies considers itself bound to use franchise privileges and corporate organization for the equal benefit of all those who contribute of their capital, with due regard for those public interests which corporations are created to serve, and to rest content with a fair return upon its own capital and a reasonable compensation for their services, on the part of the officers of the enterprises of which it assumes the responsibility and direction. ”

“ The combination in a single corporation or person, by an exchange of stock, of the power of many stockholders holding the same proportions, respectively, of the majority of the stock of each of the several corporations engaged in commerce in the same articles among the States, or with foreign nations, to restrict competition therein, renders the power thus vested in the former greater, more easily exercised, more durable, and more effective than that previously held by the stockholders, and it is illegal. ”

“ Day after day we hear of corporation tyranny, corporation lawlessness, or corporation greed, but what recognition do we give to corporations that obey the laws, whose operations are above censure and who add immeasurably to the wealth of the country and to the prosperity of every citizen in it? ”

“ When General Ward had finished reading, he lifted up his glasses and said: "Well, that's it, boys; John has come to his turn of the road. Here's the rest. It says: 'The corporation in question is practically controlled by one man, the man who has placed the information above mentioned in the hands of the government. It is a corporation owning no physical property whatever, and is organized as a rebate hopper, if one may so style it. ”