You know, a lot of people treat that as hyperbole but there’s real truth to it when you think about it. Huge, almost unbridled power, united to intelligence with no accountability and no one responsible for providing it with a conscience. And then people want the government to get off the backs of big business. They should really sit back and think about what they’re asking for.

Dealing with corporations these days is like ducking bullets from an automatic weapon. Their abusive policies come at you in such great numbers and from so many different directions that it’s impossible to detect, let alone avoid, all of them. That’s how the practice works. Even to read every terms of service agreement and amendment that corporations fire at you would be practically a full-time job. And if you don’t agree with some abusive provision, what can you do about it? Competition has been replaced by oligopoly and monopoly.

One of the most horrific examples of corporate abuse is biotechnology companies’ use of their terms of sale agreements to prevent any independent, unbiased research into the safety of genetically-engineered crops: see the New York Times article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/business/20crop.html.

Without strong government regulation, corporations by their nature will act like psychopaths: see the book “The Corporation” for a good history and analysis: http://www.amazon.com/Corporation-Pathological-Pursuit-Profit-Power/dp/0743247469/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235327264&sr=1-1.

However, corporations have legal departments whose full-time job is to stay informed about such things. As a result, their situation is not comparable to that of individual consumers.