We have been hoodwinked into considering large corporations as examples of free enterprise, just like many of the small businesses that keep popping up. A better way to consider large corporations is as monarchies.
Monarchies were rarely monolithic, top-down structures, but a complex arrangement of carrots and sticks. Carrots could include favors of money or position. Sticks could be actual assassination or character assassination. If all else failed, monarchies would divert people with a war elsewhere and demand patriotism from all
Corporations give carrots of campaign contributions and hire politicians into lucrative jobs later. Corporations have murdered strikers and sympathizers, but they have always financed and promulgated false information about those who disagree with their agenda. Do you really think the "birther movement" was "grass-roots"? And corporations are really "patriotic" when they support a war with all its profits from selling military equipment.
And to think that we make a big holiday of throwing off the yoke of a monarchy.
