“If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessities of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.” This was the fuel behind John Sherman’s anti-trust act. The act was designed to bring under control the unrestrained power of John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil corporation way back in the late 1800's.

July 2, 1890, under president Benjamin Harrison, the act became law. Author Antonia Juhasz in her tell-all book, The Tyranny of Oil adds, “The law was written in direct response to public concern that large business interests were dominating the government and was therefore designed to restrain economic wealth from becoming political power.”

The People vs. the Corporation had begun. The populist/Democratic candidate in 1896 was William Jennings Bryan. His platform is summed up in this speech fragment, “The day will come when corporations will cease to consider themselves greater than the governments which created them.” The Republicans, particularly Rockefeller, backed William McKinley in their, “Crusade against trust-busting infidels.” The Republican campaign cost sixteen times that of the democrats with Standard Oil alone supplying a quarter of a million dollars, (that would be equivalent to over five million today). Rockefeller and the Republicans got their way with just 51% of the votes. Sound familiar?

American Imperialism and its predatory exploitation imposed on behalf of corporate interests saw its first (in a very long list) declaration of war. It was against Spain just two years after McKinley’s election in 1898. In January 1900 the Philippines came into the expansionist crosshairs under the guise of annexation (the Philippines being formerly a Spanish colony along with Guam, Cuba and Puerto Rico). America’s national narcissism is here echoed in the words of then Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge, “God has made us the master organizers of the world...that we may administer...among savages and senile peoples.” From the ashes of this atrocity came the voice of Senator Hoar with this now famous anti-imperialist speech, “The question with which we now have to deal is whether congress may conquer and govern, without their (Philippines etc) consent and against their will a foreign nation… under the Declaration of Independence you cannot govern a foreign territory… because you think it is for their good when they do not because you think you are going to give them the ‘blessings of liberty.’” Now where have I heard that term before? Oh yeah, I remember: George W. Bush used ‘the blessings of liberty’ as an excuse to blow another country to pieces in his declaration of war against Iraq.

The Philippines had been fighting a bloody revolution of their own against Spain and were not about to be purchased by another Imperialist nation. Their people rose up, fought and won their independence. The American people from Texas to Kansas also rose up against Standard Oil and corporate imperialism. And they too won. In 1911 during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil was an unlawful trust and had six months to dissolve.

Antonia Juhasz uses a scene from the movie the Terminator to describe what’s been happening ever since. The scene she describes is when the Terminator Android is blown into a zillion pieces but almost immediately begins to rebuild itself just as it was. In 1984 Robert Rowen of the Washington Post summed up her analogy thusly, “The oil merger trend, any way you look at it is dubious from the public-interest point of view. Yet it may be difficult to stop because the new antitrust philosophy (if it can be dignified by that phrase) is that bigness per se is no longer a no-no. Having many years ago broken up Standard Oil in what may be it’s most famous anti-trust case, the federal government now seems willing to stand by while the monopoly gets put back together again.”

“More than 2600 mergers occurred in the U.S petroleum industry,” Juhasz writes. And this paved the way for all other corporations to ignore anti-trust laws. What does that look like in dollars and cents? The value of the mergers in 1998 and 1999 alone was $1.7 trillion! “But compared to earlier periods,” Juhasz writes, “the mergers occurred with hardly a ripple of resistance from Congress and far less analytic coverage from the mainstream media… Meanwhile, the public responded, and resistance to the mergers was part of a growing anti-corporate globalization movement that captured headlines in a string of massive protests, including the fifty thousand person protest against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Washington in 1999.”

And now it’s our turn. We here in Canada are going to get an opportunity to protest as well. June 26 and 27 in Toronto is the G 20 summit. This is where world leaders and the obscenely rich get together to decide our (the other six billion or so people on the planet) fate.

I was talking to my brother and he seems to feel as do untold millions, that these G 20 people probably know what they’re doing or that at least they are more qualified than anyone else to run the planet. Really? Is that accurate? I mean who are these people behind these massive corporations? Third, forth and fifth generation spoiled rotten brats, case in point: “Willametta Keck, daughter of William Keck, the founder of Superior oil, hated her brother Howard… they were just children when Howard fed her pet ostrich an orange. The ostrich died and Willametta never forgave her brother. Their childhood fight developed into a decades-long feud…” which in the end culminated in a $5.7 billion merger between Mobile and Superior Oil. Mobile is now one of the ten biggest corporations on the planet. These are the folks that want to run our lives people!!!

Canada is still a Democracy right? Barely? That means we get to vote on our governing bodies and what those governing bodies can or can’t do. And according to our Charter of Rights we are legally entitled to peacefully demonstrate against anything including Neo Liberalism or corporate fascism (which ever you prefer) or behind closed door meetings like the G 20 summit. So if you can make it then for your sake and your children’s sake and your children’s children, be there.