Those at the top of the corporate pyramid are, naturally enough, not anxious to apprise us of any expansion in their influence or reach. 

It serves them better to have us continue to think of them as if they were somebody’s family farms or mom-and-pop stores, while focusing all our resentment about what is vast and ominously powerful on that relatively small subset of social controllers who happen to reside in Washington.   And to meet their needs for this kind of perception management, they have had at their disposal a whole corps of hungry politicians.

If we want to avoid being politically and economically stampeded in the direction of the emerging industrial societies of other parts of the world—i.e., if we want to continue to be something more than just the Corporate States of America—we clearly need to introduce a ray of reality back into public discourse.  But how do we substitute a sense of what today's corporations are actually like, as opposed to what they would like us to believe about them?