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In the 1930s, corporations were denounced as threats to the common good. It is happening again today, says the writer.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
Adrian Wooldridge
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Every few decades, society has an allergic reaction to corporations. This happened in the 1890s, when companies were demonised as blood-sucking octopuses. It happened in the 1930s, when they were denounced as threats to the common good. It is happening again today.
Remember when Facebook was celebrated as an agent of global harmony? Now known as Meta Platforms, it is widely reviled as a poisoner of democracy. Or when everybody agreed that governments should be run more like businesses? The world’s best-known businessman-turned-politician is former United States president Donald Trump. Polemicists compete with one another to produce the most disobliging terms to describe corporations – though the prize, in my view, still goes to journalist and author Matt Taibbi’s 2009 description of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”.
