America, Inc.

Picture this: you’re watching Jeopardy. The clue flashes on the screen…“What venture triggered creation of the very first corporation?” Your mind runs through the options. Electricity? Steel? The railroads? The buzzer sounds. The answer: What is America?

The Virginia Company, which funded the initial voyage to Jamestown — America’s first permanent colony — was the first joint-stock company, a predecessor to the modern-day corporation. It was a business deal, created by London investors and sanctioned by the king. So before America was a colony or even a democracy, it was a venture. A high-risk, high-reward enterprise designed to make European men money.

This was not about freedom. This was about capital. America was conceived not in the lofty ideals of justice or equality but in the cold calculus of profit. America has always been, at its core, a venture. The priorities and preferences of capitalists have been at the helm since day one.

When Mitt Romney declared in 2011 that “corporations are people too,” people laughed, but he wasn’t wrong. In this country, corporations predate citizens. In some ways, the corporation is the original American citizen. It landed on our shores before you, before me; before the Constitution. And it has never relinquished power.

We delude ourselves when we say corporate money is corrupting our democracy. Corporate money didn’t creep in through a side door — it built the house. Citizens United didn’t break the system; it revealed it. The American project has always been tilted toward the interests of capitalists. The rest of us were invited later, as occupiers, as consumers, as labor.

And here we are again: corporate titans buying elections, shadow channels shaping laws, wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, while citizens are told to keep faith in “the system.” Faith in what, exactly? A democracy designed to serve investors, not people?

If we are serious about saving democracy, then let’s stop romanticizing its origins. America was not born to advance noble ideals. It was born to advance capital. That’s the root. That’s the truth. Until we confront that fact, we will keep spinning fairy tales while the real story — the one written in ledgers, charters, and stock certificates — plays out in front of our eyes.

America has always been a venture. The question is whether we will finally build something else. Something that belongs to the people, not the shareholders.

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