This article by Jane Anne Morris (DemocracyThemePark.org) was originally published in the Spring 2000 edition of By What Authority, & reprinted in Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy.

What to expect next from corporate sponsors of the WTO? There’s a well-thumbed page in the corporate playbook, ready to go. Whether or not it works depends on us.

The last time there was a scuffle as worrisome as the Seattle demonstrations,” Richard Milhous “Tricky Dick” Nixon was in the White House. Nearly everybody else was in the streets.

We were millions, and we demanded freedom, justice, equality, peace, clean air and water, and the right to choose our own hairstyles. We knew the joy of thinking it was all possible.

We also knew the raw fear wrought by the pop of tear gas canisters, the glint of sun on gunmetal, and the meltdown of a peaceable crowd being attacked by the forces of law and order.

But it is only at a distance of a quarter century that I begin to recognize the depths of another fear, just as visceral. As I pore over the writings by and about the corporate elite of that day, a simple fact stares out at me: they were scared witless.

While we wove our hopes into songs, and scrawled our demands onto placards, they spelled out their fears in journal articles and speeches at chambers of commerce.

The corporation was “under attack as never before,” subject to a “tidal wave” of “dissident groups, structured into onslaught vehicles of unrelenting social action,” according to corporate literature. The future looked “grim.” Corporations were about to “lose their autonomy, power and influence.” Some managers doubted that large corporations would even be “permitted” in the future. The significance of profit margins shrank as the CEO of one of the U.S.’s largest corporations wondered whether “the corporation as we know it…will survive into the next century.”

For those whose greed commanded the rudder of the ship of state, the sight of people in the streets — and not for shopping, mind you — was terrifying.

What a difference a generation makes. Corporate managers have more than survived the tumult of the Nixon era. Today, a tiny fraction of the human population, in its role as corporate managers, has been exceedingly successful in using the legal fiction of the corporation to expand its autonomy, power and influence. How did they accomplish this?

While we huddled in coffeehouses and church basements debating strategy, corporate managers plotted in board rooms. Their diagnosis unfolded into a plan. From their perspective, a Great Danger threatened: Government action spurred by public demands. A tried-and-true strategy beckoned: Make a show of voluntarily Doing Something and publicize it shamelessly.

Presented to the public, this was a plan with a thousand faces: corporate social responsibility, the corporation as a good citizen, voluntary codes of conduct, corporate executives as “trustees” for the public interest, corporations as “good neighbors,” the civic duty of the corporation, and so on.

There were three pillars to the corporate plan. First placate, then co-opt, then re-frame issues so that in the future, people would “demand” something that corporate managers want to “give.” MORE…