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Mega Corp: Difference between revisions
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* The concept is a heavily examined theme in Kim Stanley Robinson's ''[[Red Mars Trilogy]]'', where modern multinational corporations successively evolve into 'transnational corporations' (transnats) and then 'metanational corporations' (metanats, richer and powerful than most nations on earth) over the first two books before they effectively collapse in the face of a global catastrophe and worldwide uprisings near the end of the second book.
* Morning Star Cartel (a [[Meaningful Name]]) in ''A Game of Universe'' is a global corporation that became a interplanetary and then an interstellar corporation, thanks to the founder making A [[Deal with the Devil]].
* ''[[Podkayne
** In [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s ''[[Friday (novel)|Friday]]'', the Shipstone corporation owns, by the protagonist's own accounting, pretty much everything on Earth -- to the point where it controls nuclear weapons and uses them on ''countries'' that piss it off; and its internal "power struggles" are resolved by mass assassination. It is made clear that Territorial States don't stand a real chance against Corporate States.
** The main plot of ''[[Magic, Inc.]]'' is about the eponymous corporation taking over all magical dealings first in the city, then the state and the entire US. {{spoiler|The heroes find out that it is a ''literal'' evil corporation when they discover that the founder and CEO is a high ranking demon from hell.}}
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* [[The New Russia|Russian]] company Transmashholding doesn't make ''everything'' but it does own all the locomotive, wagon, and other railway-related manufacturers, so it's only competing with itself. It acts like a cross between a close subsidiary and business partner of Russian Railways, itself technically a large corporation, albeit one owned by the government and whose president is a political appointee.
** [[The New Russia]] is, in fact, chock full of Evil Mega Corps; during the 90's, they were bigger than the government. The most notorious is certainly Gazprom, which produces natural gas used to heat most of Europe; other ones include LukOil (oil), RusAl (aluminium), MTS, BeeLine and MegaPhone (cell phones; MTS is in fact a subsidiary of the much larger but lesser known AFK Sistema, a [[Mega Corp]] that makes everything but is most known for telecommunications and a recurring egg-shaped logo that comes in various colors for its various subsidiaries).
* For decades, corporations that owned coal mines in the U.S. Appalachian Mountains could get away with pretty much anything, and this led to a cautionary tale of what exactly this kind of behavior tends to result in. When the miners formed a union, the union leader was gunned down by 17 hired goons, and when a sympathetic sheriff investigated they had ''him'' killed as well and promptly tried to crush the union with yet more copious brutality, which resulted in the union militarizing and [[Bomb-Throwing Anarchists|radicalizing]] to the point where, when the actual law enforcement (who, granted, likely had had bribes from the companies) were called in to deal with "scabs" being sniped at, they were attacked by several thousand armed and angry miners talking about forming a [[Does This Remind You of Anything?|"workers' state" and of exterminating their oppressors and anybody remotely connected to them.]]<br /><br />This led to the [[wikipedia:Battle of Blair Mountain|Battle of Blair Mountain]], between 13,000 miners and a 2,000-man, hodge-podge army consisting of [[Pinkerton Detective|Baldwin & Felts agents,]] probably corrupt cops, ROTC graduates who had been rapidly shipped to the scene by a rightfully alarmed Federal government, and miscellaneous [[World War I]] veteran volunteers, who eventually managed to defeat the miners. Nearly 1,000 miners were charged with treason and would likely have resulted in the largest mass execution in U.S. judicial history if not for the fact that the rampant corruption of the corporations came to light as being responsible for everything in the first place, leading to a public outcry that prevented it from being carried out. Unfortunately, it took until [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]]'s election for most of those on trial to be pardoned and the beginning of modern labor laws.
* Comcast. They even have localized Monopolies in some areas of the world. As a result of a localized monopoly, they can allow their customer service to slack because what choice do people have during monopolies? There are many places in America where you have to buy Comcast and deal with any data caps or restrictions they provide, or else you do not get internet. At ''all''. This is especially prevalent in their tech support, which is handled by another outsourcing company where the average employee retention span of ''a month''.
** Not to mention, Comcast and other ISPs made it illegal for small towns to run their own ISPs -- when some of these ISPs were actually ''better'' than what they had!
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