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Mega Corp: Difference between revisions
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** [http://www.law.fsu.edu/journals/lawreview/downloads/362/emerson.pdf A citation] for those who like such things. Disney does have that sort of legal authority but the Florida legislature can remove it.
* The Hudson's Bay Company owned the vast majority of the land now known as western Canada up until the late 19th century. It acted as the de facto government for the area, issuing its own currency and enforcing a monopoly on trade. The company survives into the present day, though it's no longer the Mega Corp it once was, being best known as the owner of several Canadian department store chains. It lost its independence after being bought out by the Zucker family in 2006, having lasted for more than ''three hundred and thirty years''.
* Inco, subsidiary of the Brazilian mining company Vale, can sometimes look like an evil Mega Corporation right out of a Cyberpunk story. Richer than whole countries, it buys and takes lands away from their people to mine metals (mostly nickel), bribing politicians to pay the least possible amount in taxes and fees. Once on their land, the union and employment laws of the country do not even apply anymore, and things have sometimes gone so far that the company was removed from the
* [[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.]] 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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