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Comment by black-tea | Hacker News Reader

Practically speaking some of today's big companies are branches of the government too.

Not sure why you got down-voted, as I remember that as recently as the early 2010s some US agencies were still involved in industrial espionage on behalf of US companies. From a 2014 Snowden interview [1]:

> The U.S. National Security Agency is involved in industrial espionage and will grab any intelligence it can get its hands on regardless of its value to national security, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden told a German TV network. (...) “If there’s information at Siemens that’s beneficial to U.S. national interests - even if it doesn’t have anything to do with national security - then they’ll take that information nevertheless,” Snowden said, according to ARD, which recorded the interview in Russia where he has claimed asylum.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-snowden-germany/...

Outside of company towns in a few industries, and maybe some multi-national resource extraction companies that operate in lawless areas, how is this true?

There aren't too many, but Saudi Aramco, Statoil (until 2007, when it became the multinational Equinor), China Petrochemical, and a few other giant corporations exist (or in the case of Statoil, recently existed). Corporations wholly owned by nations. I think that qualifies.

Although I believe the parent was perhaps making a cynical comment about how e.g. Lockheed is basically a branch of the US military.

Statoil became Equinor in 2018, not 2007. Also, Equinor is still largely owned by the Norwegian government (67% as of 2017)

Name one?

Disney is mostly responsible for copyright in the US being extended to ludicrous lengths. They changed the law so they could keep making money.

Also these copyright companies seem to get special treatment by the government. Notice how they are able to use police to "raid" data centres etc.? In the UK a young guy who ran a torrent site was raided by police in the early hours only to be released without charge months later. These companies have special powers in government, hence practically they are a part of the government.

disney is a publicly traded company. i own stock in disney :)

The Dutch East India Company was publicly traded too.

It was in fact the first company in the world that was publicly traded at the world's first stock exchange.

There were bonds issued by Dutch East India Company

https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3433724

Bonds are just a debt instrument, they don't give control over companies like stocks. The VOC also had publicly tradable stocks though.

The Dutch East India Company was the first company in the history of the world to issue shares to the public. They paid an 18% dividend for over 200 years.

It's probably reasonable to consider regulatory capture the same thing, in practice. For instance this [1] was who the former president appointed to a newly created post, which he himself (the president) referred to as 'The Czar of Foods'. He was the effective head of the FDA's food division. He was a Monsanto VP and lobbyist who had argued for such things as allowing companies to knowingly allow at least a minimal amount of carcinogenic material into processed foods. Great guy to be in charge of food safety. It meant that Monsanto was effectively in charge of food safety in the US.

This led to things such as the FDA not even testing foodstuffs for excessive levels of glyphosate until a Government Accountability Report publicized this [2,3], federal legislation prohibiting state labeling requirements for genetically engineered foodstuffs, the FDA opting for no regulations whatsoever specific to genetic engineering instead offering a purely voluntary consultation process and otherwise relying on self regulation, etc. Monsanto's contemporary success was largely a product of government engineering.

The epilogue also feels somehow political. Shortly after Bayer (a German company) bought Monsanto, they suddenly started losing critical court cases in the US. In particular they've now lost two cases in the US with the courts deciding that Monsanto's glyphosate was the cause of the plaintiff's cancer. This, in turn, has now set the precedent and opened the door for some 11,200 more lawsuits against Bayer for glyphosate causing cancer. In something like 3 years we went from 'This product is so safe, we don't even need to test for it.' to 'This product undoubtedly causes cancer and you now owe billions of dollars in damages to thousands of plaintiffs.' The acquisition was a modern day Trojan Horse.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_R._Taylor

[2] - https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-15-38

[3] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-food-agriculture-glyphosa...

Blackwater/Xe/Academi/whatever they will whitewash their name to next.

Mercenary outfits are by definition not part of the government. That's what makes them mercenaries.

Goldman Sachs

Google?? Excuse me, Alphabet!

Renault is partially owned by the French Government I believe

The government holds only 15.01% of the company, according to Euronext, just 0.01% more than the second largest investor.

Facebook

Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company is the largest company in the country by number of employees and revenue. Two of the largest banks here, Banco do Brasil and Caixa Economica Federal are both federally owned and both are larger than their private competitors, thanks to a couple of monopolie they hold (BB has a stranglehold on financing agriculture, and CEF operates the lotteries).

Not really, what you see rather is Crony capitalism which is when government and large corporations work together to further their interests, often in what should be considered an illegal way.

The problem is that the wealthy people are the one's who govern. (they define what is and what isn't legal)

This is interconnected and to change it would mean to break it up somehow.

Therefor you'd need to change the premise that "wealth is power" which is a basic equation of our global system since centuries.

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