Could even Marshall McLuhan or George Orwell have predicted a corporate takeover of our world on the scale the Internet has made possible, reducing not just the worker but also the individual in general to a mere pawn in a massive game played by the Multi-Nationals? It's doubtful. Have no doubt, Multi-National doesn't mean International and it doesn't in any sense presuppose fair play. Rather, it's all about large corporate organizations in certain wealthy nations fiscally invading as many smaller nations as possible. Colonialism by any other name is still colonialism.

Before I go too far with this, let me give you a better idea of who I am and from whence my comments come. I am an individual. I am not a large corporation or even a small private company. I've lived a lot of years and in that time have learned a great deal, but increasingly believe that doesn't count for a great deal. I'm not a politician or a pundit or a fiscal wizard, but I've read a lot about history and politics and, from both sides of the fence, how those in power abuse those who have no power.

By the time I was fifteen years of age, I was reading Mein Kampf and Das Capital and Macchiavelli, and all of the great modern economic and political theorists, socialists, and philosophers. I continued to read these great thinkers throughout my life. Did I learn anything? I really don't know, but I hope I did. I've been accused of being an iconoclast and an anarchist and occasionally, incorrectly, of being dishonest.

To quote television's The Prisoner when faced with an intolerable and dehumanizing situation, "I am not a number. I am a free man."

Recently, I had a run-in with the new corporate megalith Google. I've had disagreements in the past with other large corporations and I have friends who have encountered corporate ire, so this is not new to me or to our society. In fact, over the past fifty years, I've read many tales of corporate Goliaths running roughshod over individual Davids who dared to stand up to them. I'm writing about my experience with Google, not because this is a unique circumstance but because it is not, and so will serve as an example of the widespread contemporary corporate disregard by multinationals of the humanity of the individual man and woman.