Corporations

Amazon.com Inc. shut like a book. Domino's Pizza Inc. was late but eventually delivered. And CNN focused on the good news. When the three major brands engaged with their Web-savvy fans and critics in separate incidents last week, their responses demonstrated how corporations are still learning how to control their messages -- and reputations -- in a fast-twitch online world.

The average Californian's taxes would shoot up five different ways in the state budget blueprint that lawmakers hope to vote on this weekend. But the bipartisan plan for wiping out the state's giant deficit isn't so bad for large corporations, many of which would receive a permanent windfall. About $1 billion in corporate tax breaks -- directed mostly at multi-state and multinational companies -- is tucked into the proposal.

As hundreds of fourth-quarter earnings reports stream in this week, Wall Street's reaction will turn on companies' answers to one question: When will the recession end? "Not soon" is what the market heard last week. Big banks posted ugly numbers and told investors they were still struggling with rickety balance sheets. That revived fears that the economic recovery that some analysts have forecast for the second half of the year won't materialize.

Chinese industrial companies' profits dropped as the global recession trimmed demand for exports. Net income sank 37.3% in the first two months of 2009 from a year earlier to 219.1 billion yuan ($32 billion), the statistics bureau said Thursday. Profits expanded 16.5% in the same period last year. China's economy grew at the slowest pace in seven years in the fourth quarter, industrial output growth slowed in this year's first two months, and overseas sales fell a record amount.

By showing General Motors chief Rick Wagoner the door, President Obama is in effect announcing that if the government picks up the tab for a stumbling business, it gets the right to call the shots. The move is as dramatic a reach into the boardroom of an independent American corporation as the government has made in decades, possibly since the '30s.

It's a simple matter in our capitalist economy to explain why so many people have lost their jobs in recent months: Companies have been desperate to slash costs to protect what's left of their bottom line. When profit is under siege, labor -- most companies' biggest expense -- inevitably takes the hit. As first-quarter earnings reports roll out in the next few weeks, the numbers are expected to be disastrous. Wall Street already knows as much.

Exxon Mobil Corp. unseated Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on this year's Fortune 500 list, shrugging off the oil price bubble and weathering what the magazine called the worst year ever for the country's largest publicly traded companies. Fortune's closely watched list, released Sunday, ranked companies by their revenue in 2008. Exxon in Irving, Texas, took in $442.9 billion in revenue last year, up almost 19% from 2007. The company also raked in the biggest annual profit, earning $45.2 billion.

Growing up in West Germany, Lothar Schroeder never knew that terrible sense of violation suffered by people in the communist East at the hands of the secret police who tailed them, bugged their homes and recruited neighbors and even family members to snitch on them. Now he knows. But it's not a totalitarian state doing the snooping this time; it's some of the country's largest corporations -- big names in telecommunications, transportation and retail.

The Supreme Court signaled Monday that it might be ready to give corporations a free-speech right to spend their money to elect or defeat favored candidates. In an unusual order, the justices said they were putting off until next term a decision over whether a politically charged film -- in this instance, "Hillary: The Movie" -- could be regulated as a type of campaign ad.

If we learned anything this last year, it's that corporations must have government oversight. They are too big to fail, and powerful enough that corporate malfeasance, abetted by a lax government, can bring the global economy to its knees. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court has reached out to consider an argument to give corporations a free hand to influence electoral politics. A ruling accepting this argument would shake the very foundation of our republic, turning us from a government of "we the people" to "we the corporations."