In the years following the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, its most successful claimants were not black Americans fighting the rising tide of the Klan or Jim Crow, but rather railroads and utilities companies fighting “discrimination” by the state. It’s an attempt by a corporate giant to use the language of freedom to promote the interests of capital. This is not just a consequence of the recent Citizens United verdict, which some have suggested is the most “sweeping expansion of corporate personhood to date.” Nor is it just another innovation peculiar to the fast food industry, a legal version of a rib sandwich that contains no ribs. The other is that, for legal purposes, the company itself is a person. One is that the company’s individual franchisees are small businesses. The McDonald’s corporation’s efforts to avoid the mandate of Seattle’s minimum wage increase hinges on two claims. And yet the prospect of a $15 per hour minimum wage in Seattle has led this grand institution to turn, not to greater economies of scale or improvements in vertical integration, but to the Fourteenth Amendment-a law ratified in 1868, primarily to protect the rights of recently freed slaves. Ronald McDonald is second in popularity with children to only one figure-Santa Claus.īy any (and every) measure, McDonald’s is a juggernaut. The McDonald’s logo is more recognizable than the Christian cross. The company trains more Americans than the U.S. McDonald’s is the largest owner of retail property in the world. In his book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser demonstrates the dominance of McDonald’s, not just in the context of the history of the fast food industry, but in the history of all industry.
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