RANGE: The lair or den of the Corporate Giants is widely believed to be in Delaware. Yet some suggest that this emphatically American ogre makes his home offshore, in the beautiful Bahamas. Little reliable information about the Corporate Giants’ scope of activities exists—some of those who tracked them to their lair having been consumed and others simply co-opted. Evidence of their presence can be found throughout the country, however—Houston and Dallas are possibly boot prints where they have stomped. Each is but a man step for Giantkind.
HABITS: The behavior of Corporate Giants attracts little scrutiny or comment in America. And perhaps it is this undeserved lack of attention which spurs the mammoth creatures on, in their attempts to exceed even their Giant forbears in acts of voracity, rapaciousness, and in fact, every trait for which Giants from Goliath to Andre The have been famous. Although they are enormous and ubiquitous, Corporate Giants are terribly difficult to find, as more than one investigating committee has discovered. The Corporate Giant lives outside the law, in Delaware and New York. It is presumed that they dress conservatively, in three piece anti-antitrust suits. Their indiscriminate gobbling up of Small Businessmen has so adversely affected their digestion that they issue booming quarterly reports. Their mating customs remain mysterious, but they are certainly not monogamous. Citizens of both sexes everywhere complain of “having been shafted” by these Keynes Kongs. Alas, everyone who has gotten close enough to a Corporate Giant to speak about him with authority later proved to be an unreliable Communist in the pay of Karl Marx or had already declared himself to have been certifiably insane before taking a job with the Corporation. We can only be certain that, in some way, Corporate Giants are hard at work shaping America’s future, employing everything from “Better Ideas” to “Stupid Slogans” to further their ends. No matter what magical means they use to exercise it, the Corporate Giants’ influence upon the direction of American commercial enterprise is to be deplored. If the Giants’ collective lock upon the wattled throats and withered minds of our captains of industry is not soon broken, many great capitalist ventures will come to grief, in the time-honored manner of all Giants’ works and pomps. For example, after devouring everything within walking distance (including streams, wasps’ nests, oil-rich tundra), a Giant tends to doze off. Should he ever wake (a fifty-fifty proposition, according to Giant lore), he will discover that in his sleep he has been looted (by Jack the Giant-Killer), or blinded (by crafty Ulysses), or castrated and worse (by Ralph Nader).
HISTORY: Even the ethnic roots of Corporate Giants are difficult to discover; probably, they are multinational. In Greek mythology, they are mentioned as shipping tycoons, who wrecked the Titanic monopoly. Yet they seem to have sprung from earlier, well-travelled and prolific stock, for we read of Frost Giants menacing promiscuous and socialistic mythological characters of old Scandinavia and doing well in the rug trade as Djinns of ancient Persia. They were long associated with cannibalism, stupidity, and dumb jingles like “Fee Fi Fo Fum.” Many jocular stories have survived, detailing Giants’ absurd attempts to squeeze whey from stones, their defenseless-ness against goose burglars, and their notorious inability to distinguish between a traveller they wished to club to death and a pile of pillows. Banished from the Old World for their lack of guile, or, for that matter, common sense, the Giants have sought to conceal their idiocy in the New World by acting through committee. Corporate Giants, as they have come to be called, try to influence or discourage legislative sessions. But they adore board meetings.
SPOTTER’S TIPS: It is unlikely that an investigator’s approach will go unnoticed. Express an interest in a Corporate Giant, and he’ll find you. They may be stupid, but they have a nose for blood—especially the blood of an Englishman. Those who approach a Corporate Giant do so at their peril. They return either as zombie “Veeps,” mindless except where foreign markets are concerned—or as discredited babbling hulks, bearing the marks of welding equipment on their person. Corporate Giants? Don’t ask.