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Anti-Corporate Flags (U.S.)

image by Zachary Harden, 3 February 2002

Description of the flag
Variants of the flag

See also:

Description of the flag

The purpose of such flags is to show that the people's US as of now is dead, and corporate America is now running America. They also refer to these flags as Brands and Bands because most of the logos on there belong to music (MTV) or brands (Coke and Pepsi). The flag above is the common design of the flag; variants abound.
Zachary Harden, 3 February 2002

The flag was designed by an American organization called Adbusters. They have an image of their "flag of corporate America" at www.adbusters.org. The design replaces stars in the US flag canton with 30 corporate logos in white. These are trademarks of 30 large and well-known US corporations. I think the number 30 was chosen for visibility: any more and they would have been so small that no one could see that they are symbols rather than stars. Any fewer and they would have had to omit too many of the corporations they love to hate. As others have discussed, the US S&S is considered recognizable with nearly any number of stars or stripes in the familiar pattern.

They offer for sale on-line and in their magazine. The design, however, is not copyrighted, and they encourage everyone to download it and use it. Not copyrighting their design also has another side: the 30 large corporations whose logos they use are probably not very happy about being skewered as "corporate controllers of America," and would like to sue Adbusters for using their logos ... but apparently the intent is not to counterfeit products and sell them as genuine brand-name items, so there is no grounds for a suit. But if they tried to copyright a design with copyrighted (are they? I'm not sure) corporate logos, the fur might really fly!
Bill Dunning, 2 April 2003

Variants of the flag

image located by Zachary Harden, 3 February 2002

image by Zachary Harden, 3 February 2002

Since the US flag has "molted" into a 50 star version, this flag needs to "molt" too. It has now 35 logos on it, the new ones from top to bottom are MTV, Citibank, a computer company, the Rockefeller Center, and Enron.
Zachary Harden, 3 February 2002