We are facing an unprecedented corporate tyranny in America
You must pay attention when voices from both left and right come together to express a common concern. In this case, those voices are Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson. Both share dismay at the unprecedented power corporate America has acquired. They are right to be worried.
In 1986, I heard Arthur Miller speak in Dallas. This wasn’t Arthur Miller, the playwright and husband to Marilyn Monroe, but Arthur Miller, a former Harvard Law professor who is one-half of Wright & Miller’s Federal Practice and Procedure, possibly the most famous American legal treatise.
Professor Miller described the dangers to privacy arising from corporations acquiring data about Americans. It was an interesting talk but I, with all the arrogance of a 25-year-old, was unimpressed.
Then, corporations had limited data collection methods, mostly revolving around credit card usage. I didn’t care then that a technician working at Mastercard might know what I bought at Safeway. I was more worried that my neighbors or classmates might know too much about my life. They could make my life miserable, while Mastercard, I thought, could not.
Miller was prescient and I was foolish. Today, corporations have complete control over our lives. They know everything we buy, everything we earn, everything we think, and everyone with whom we communicate – and they have the on/off switch for all these things.
Corporations acquired this information in the most user-friendly ways. They made life easier for us. As a former student of Glenn Reynolds told me, back in those days, corporations treated us like royalty, giving us everything we could ever want and anticipating our every wish.
They started flexing their muscles when Trump entered office because they hated his willingness to stop the cheap labor that supported them, whether Chinese slave labor or the illegal aliens and affordable HB-1 visa immigrants. Thanks to the vast wealth we gave them, they bought American politics. Most of Washington, D.C. is beholden to corporations, especially Amazon and the tech tyrants. Given a choice between serving the public and serving Big Tech, the public can go hang itself.
Corporations promoted the lockdowns because they allowed the largest wealth transfer in the history of the world. Mom & Pop went out of business, but Amazon and Walmart made bank.
Corporations promoted the riots. Tucker Carlson (as you’ll see) says this was to shut down their Main Street competition. I believe, too, that it placated the Left, which once hated corporate America, but could now see it as an ally.
The tech tyrants and the corporate media controlled the 2020 presidential news cycle. They excoriated Trump, who fought for America, and lionized Biden, a stupid man with 47-years of failures behind him. After their four years pretending that Trump was allied with Russia, they dedicated 2020 to stifling facts proving China owned Biden. Their billionaires funded candidates and funded systems that supported their chosen candidates.
Credit card companies began to deny service to people buying products leftists dislike, especially guns. In places in which leftists ran gun sellers out of town, that made it impossible for residents to use the internet for their Second Amendment rights.
Glenn Greenwald, who values freedom and foolishly thought leftism was that path to freedom, understands this, why is why he wrote that “The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump.” Instead, the real threat comes from “a few corporate monopolies.”
Trump, he notes, has invariably avoided authoritarianism, although some branches of his administration flexed the muscles they’ve acquired over several decades. Meanwhile,
A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else….
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Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants which are thriving, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S.
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These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.
Read the whole thing. Then watch Tucker Carlson’s speech at Turning Point USA:
Now, think about the Constitution’s silence regarding corporate tyranny and contemplate how we can escape from it.
