Corporate state tyranny

In the Claremont Institute, Joel Kotkin writes a lengthy, heavily footnoted article explaining what is happening in America today.

Most importantly, fascist corporatism, by rejecting the autonomy of private interests, parallels today’s fashionable theories like “stakeholder capitalism” and the environmental “Great Reset.” As in the fascist state, corporations now take it on themselves to be conscious change agents for particular political and moral agendas. Two doctrines guide these actions. First, “stakeholder capitalism,” which holds that corporations must push onto society doctrines concerning gender, “systemic racism,” and other elements of the woke agenda. Second, the “Great Reset,” which seeks to have companies essentially “save” the planet by slowing material growth for the working and middle classes while maintaining rich profit opportunities through “disruption” of energy and other industries. Both doctrines currently guide the majority of America’s major corporations.

China has already followed this model, and America’s corporations are on the cusp of doing so. In China, as one scholar observes, corporatism is “a socio-political process” where monopolies flourish with the assistance and connivance of state agencies. They follow state strictures by embracing the official ideology, celebrating the Communist Party’s vision, and enforcing ideological conformity among employees and even foreign business partners.

A tenth of the US economy is made up of industries where four firms dominate more than two-thirds of the market, with finance and information technology now among the most concentrated.[10]

Local banks have disappeared and been replaced by online and large national financial institutions. Between 1983 and 2018, the number of banks fell from 11,000 to barely 4,000. This is not an anomaly, but a trend.

Today, a handful of giant corporations account for nearly 40 percent of the value of the Standard and Poor Index, a level of concentration unprecedented in modern history.[15] The leftist blog The Bellows notes that last year Amazon tripled its profits and Jeff Bezos made $70 billion while billionaires had earned over $1 trillion since March.[16] Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft now make up 20 percent of the stock market’s total worth.[17] Overall, in 2020, the top seven tech firms added $3.4 trillion in value.[18]

samAt the e time companies also had to deal with a diversity of small shareholders; households in 1960 accounted for 90 percent of all corporate equity. That percentage is now barely one-third. The role of large mutual and pension funds, as well as of foreign investors, has waxed greatly and concentrated key economic decision-making in an ever-smaller number of hands.[27]

Remarkably, the “party of the people” under the Obama administration protected the largest banking firms, and prevented antitrust enforcement against large corporate interests.[30] The ostensibly progressive White House presided over a continued decline in the share of income going to workers, and the growth of overweening, concentrated power metamorphosed through a series of financial arrangements that allowed even the companies behind the 2008 recession to come back with surprising ease.

The current Democratic Party may represent the apotheosis of the new corporate state. It raises record sums from the corporate elite[35]—notably, the tech oligarchs[36] and their Wall Street allies.[37] Among financial firms, communications companies, and lawyers, Biden outraised Trump by five to one or more.[38] Equally important, the tech giants actively helped direct Biden’s presidential campaign,[39] providing digital savvy,[40] with Mark Zuckerberg himself financing election day operations in many critical states.[41] Time magazine’s approving exposé of the corporate elites’ scheme to unseat President Trump noted that an “informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans” had succeeded in influencing election results through both cash donations to Democrats and manipulation of media for political ends.[42]

The oligarchs often couched their support in progressive and even patriotic rhetoric that also served their economic interests. They needed to turn back challenges posed by real progressives, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who openly challenged their power.[43] Oligarchs like Jeff Bezos, through his mouthpiece the Washington Post, backed Biden and consistently denigrated Sanders.[44] They also have a great interest in reducing conflict with China, which they see as a key market and a source of supply, and they also seek to restore the flow of high-tech de facto indentured servants imported from abroad, who constitute upward of 40 percent of Silicon Valley’s high-tech workforce.

Ironically, many of the more woke companies—the NBA, Nike, Coca-Cola, and Google, among others—see no contradiction in supporting claims of “systemic racism” and “social justice” while cooperating with Chinese authorities to abuse basic human rights in Hong Kong or to impose forced labor in Xinjiang.[72] Boldly progressive firms like Airbnb have no problems sharing customer data with China’s security state; nor does Apple show compunction in building their products with slavelike labor.[73] To the American elite one can be endlessly woke at home, while ignoring the implications, and utter hypocrisy, of their engagement with China’s corporate state.

Yet, at least for now, our constitution provides some room for action. Strong actions to break up or at least restrain the acquisitions of the largest firms—notably, in tech and finance—are a viable response. Breaking up these firms, or turning them essentially into regulated utilities, also makes sense. Certainly, other actions to guarantee free speech rights and to preserve some degree of local autonomy have appeal across the political spectrum.

Read more here: https://dc.claremont.org/the-rise-of-corporate-state-tyranny/