Governments working hand-in-hand with Corporations is never a good idea.
Both of these structures have a lot of power. In a well-functioning capitalist economy, each structure would be antagonistic to the other. Problems arise if the objectives of these functions start aligning with each other. Such alignment is not going to be healthy for democracy. In fact, it’s a feature of fascism:
Fascism can be defined as a capitalist economy that is subject to stringent government controls.
Which is why I have become concerned in recent years as to how much influence Corporations have over our Governments. It began to occur to me that Corporations may never have had so much influence and control of both government and cultural policy. So, the twist from ‘normal’ fascism is that rather than governments controlling business, we are seeing a model emerge whereby business is controlling governments. Either way, the co-operation between these two branches of the nation is too close to be healthy.
So what symbiosis am I referring to?
Well, I am writing this in early 2021 and we all know that Big Tech has given hints of its true power in recent weeks. Big Tech is now feeling brave enough to dispense with the pretense that it is merely a platform and not a publisher. Big Tech now revels in its preferred publisher role. These companies can promote their social justice, anti-white ideologies with gay (LGBT?) abandon which they achieve by censoring, suspending and deactivating posts, memes and people that they disagree with. Even President Trump has been silenced.
Now that Big Tech are ardent publishers, are governments going to revisit the communication laws that treated these companies as platforms only? It doesn’t look like it. In fact, Western governments are mimicking the behaviour of Big Tech by suppressing free-speech through the introduction of hate speech legislation. Here is an example of Governments and Corporations working in perfect harmony to undermine a key freedom of liberal democracies: free speech.
“True power resides with their [politicians’] donors: the bankers, the CEOs, financiers, and tech oligarchs who don’t run for office, but are content to buy off those who do. The end result is the same either way: economic globalism and financial consolidation of power in a declared meritocratic but actually semi-hereditary class.”
https://www.patrioticalternative.org.uk/a_black_pill_or_a_fork_in_the_road
The Left have always distrusted large corporations. However, more and more, people from the Right are realising that corporations are a threat to our way of life. Perversely, this is happening at just the time when most of the Left are embracing the attacks on free speech and enjoying the ‘woke’ advertising campaigns from multinational corporations.
Multinational corporations do not care about their employees. If they could replace 50% of their staff with AI tomorrow, they would do it.
Such companies benefit hugely from globalisation: they gain access to a much bigger pool of resources, either people or commodities or markets – and can leverage these to increase profits. Also, they can offset their revenues and profits in loss-making countries to minimise their tax obligations. Furthermore, they ensure that any tax they do pay is paid in tax friendly locations. These are the reasons that all large corporations were anti-Brexit. The EU was another example where corporate and political governance were perfectly aligned. In fact, the unaccountability and non-transparency of the EU provides the perfect cover for corporate lobbyists and EU politicians to work together for their mutual benefit.
I wrote the following about lobbyists in my blog piece arguing for Brexit. I wrote the following:
‘…let me describe the ‘jobs for the boys’ culture in play within the EU: senior EU politicians usually walk into heavily remunerated roles with multi-nationals as soon as they relinquish their EU roles. For example, Jonathan Hill – the UK’s former (unelected) EU commissioner – had taken on 6 lucrative roles with multi-national firms within 2 years of leaving his post: Aviva Insurance; Deloitte; Freshfields; Iberdrola; Times Newspapers and UBS. Is it probable that Mr Hill was offered at least some of these positions whilst still in his role as commissioner? It seems likely. Either way, this represents a huge conflict of interest. The role of a commissioner is to define the laws that will be voted on by the EU parliament. Who was Mr Hill representing during his time at the top of the EU power structure: multi-national firms or the citizens of Europe?‘
Further evidence of the anti-demicratic influence of lobbyists is provided in this Guardian article that describes how 30,000 lobbyists influence 75% of EU legislation:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/08/lobbyists-european-parliament-brussels-corporate
This is not healthy. We are seeing more and more evidence that Corporations and Governments are working closely together. In fact, Corporations are unofficially taking on roles that the Government would like to expedite but cannot be seen to do so for political reasons. An example of this is the Covid19 health identity cards that are being pushed by the media, under direction from the government. ID cards are a tricky thing for a liberal government to introduce. Tony Blair failed in his attempt to introduce them. However, many corporations – almost certainly at the behest of governments – are introducing rules whereby unvaccinated people will not be able to use their products or services, eg. airline flights, hotels etc. This is unofficial vaccine coercion that achieves government objectives.
The noose is tightening.
I predict this situation is going to get worse. We need to recognise how anti-democratic this is and fight it. This is creeping fascism. We, the people, are being ‘nudged’ by undemocratic forces.
Update 16th April 2021:
This article treads the same ground
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/04/16/woke-capitalism-is-a-menace-to-democracy/
Atticus Fox 