Rebellion in the Post-Profit Era: Disenchanting the Corporate Spell
How should a right-leaning thinker consider corporate power in the current post-profit and post-democratic decline of global civilization?
Moral Considerations in Use and Scope of Government Power
A concession to the legitimacy of government power is an acceptance of a degree of utilitarian ethics, gauging success by some measure of aggregate happiness within a jurisdiction. A first-principle approach, deontological ethics, leads us to a rejection of all government power. Let's illustrate the two ethical orientations with extreme examples. If euthanasia results in an increase in aggregate happiness resulting from the dead boomers, euthanasia is just under utilitarian ethics. Under deontological ethics, while a state-funded policeman arresting a murderer is just, the threat of force behind taxes that fund the justice system to conduct that arrest is unjust, making the arrest fruit from a poisonous tree.
Most citizens take a pragmatic approach and recognize the danger in these two extreme orientations of political philosophy. Thus, we balance the rights of the individual against violating those rights for what we perceive as the aggregate happiness of the community.
This struggle between first principles and aggregate happiness is particularly acute among right-wing thinkers and results in a dichotomy: conservative-leaning rightists versus libertarian-leaning rightists. The conservative and libertarian both agree that trans-gender hormones should not be prescribed by military healthcare. The conservative, because mental illness should not be promoted and encouraged, as it decreases aggregate happiness and the effectiveness of our military. The libertarian, because state-funded healthcare is theft of private property via taxation to fund it, and aggregate happiness is not considered since the ends don't justify the means.
To anarchist libertarians taking deontological ethics to their natural end, like Stefan Molyneux, I understand and respect their commitment. If the game is unjust, one option is to refuse to play it. On the other hand, you may not take an interest in politics, but politics takes an interest in you and, more importantly, your loved ones and posterity. The title of this blog, Stratagems of the Right, concedes a pragmatic commitment to employing a degree of utilitarian ethics to better achieve human flourishing. If we don't organize to promote our values through political power, the other side most certainly will.
Confusing lines are drawn between deontological and utilitarian ethics in right-wing political philosophy. Most of us agree that a policy requiring anyone over the age of 70 to die is unjust (despite cross-generational contempt for boomers), but we accept age-requirements for a driver's license. Likewise, most of us concede that a tax-funded monopoly on justice via some kind of democratic control is just, but we concede limitations on this power, like search-warrant requirements, and that we should grant certain inalienable rights, like gun ownership and political speech, that bar most government intrusion. But between these ethical orientations on the right, the lines gets blurry. The blurriest line regards corporate power.
Corporate Power as a Political Tool
How much power for a corporation is too much before the law should be a remedy? Is it a question of scope or application? Are the details of quality and quantity of its power a left versus right-wing issue? Libertarian deontological ethics lead us to believe government action to reduce corporate power is an immoral means that can't justify moral ends, like fruit from a poisonous tree. Is this so?
Should corporations be allowed to spend their capital on causes for the general good of the public at the expense of pursuing profit for shareholders without civil-liability consequences? Or, should courts allow shareholders to sue the corporation for frivolous charitable or social-justice spending that results in lost profits or outright losses that devalue share prices, especially when done too cavalierly? This question was once posed in my law-school class on corporations. I was one of two people in the entire class to raise my hand for the latter.
Addressing political causes via a non-democratic cabal struck me as dangerous. Charity is an individual endeavor, not a corporate one. Executives should spend their own money from their personal assets and income if they want to help people, not spend the shareholder's money on such measures, especially on items related to racial grievances and other variants of left-wing activism. It's one thing for a corporation to take a political position, but it's another for a large entity with access to billions of dollars in revenue and low-interest loans, especially monopolistic streams of revenue which are the basis for such low-interest loans, to use its resources to effect what its management believes is social justice. Surely, I thought, management should be liable for devaluing the company through diverting other people's money and resources to social justice causes the executives personally support.
There were more than two right-wing thinkers in my class, so I was surprised to see such unanimity in the idea that corporations should be allowed to use their resources for social-justice causes without legal consequence. Perhaps the right-wing thinkers took a deontological perspective. They may not agree with all the social-justice leftist values a corporation funds, but better a corporation does it than the government, and, maybe the court system is an unjust remedy to reign in corporate power, since governmental power to enforce court judgments is involuntary.
I understood it from the left's point of view perfectly well. If a corporation donates millions or billions of dollars in profit to paying reparations, for example, why should greedy shareholders be allowed to stop it? The left looks to what the corporation does as opposed to deontological ethics when deciding what powers a corporation should be permitted to have.
This position starkly contrasts with the "money is speech" and "corporations are people" rhetoric the left rallied behind as a result of the seminal U.S. Supreme Court case, Citizens United [*1]. In that case, a group of conservatives formed a non-profit corporation, Citizens United, and put out a movie on cable television criticizing Hillary Clinton during her run in the 2008 Democratic primary. For doing so, the Federal Elections Commission found the group in violation of criminal, as well as civil, election law. Do the base-level facts strike you as a just application of the law? The Supreme Court understandably refused to apply that law, and its holding relaxed inhibitions on behavior for unions and corporations to engage in political speech. The left was, and still is, staunchly against this holding and believes the First Amendment should not protect corporations from criminal liability for engaging in political speech, because they fear corporations will unduly influence voters by diverting their profits to public political messaging in favor or against political candidates, away from what voters would truly want absent such interference.
It's one thing for a band of citizens to form a corporation to make a movie against or in favor of a political candidate. It's another for a monopoly to use its resources to influence public policy. How could we tell if the left-wing position on Citizens United is held in principles of fairness to the voting public as opposed to a tactical position to increase leftists' effectiveness at obtaining and/or maintaining political power? The assumption the left had was that corporations are right-wing. So, if corporations were allowed to engage in political speech, the left's preferred candidates for public office would be less likely to win. But what if corporations become left-wing?
The classic leftist tactic was to heavily regulate corporate conduct and/or shrink or limit the size of corporations, trust-bust them and break them up when they become too powerful as monopolies. Why? Because corporations were seen as institutions that would, if allowed, fight to decrease the scope and power of government, which is the left's primary tool to effect social justice. You never saw the left advocate for limiting union power to spend dues on left-wing political causes and speech entirely unrelated to the benefits of the workers they represent. Thus, to the left, corporations are like any tool. If they're a detriment to left-wing ideals, they must be reigned in. If they're a benefit to those ideals, they're not a problem but an asset.
So, how can a corporation, especially a monopolistic one, avoid injury by left-wing activism? By catering to the lowest-cost left-wing political causes it can. Corporate officers looking to maintain and expand their power understand that the political left will use the government to limit or reduce their power, possibly even break up the corporation. Thus, keeping leftists happy is a priority, especially for corporate monopolies. To a monopoly, there is no competition. Its only predator is the government. If right-wingers are pacified by deontological ethics to leave corporations alone, the only real danger is leftists wielding government power.
Thus, we have an unholy alliance between the political left and corporate power. Note these eighteen corporations that donated to the radical communist social-justice group, Black Lives Matter [*2], who memory-holed their "What We Believe" page [*3] containing the text:
The idea of converging corporations toward the whims of social justice is a more recent tactical innovation by the political left that capitalizes on seemingly right-wing principles of laissez-faire hands-off capitalism. The left wields both the stick and carrot to control corporate behavior, while the right sits on the sidelines, clinging to illusory deontological ethics.
Of course, corporate leftism will naturally shy away from more-costly left-wing matters like unionization, requiring employers to pay for more benefits like healthcare, or anything that limits the financial resources and power of the corporation. Instead, we see them champion token issues of social justice like diversity and inclusion, and, more importantly, as I've written in extensive detail before, punishing and censoring enemies of the political left [*4].
Meanwhile, we see purportedly right-wing proponents idly standing by or attacking anyone who would disagree with the notion corporations should be allowed to do whatever they want, including Disney, the Devil Mouse itself, selectively applying its rules to punish even potentially right-wing thinkers like Gina Carano, without so-much as a justified public boycott.
The above tweet was by a leading attorney for President Trump's legal strategy to overturn the fraudulent 2020 election. To the extent you agree with the direction my argument on corporate power is taking so far, you can tell she's not a particularly acute strategic thinker.
The Public Purpose of a Corporation
A corporation is an invention of the state to protect financial backers from being held legally accountable for the debts and wrongdoings of the enterprises they back. The corporate coffers can be legally raided via court judgements to pay for debts and civil wrongdoing but not the financiers of the corporate coffers themselves. If you owned a lien-free million-dollar house, would you risk your home being sold in foreclosure as a result of investing in an enterprise that went bankrupt or had an employee that accidentally killed people, resulting in a multi-million dollar civil judgement?
We call this protection of financiers the "corporate veil." Its justification is encouraging investment. Enterprises, like railroads in the industrial era, required immense capital investment. If financial backers could be sued, perhaps such investment would've never happened. Investing in a railroad might prove too dangerous, since, if the railroad fails to pay its debts or received a court judgment to pay someone it injures, the investors themselves would naturally be liable absent the corporate veil. Thus, maybe we wouldn't have industries like air and train travel absent allowing states to charter protections for investors we refer to as "incorporation." If people can financially back an enterprise without such fear, and be protected by the corporate veil, large projects that make civilization more comfortable and efficient, like train and air travel, are more likely to be realized, so it is argued.
The idea behind corporations is to give groups of people special protection that they would otherwise not have if they acted as a non-corporate group. It has nothing to do with right-wing, left-wing, or even capitalist values in and of itself.
Is civilization better off with these large corporations, especially as they buy more and more smaller corporations, consolidating power into giant conglomerates? By one estimate, 90% of media and scientific journals are owned by six corporations: GE, Disney, Time Warner, Comcast, Viacom, and Newscorp [*5]. Consider, also, the tech monopolies, Facebook, Google (who hosts this blog, owned by Alphabet), and Twitter, with a collusive global monopoly on written public debate between every-day people. What public purpose or great invention have these media companies given the public to earn a corporate veil solidifying their power that thousands of independently-owned unincorporated entrepreneurs couldn't give us?
The strongest example of a public benefit mass liability-free investment has given the public I can think of might be pharmaceuticals. But, even with that, we are all aware of the love-hate relationship we have with what both the right and left colloqueally refer to as "Big Pharma," creating a pill-based healing model.
A similar public-benefit argument is made to justify laws pertaining to intellectual property. Intellectual property laws are inherently anti-free market, as they use the state to actively prevent commerce with competitors by granting temporary monopolies. The idea, however, is that, without these protections, copy-cats would unjustly profit from the original ideas of others, and original-thinkers wouldn't be incentivized to create things that make our lives better, be it the tales of Mickey Mouse or a medicine that heals the sick. This intellectual-property justification even applies to branding, as the shape of packaging, logos, or even colors for packets of sugar are trademarked to ensure the public doesn't accidentally pick up the wrong brand.
As many writers have pointed out [*6], the 1928 invention of Mickey Mouse contrasted with the continuous laws to extend its monopoly on monetization every time the copyright comes close to tolling belies a transparently-obvious comical farce of public policy, supposedly for the benefit of over 320 million Americans and others living within the jurisdiction, tracing with the needs of a single corporation.
Laws pertaining to corporate veils and intellectual property are akin to laws regulating workplace safety, furnishing healthcare to employees, or any other item of general public policy. Putting aside libertarian deontological arguments and focusing on utilitarian ones, as is the inherent nature of public policy, we weigh the costs and benefits when deciding whether we want them or not. Policies like corporations and intellectual property can be rooted in either left or right-wing values. A monopolist media conglomerate that cannibalizes pop culture properties to make social-justice propaganda is antithetical to right-wing values. A patent on transgender hormones for children is also antithetical to such values. To claim corporations or patents, in and of themselves, are a right-wing idea is transparently absurd, a sophistic spell cast upon right-wing communities to steer them away from challenging their corporate overlords.
And since a corporation is a state benefit to exempt certain people from liability, its use has no basis in deontological ethics. The pure libertarian position would be to do away with and unincorporate all enterprises and allow them be seen in the eyes of the public as they truly are: a band of individuals organizing to create something, all of whom should be accountable for the mistakes and debts of the invested-in enterprise.
Pragmatically speaking, we will never see this result. The left now loves large corporations, since they increasingly advance social-justice causes and ostracize right-wing elements.
Since corporations are a tool of the state and the left views them in the context of whether or not they help or hinder left-wing values, the right should view this tool the same way. Perhaps the corporation has outlived its usefulness, and it's a relic of the industrial age for encouraging private investment in mass infrastructure for enterprises like railroads. What mass projects can be funded in the modern era to make people's lives better using the corporate veil to encourage investment? Would air travel suddenly stop if the corporate veils were lifted? Would all organizations move overseas without it? My aim here isn't necessarily to advocate a sudden removal of all U.S. corporate veils but to think of the corporation as a public policy tool that must justify its special privilege.
The public cost of giving enterprises such special power now results in them using their power to benefit low-cost left-wing causes, as they curry favor with the side that traditionally advocates reigning them in.
A monopolistic corporation will naturally use some of its resources to placate the political class most likely to advance trust-busting or regulations that reduce corporate power. Meanwhile, the right wing can be placated with a false application of deontological ethics to discourage support of trust-busting, regulation, and other tools of political power that reduce the power of the corporation.
Corporate Power in the Post-Profit Era
At what point does profit become irrelevant to a corporation?
YouTube, owned by Google, which is owned by Alphabet, dominates the internet video media market. When was the last time YouTube turned a profit?
Jeff Bezos' owns Amazon and the Washington Post, a news publication thoroughly dedicated to spreading pandemic fear with speculative stories about what the virus du jour could do based on people testing positive for the virus while having other nasty symptoms that may (or may not) be related, all the while Amazon has made billions off fear of in-person shopping without the internet as an aid. When was the last time the Washington Post made a profit?
Twitter effectively controls most communication between every-day people and the global public. It banned President Trump before he even relinquished power, effectively driving the Twitter share-price down billions of dollars [*7]. When was the last time Twitter turned a profit? Shouldn't shareholders be allowed to sue Twitter for such an overt political act of not just censorship, but outright contempt for right-wing political elements, that caused a dramatic drop in share price?
Why can large corporations go so long without turning real profits? Because they have access to low-interest loans to satisfy cash flow. They don't need profit to operate. And, since share value is determined by long-term prospects for profit, as long as the share price grants the illusion of a good buy, investors are plentiful.
The same reason investors readily buy bonds in the U.S. government despite it having 28 trillion dollars in debt while raking in only about 3.5 trillion dollars in annual tax-revenue is the same reason large corporations like Disney can continue to get low-interest loans despite suffering colossal losses during the 2020-? "pandemic." The U.S. government doesn't need profit to pay back its investors. Eventually, the government can raises taxes if need be to ensure debts are paid. Likewise, monopolist corporations can simply raise prices or keep spending until they hit a sufficiently popular and profitable good or service at some point in the future to ensure its debts are paid.
Financial reporting for large corporations is beyond my scope here, but, suffice to say, the larger an organization is and the more complex its finances, the more speculation for future earnings can be made in the eyes of its financiers and creditors. Value, and thus access to capital, are not based in objective reality but creative accounting to justify a subjective view of what others hope it to be.
At some point, a corporation becomes a post-profit entity. This isn't to say it can abandon an illusion of future profits for placating shareholders or that post-profit means no actual profits. It simply means that short-term profit isn't necessary, and the can for future profit can be continuously kicked down the road if needed. And, with conglomerates, smaller corporations can be run at mass losses (like YouTube and the Washington Post) if they serve a strategic purpose of the parent corporation or individual owners.
A post-profit corporation can, of course, make as much profit as it likes, just like a wealthy man is free to take up as many projects as he wants to make additional money. But the post-profit entity and the wealthy man are both free to spend their resources on personal ventures with little regard to cash flow.
As these personal ventures of corporations increasingly wind up being social justice causes of the political left, we on the right must ask ourselves: why are we giving investors an antiquated form of legal immunity that allows our enemies to grow into monopolies that actively hate us and implement policies to harm our interests?
Rebellion in the Post-Democratic Era
The comically-obvious fraud of the 2020/1 U.S. elections was so blatant even Mr. Magoo could discover it. Nobody honestly believes Joe Biden: (1) won 10.5 million votes more (13% more, with 80 million "votes") than the previous record-holder, Barrack Obama in 2008 (about 69.5 million), while (2) winning 45% less counties (Obama 875, Biden 477), with (3) most excess votes coming from four cities that shut down counting operations at night, and (4) suddenly found statistically-absurd Biden-only ballot dumps
under (5) the circumstances of a thousand affidavits witnessing boxes of early-morning Biden-only ballots being run through machines multiple times
while (6) observers were purposefully being distracted and conveniently kicked out (like in Michigan),
including after (7) a pipe "burst" in Atlanta (later changed to a "leak") where ballots in a case under a cloth-covered table were dragged out and counted after the observers were told to leave, and
(8) forensic tests of the Dominion Voting machines used in these same states, in Michigan's Antrim county, sent data overseas with 2/3rds of the votes decided in private-party adjudication by an unknown party with a deleted audit trail for the voting decisions, as subpoenas to test machines in other states like Georgia and Arizona were usurped or ignored. [*8] (further analysis using the images seen above also found here [*9] and here [*10]).
My suspicion is that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) handled the fraud in question, as it has interfered with at least 81 elections around the world that we know of since its 1947 inception through 2000 (afterwards, it apparently becomes murkier to uncover) [*7].
Even if those running the show behind the CIA didn't use their immense experience to manipulate the American election, as that of course would be illegal, how many more elections around the world have been stolen by their wickedness guised as "national security?" 50 U.S. Code § 3036.
Besides, if a cabal can't successfully manufacture votes to steal an election, the government can always ignore the vote. In perhaps the world's second foremost democracy, the United Kingdom, the 2016 popular referendum for Brexit was not honored. Since both direct and representative democracy are broken in the world's two leading democracies, one wonders where in the world we can trust democracy actually works?
This doesn't mean criminal handlers will interfere with every election going forward. But major elections that influence geo-political offices like the U.S. President and those that tip the balance of power in Congress certainly will be rigged going forward. Since they got away with it under a vigorously-vocal president that contested the fraud, while about half of U.S. voters believe the election was stolen with fraud,
imagine how easy fraud will be to get away with when less-charismatic candidates become the victim, especially under the increasingly-blunt mass-censorship environment of corporate monopolies controlling political speech.
Speaking of political speech, another spell cast upon the right regards these bow-tie faux-intellectual conservatives uttering the phrase "private corporations can do whatever they want; the First Amendment only applies to censorship by the government." This infers that the government can contract away what would otherwise be rights violations, or perhaps merely give a wink and a nod to our corporate overlords, who can violate constitutional rights by proxy.
Corporations are an invention by the state that grow into these mass conglomerates approaching a trillion dollars in value due to special legal protections. Clearly, the public has some right to restrict their activity once they monopolize media and censor dissident political voices. It's one thing for a corporation to have a political position; it's another for it to use monopoly powers to ensure only political positions it agrees with are heard around the world. Surely, corporations don't get special state protection and also become free to do whatever they want with trillions of dollars in aggregate resources by an investor class who legally bares no responsibility for faults or debts of the corporations.
Regardless, change through conventional political speech by persuading voters to put the right people in command is no longer a serious option. This isn't to say the right should stop voting, as perhaps one day we'll catch our enemies in election fraud more obvious as to embarrass them sufficiently, further reduce their credibility, and, hence, reduce their ability to manipulate the public into voluntarily complying with irrational demands.
Most corporations are effectively enemies of the right, just as much as the leftist bureaucrats arbitrarily pulling the post-democratic levers of power. But, more importantly, corporations are an enemy we have more power over than the leftist bureaucrats cemented in their post-democratic reign.
If half of America, or even a quarter of America, recognized the danger these corporations pose and simply reduce spending with them and, more importantly, started investing and spending on their competitors, perhaps we can eventually drive a wedge between this unholy alliance of corporate power and the leftist ruling elite.
We need to start building our own communities of like-minded people and creating alternatives to the emerging monopolies. With pandemic restrictions, business closures, and Amazon's effective monopoly on many consumer goods, most of us are practically forced to make an occasional purchase from the enemy. But we can reduce how many times we make a purchase and, wherever possible, spend our money on our allies. We need to actively look for alternatives and start supporting them.
For example, I shop at my local meat shop whenever I can and avoid my BLM-supporting grocery chain, despite its convenient location. I have multiple gym memberships for when I travel, and support a boxing gym local to an office I travel to. I support a wide variety of alternative platforms, like Infogalactic in lieu of Wikipedia, Social Galactic and Gab in lieu of Twitter. I'm not tech savvy, but wouldn't it be wonderful for someone to build a platform those with right-wing values can congregate to and support each other in establishing competing small businesses?
In the post-democratic era, more creative approaches are needed for political change. Our rebellion involves divesting ourselves from corporate power as much as possible and building our own institutions for an eventual separation into a new jurisdiction, should such an opportunity arise.
What behaviors will you change today to help the cause?
---
FOOTNOTES
[*1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf
[*2] https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/07/07/these-18-corporations-gave-money-to-black-lives-matter-group/
[*3] https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2020/09/21/memory-hole-black-lives-matter-deletes-believe-page/
[*4] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-ire-and-corruption-of-social.html
[*5] https://www.gaia.com/article/6-corporations-control-most-scientific-publications
[*6] https://alj.artrepreneur.com/mickey-mouse-keeps-changing-copyright-law/
[*7] https://nypost.com/2021/01/11/twitter-stock-plunges-after-banning-president-trump/
[*8] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2021/01/planning-for-post-democratic-divided.html
[*9] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2020/11/a-measure-of-cowardice-and-sociopathy.html
[*10] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2020/12/election-fraud-law-violations-should.html
[*11] This course is taught by Hugh Wilford, available on the Great Courses and via Amazon, who gives a clinical and overall favorable take toward the CIA. The referenced-page is screenshot and taken from his companion course book. https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Agency-A-History-of-the-CIA-Audiobook/1629976563
Moral Considerations in Use and Scope of Government Power
A concession to the legitimacy of government power is an acceptance of a degree of utilitarian ethics, gauging success by some measure of aggregate happiness within a jurisdiction. A first-principle approach, deontological ethics, leads us to a rejection of all government power. Let's illustrate the two ethical orientations with extreme examples. If euthanasia results in an increase in aggregate happiness resulting from the dead boomers, euthanasia is just under utilitarian ethics. Under deontological ethics, while a state-funded policeman arresting a murderer is just, the threat of force behind taxes that fund the justice system to conduct that arrest is unjust, making the arrest fruit from a poisonous tree.
Most citizens take a pragmatic approach and recognize the danger in these two extreme orientations of political philosophy. Thus, we balance the rights of the individual against violating those rights for what we perceive as the aggregate happiness of the community.
This struggle between first principles and aggregate happiness is particularly acute among right-wing thinkers and results in a dichotomy: conservative-leaning rightists versus libertarian-leaning rightists. The conservative and libertarian both agree that trans-gender hormones should not be prescribed by military healthcare. The conservative, because mental illness should not be promoted and encouraged, as it decreases aggregate happiness and the effectiveness of our military. The libertarian, because state-funded healthcare is theft of private property via taxation to fund it, and aggregate happiness is not considered since the ends don't justify the means.
To anarchist libertarians taking deontological ethics to their natural end, like Stefan Molyneux, I understand and respect their commitment. If the game is unjust, one option is to refuse to play it. On the other hand, you may not take an interest in politics, but politics takes an interest in you and, more importantly, your loved ones and posterity. The title of this blog, Stratagems of the Right, concedes a pragmatic commitment to employing a degree of utilitarian ethics to better achieve human flourishing. If we don't organize to promote our values through political power, the other side most certainly will.
Confusing lines are drawn between deontological and utilitarian ethics in right-wing political philosophy. Most of us agree that a policy requiring anyone over the age of 70 to die is unjust (despite cross-generational contempt for boomers), but we accept age-requirements for a driver's license. Likewise, most of us concede that a tax-funded monopoly on justice via some kind of democratic control is just, but we concede limitations on this power, like search-warrant requirements, and that we should grant certain inalienable rights, like gun ownership and political speech, that bar most government intrusion. But between these ethical orientations on the right, the lines gets blurry. The blurriest line regards corporate power.
Corporate Power as a Political Tool
How much power for a corporation is too much before the law should be a remedy? Is it a question of scope or application? Are the details of quality and quantity of its power a left versus right-wing issue? Libertarian deontological ethics lead us to believe government action to reduce corporate power is an immoral means that can't justify moral ends, like fruit from a poisonous tree. Is this so?
Should corporations be allowed to spend their capital on causes for the general good of the public at the expense of pursuing profit for shareholders without civil-liability consequences? Or, should courts allow shareholders to sue the corporation for frivolous charitable or social-justice spending that results in lost profits or outright losses that devalue share prices, especially when done too cavalierly? This question was once posed in my law-school class on corporations. I was one of two people in the entire class to raise my hand for the latter.
Addressing political causes via a non-democratic cabal struck me as dangerous. Charity is an individual endeavor, not a corporate one. Executives should spend their own money from their personal assets and income if they want to help people, not spend the shareholder's money on such measures, especially on items related to racial grievances and other variants of left-wing activism. It's one thing for a corporation to take a political position, but it's another for a large entity with access to billions of dollars in revenue and low-interest loans, especially monopolistic streams of revenue which are the basis for such low-interest loans, to use its resources to effect what its management believes is social justice. Surely, I thought, management should be liable for devaluing the company through diverting other people's money and resources to social justice causes the executives personally support.
There were more than two right-wing thinkers in my class, so I was surprised to see such unanimity in the idea that corporations should be allowed to use their resources for social-justice causes without legal consequence. Perhaps the right-wing thinkers took a deontological perspective. They may not agree with all the social-justice leftist values a corporation funds, but better a corporation does it than the government, and, maybe the court system is an unjust remedy to reign in corporate power, since governmental power to enforce court judgments is involuntary.
I understood it from the left's point of view perfectly well. If a corporation donates millions or billions of dollars in profit to paying reparations, for example, why should greedy shareholders be allowed to stop it? The left looks to what the corporation does as opposed to deontological ethics when deciding what powers a corporation should be permitted to have.
This position starkly contrasts with the "money is speech" and "corporations are people" rhetoric the left rallied behind as a result of the seminal U.S. Supreme Court case, Citizens United [*1]. In that case, a group of conservatives formed a non-profit corporation, Citizens United, and put out a movie on cable television criticizing Hillary Clinton during her run in the 2008 Democratic primary. For doing so, the Federal Elections Commission found the group in violation of criminal, as well as civil, election law. Do the base-level facts strike you as a just application of the law? The Supreme Court understandably refused to apply that law, and its holding relaxed inhibitions on behavior for unions and corporations to engage in political speech. The left was, and still is, staunchly against this holding and believes the First Amendment should not protect corporations from criminal liability for engaging in political speech, because they fear corporations will unduly influence voters by diverting their profits to public political messaging in favor or against political candidates, away from what voters would truly want absent such interference.
It's one thing for a band of citizens to form a corporation to make a movie against or in favor of a political candidate. It's another for a monopoly to use its resources to influence public policy. How could we tell if the left-wing position on Citizens United is held in principles of fairness to the voting public as opposed to a tactical position to increase leftists' effectiveness at obtaining and/or maintaining political power? The assumption the left had was that corporations are right-wing. So, if corporations were allowed to engage in political speech, the left's preferred candidates for public office would be less likely to win. But what if corporations become left-wing?
The classic leftist tactic was to heavily regulate corporate conduct and/or shrink or limit the size of corporations, trust-bust them and break them up when they become too powerful as monopolies. Why? Because corporations were seen as institutions that would, if allowed, fight to decrease the scope and power of government, which is the left's primary tool to effect social justice. You never saw the left advocate for limiting union power to spend dues on left-wing political causes and speech entirely unrelated to the benefits of the workers they represent. Thus, to the left, corporations are like any tool. If they're a detriment to left-wing ideals, they must be reigned in. If they're a benefit to those ideals, they're not a problem but an asset.
So, how can a corporation, especially a monopolistic one, avoid injury by left-wing activism? By catering to the lowest-cost left-wing political causes it can. Corporate officers looking to maintain and expand their power understand that the political left will use the government to limit or reduce their power, possibly even break up the corporation. Thus, keeping leftists happy is a priority, especially for corporate monopolies. To a monopoly, there is no competition. Its only predator is the government. If right-wingers are pacified by deontological ethics to leave corporations alone, the only real danger is leftists wielding government power.
Thus, we have an unholy alliance between the political left and corporate power. Note these eighteen corporations that donated to the radical communist social-justice group, Black Lives Matter [*2], who memory-holed their "What We Believe" page [*3] containing the text:
Note the language "peace in our engagements with one another," inferring engagements outside "one another" are not to be peaceful.We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable. … We embody and practice justice, liberation, and peace in our engagements with one another.
The idea of converging corporations toward the whims of social justice is a more recent tactical innovation by the political left that capitalizes on seemingly right-wing principles of laissez-faire hands-off capitalism. The left wields both the stick and carrot to control corporate behavior, while the right sits on the sidelines, clinging to illusory deontological ethics.
Of course, corporate leftism will naturally shy away from more-costly left-wing matters like unionization, requiring employers to pay for more benefits like healthcare, or anything that limits the financial resources and power of the corporation. Instead, we see them champion token issues of social justice like diversity and inclusion, and, more importantly, as I've written in extensive detail before, punishing and censoring enemies of the political left [*4].
Meanwhile, we see purportedly right-wing proponents idly standing by or attacking anyone who would disagree with the notion corporations should be allowed to do whatever they want, including Disney, the Devil Mouse itself, selectively applying its rules to punish even potentially right-wing thinkers like Gina Carano, without so-much as a justified public boycott.
The above tweet was by a leading attorney for President Trump's legal strategy to overturn the fraudulent 2020 election. To the extent you agree with the direction my argument on corporate power is taking so far, you can tell she's not a particularly acute strategic thinker.
The Public Purpose of a Corporation
A corporation is an invention of the state to protect financial backers from being held legally accountable for the debts and wrongdoings of the enterprises they back. The corporate coffers can be legally raided via court judgements to pay for debts and civil wrongdoing but not the financiers of the corporate coffers themselves. If you owned a lien-free million-dollar house, would you risk your home being sold in foreclosure as a result of investing in an enterprise that went bankrupt or had an employee that accidentally killed people, resulting in a multi-million dollar civil judgement?
We call this protection of financiers the "corporate veil." Its justification is encouraging investment. Enterprises, like railroads in the industrial era, required immense capital investment. If financial backers could be sued, perhaps such investment would've never happened. Investing in a railroad might prove too dangerous, since, if the railroad fails to pay its debts or received a court judgment to pay someone it injures, the investors themselves would naturally be liable absent the corporate veil. Thus, maybe we wouldn't have industries like air and train travel absent allowing states to charter protections for investors we refer to as "incorporation." If people can financially back an enterprise without such fear, and be protected by the corporate veil, large projects that make civilization more comfortable and efficient, like train and air travel, are more likely to be realized, so it is argued.
The idea behind corporations is to give groups of people special protection that they would otherwise not have if they acted as a non-corporate group. It has nothing to do with right-wing, left-wing, or even capitalist values in and of itself.
Is civilization better off with these large corporations, especially as they buy more and more smaller corporations, consolidating power into giant conglomerates? By one estimate, 90% of media and scientific journals are owned by six corporations: GE, Disney, Time Warner, Comcast, Viacom, and Newscorp [*5]. Consider, also, the tech monopolies, Facebook, Google (who hosts this blog, owned by Alphabet), and Twitter, with a collusive global monopoly on written public debate between every-day people. What public purpose or great invention have these media companies given the public to earn a corporate veil solidifying their power that thousands of independently-owned unincorporated entrepreneurs couldn't give us?
The strongest example of a public benefit mass liability-free investment has given the public I can think of might be pharmaceuticals. But, even with that, we are all aware of the love-hate relationship we have with what both the right and left colloqueally refer to as "Big Pharma," creating a pill-based healing model.
A similar public-benefit argument is made to justify laws pertaining to intellectual property. Intellectual property laws are inherently anti-free market, as they use the state to actively prevent commerce with competitors by granting temporary monopolies. The idea, however, is that, without these protections, copy-cats would unjustly profit from the original ideas of others, and original-thinkers wouldn't be incentivized to create things that make our lives better, be it the tales of Mickey Mouse or a medicine that heals the sick. This intellectual-property justification even applies to branding, as the shape of packaging, logos, or even colors for packets of sugar are trademarked to ensure the public doesn't accidentally pick up the wrong brand.
As many writers have pointed out [*6], the 1928 invention of Mickey Mouse contrasted with the continuous laws to extend its monopoly on monetization every time the copyright comes close to tolling belies a transparently-obvious comical farce of public policy, supposedly for the benefit of over 320 million Americans and others living within the jurisdiction, tracing with the needs of a single corporation.
 |
| Taken from https://alj.artrepreneur.com/mickey-mouse-keeps-changing-copyright-law/. |
Laws pertaining to corporate veils and intellectual property are akin to laws regulating workplace safety, furnishing healthcare to employees, or any other item of general public policy. Putting aside libertarian deontological arguments and focusing on utilitarian ones, as is the inherent nature of public policy, we weigh the costs and benefits when deciding whether we want them or not. Policies like corporations and intellectual property can be rooted in either left or right-wing values. A monopolist media conglomerate that cannibalizes pop culture properties to make social-justice propaganda is antithetical to right-wing values. A patent on transgender hormones for children is also antithetical to such values. To claim corporations or patents, in and of themselves, are a right-wing idea is transparently absurd, a sophistic spell cast upon right-wing communities to steer them away from challenging their corporate overlords.
And since a corporation is a state benefit to exempt certain people from liability, its use has no basis in deontological ethics. The pure libertarian position would be to do away with and unincorporate all enterprises and allow them be seen in the eyes of the public as they truly are: a band of individuals organizing to create something, all of whom should be accountable for the mistakes and debts of the invested-in enterprise.
Pragmatically speaking, we will never see this result. The left now loves large corporations, since they increasingly advance social-justice causes and ostracize right-wing elements.
Since corporations are a tool of the state and the left views them in the context of whether or not they help or hinder left-wing values, the right should view this tool the same way. Perhaps the corporation has outlived its usefulness, and it's a relic of the industrial age for encouraging private investment in mass infrastructure for enterprises like railroads. What mass projects can be funded in the modern era to make people's lives better using the corporate veil to encourage investment? Would air travel suddenly stop if the corporate veils were lifted? Would all organizations move overseas without it? My aim here isn't necessarily to advocate a sudden removal of all U.S. corporate veils but to think of the corporation as a public policy tool that must justify its special privilege.
The public cost of giving enterprises such special power now results in them using their power to benefit low-cost left-wing causes, as they curry favor with the side that traditionally advocates reigning them in.
A monopolistic corporation will naturally use some of its resources to placate the political class most likely to advance trust-busting or regulations that reduce corporate power. Meanwhile, the right wing can be placated with a false application of deontological ethics to discourage support of trust-busting, regulation, and other tools of political power that reduce the power of the corporation.
Corporate Power in the Post-Profit Era
At what point does profit become irrelevant to a corporation?
YouTube, owned by Google, which is owned by Alphabet, dominates the internet video media market. When was the last time YouTube turned a profit?
Jeff Bezos' owns Amazon and the Washington Post, a news publication thoroughly dedicated to spreading pandemic fear with speculative stories about what the virus du jour could do based on people testing positive for the virus while having other nasty symptoms that may (or may not) be related, all the while Amazon has made billions off fear of in-person shopping without the internet as an aid. When was the last time the Washington Post made a profit?
Twitter effectively controls most communication between every-day people and the global public. It banned President Trump before he even relinquished power, effectively driving the Twitter share-price down billions of dollars [*7]. When was the last time Twitter turned a profit? Shouldn't shareholders be allowed to sue Twitter for such an overt political act of not just censorship, but outright contempt for right-wing political elements, that caused a dramatic drop in share price?
Why can large corporations go so long without turning real profits? Because they have access to low-interest loans to satisfy cash flow. They don't need profit to operate. And, since share value is determined by long-term prospects for profit, as long as the share price grants the illusion of a good buy, investors are plentiful.
The same reason investors readily buy bonds in the U.S. government despite it having 28 trillion dollars in debt while raking in only about 3.5 trillion dollars in annual tax-revenue is the same reason large corporations like Disney can continue to get low-interest loans despite suffering colossal losses during the 2020-? "pandemic." The U.S. government doesn't need profit to pay back its investors. Eventually, the government can raises taxes if need be to ensure debts are paid. Likewise, monopolist corporations can simply raise prices or keep spending until they hit a sufficiently popular and profitable good or service at some point in the future to ensure its debts are paid.
Financial reporting for large corporations is beyond my scope here, but, suffice to say, the larger an organization is and the more complex its finances, the more speculation for future earnings can be made in the eyes of its financiers and creditors. Value, and thus access to capital, are not based in objective reality but creative accounting to justify a subjective view of what others hope it to be.
At some point, a corporation becomes a post-profit entity. This isn't to say it can abandon an illusion of future profits for placating shareholders or that post-profit means no actual profits. It simply means that short-term profit isn't necessary, and the can for future profit can be continuously kicked down the road if needed. And, with conglomerates, smaller corporations can be run at mass losses (like YouTube and the Washington Post) if they serve a strategic purpose of the parent corporation or individual owners.
A post-profit corporation can, of course, make as much profit as it likes, just like a wealthy man is free to take up as many projects as he wants to make additional money. But the post-profit entity and the wealthy man are both free to spend their resources on personal ventures with little regard to cash flow.
As these personal ventures of corporations increasingly wind up being social justice causes of the political left, we on the right must ask ourselves: why are we giving investors an antiquated form of legal immunity that allows our enemies to grow into monopolies that actively hate us and implement policies to harm our interests?
Rebellion in the Post-Democratic Era
The comically-obvious fraud of the 2020/1 U.S. elections was so blatant even Mr. Magoo could discover it. Nobody honestly believes Joe Biden: (1) won 10.5 million votes more (13% more, with 80 million "votes") than the previous record-holder, Barrack Obama in 2008 (about 69.5 million), while (2) winning 45% less counties (Obama 875, Biden 477), with (3) most excess votes coming from four cities that shut down counting operations at night, and (4) suddenly found statistically-absurd Biden-only ballot dumps
under (5) the circumstances of a thousand affidavits witnessing boxes of early-morning Biden-only ballots being run through machines multiple times
while (6) observers were purposefully being distracted and conveniently kicked out (like in Michigan),
including after (7) a pipe "burst" in Atlanta (later changed to a "leak") where ballots in a case under a cloth-covered table were dragged out and counted after the observers were told to leave, and
(8) forensic tests of the Dominion Voting machines used in these same states, in Michigan's Antrim county, sent data overseas with 2/3rds of the votes decided in private-party adjudication by an unknown party with a deleted audit trail for the voting decisions, as subpoenas to test machines in other states like Georgia and Arizona were usurped or ignored. [*8] (further analysis using the images seen above also found here [*9] and here [*10]).
My suspicion is that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) handled the fraud in question, as it has interfered with at least 81 elections around the world that we know of since its 1947 inception through 2000 (afterwards, it apparently becomes murkier to uncover) [*7].
Even if those running the show behind the CIA didn't use their immense experience to manipulate the American election, as that of course would be illegal, how many more elections around the world have been stolen by their wickedness guised as "national security?" 50 U.S. Code § 3036.
Besides, if a cabal can't successfully manufacture votes to steal an election, the government can always ignore the vote. In perhaps the world's second foremost democracy, the United Kingdom, the 2016 popular referendum for Brexit was not honored. Since both direct and representative democracy are broken in the world's two leading democracies, one wonders where in the world we can trust democracy actually works?
This doesn't mean criminal handlers will interfere with every election going forward. But major elections that influence geo-political offices like the U.S. President and those that tip the balance of power in Congress certainly will be rigged going forward. Since they got away with it under a vigorously-vocal president that contested the fraud, while about half of U.S. voters believe the election was stolen with fraud,
imagine how easy fraud will be to get away with when less-charismatic candidates become the victim, especially under the increasingly-blunt mass-censorship environment of corporate monopolies controlling political speech.
Speaking of political speech, another spell cast upon the right regards these bow-tie faux-intellectual conservatives uttering the phrase "private corporations can do whatever they want; the First Amendment only applies to censorship by the government." This infers that the government can contract away what would otherwise be rights violations, or perhaps merely give a wink and a nod to our corporate overlords, who can violate constitutional rights by proxy.
Corporations are an invention by the state that grow into these mass conglomerates approaching a trillion dollars in value due to special legal protections. Clearly, the public has some right to restrict their activity once they monopolize media and censor dissident political voices. It's one thing for a corporation to have a political position; it's another for it to use monopoly powers to ensure only political positions it agrees with are heard around the world. Surely, corporations don't get special state protection and also become free to do whatever they want with trillions of dollars in aggregate resources by an investor class who legally bares no responsibility for faults or debts of the corporations.
Regardless, change through conventional political speech by persuading voters to put the right people in command is no longer a serious option. This isn't to say the right should stop voting, as perhaps one day we'll catch our enemies in election fraud more obvious as to embarrass them sufficiently, further reduce their credibility, and, hence, reduce their ability to manipulate the public into voluntarily complying with irrational demands.
Most corporations are effectively enemies of the right, just as much as the leftist bureaucrats arbitrarily pulling the post-democratic levers of power. But, more importantly, corporations are an enemy we have more power over than the leftist bureaucrats cemented in their post-democratic reign.
If half of America, or even a quarter of America, recognized the danger these corporations pose and simply reduce spending with them and, more importantly, started investing and spending on their competitors, perhaps we can eventually drive a wedge between this unholy alliance of corporate power and the leftist ruling elite.
We need to start building our own communities of like-minded people and creating alternatives to the emerging monopolies. With pandemic restrictions, business closures, and Amazon's effective monopoly on many consumer goods, most of us are practically forced to make an occasional purchase from the enemy. But we can reduce how many times we make a purchase and, wherever possible, spend our money on our allies. We need to actively look for alternatives and start supporting them.
For example, I shop at my local meat shop whenever I can and avoid my BLM-supporting grocery chain, despite its convenient location. I have multiple gym memberships for when I travel, and support a boxing gym local to an office I travel to. I support a wide variety of alternative platforms, like Infogalactic in lieu of Wikipedia, Social Galactic and Gab in lieu of Twitter. I'm not tech savvy, but wouldn't it be wonderful for someone to build a platform those with right-wing values can congregate to and support each other in establishing competing small businesses?
In the post-democratic era, more creative approaches are needed for political change. Our rebellion involves divesting ourselves from corporate power as much as possible and building our own institutions for an eventual separation into a new jurisdiction, should such an opportunity arise.
What behaviors will you change today to help the cause?
---
FOOTNOTES
[*1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf
[*2] https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/07/07/these-18-corporations-gave-money-to-black-lives-matter-group/
[*3] https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2020/09/21/memory-hole-black-lives-matter-deletes-believe-page/
[*4] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-ire-and-corruption-of-social.html
[*5] https://www.gaia.com/article/6-corporations-control-most-scientific-publications
[*6] https://alj.artrepreneur.com/mickey-mouse-keeps-changing-copyright-law/
[*7] https://nypost.com/2021/01/11/twitter-stock-plunges-after-banning-president-trump/
[*8] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2021/01/planning-for-post-democratic-divided.html
[*9] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2020/11/a-measure-of-cowardice-and-sociopathy.html
[*10] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2020/12/election-fraud-law-violations-should.html
[*11] This course is taught by Hugh Wilford, available on the Great Courses and via Amazon, who gives a clinical and overall favorable take toward the CIA. The referenced-page is screenshot and taken from his companion course book. https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Agency-A-History-of-the-CIA-Audiobook/1629976563
Comments
Post a Comment