Corporate totalitarianism means total control by corporate interests. If they want a war, they get a war. If they want GMOs, they get GMOs. If they want fracking, they get fracking. If they want big banks to control our monetary policy, big banks control our monetary policy. If they want a tax break, they get a tax break. If they want the TPP, they get the TPP. If they want to deregulate to the point of complete irresponsibility to our children and to the earth, they deregulate as much as they care to. And if they see a way to profit from the vulnerability of the old, the disadvantaged, the poor, the young, or the sick, then they are given the right to do so.
Through their control of politicians, political parties and corporate media, they do everything necessary to make sure that political candidates who resist them get nowhere near the levers of power. It is not by accident that they have created Trump, protected Clinton, and sidelined Sanders.
To those who say there is no political revolution, I say that if it’s true then that’s very sad — because there should be. What’s happening in the United States today is a corporate coup of the U.S. government, and anyone who isn’t grieving that must not be looking.
At what point do you think this expression of collective ego, this newest formation of an ancient aristocratic idea, is going to wake up and say, “Okay, you can have your country back”? They will never say this. In the words of Frederick Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
And if we do not wake up soon, the window will close on our capacity to say to them, “Actually, we thought about it, and we prefer that our government be of the people, by the people and for the people, after all.”
No person or party leadership whose politics seek to compromise with the new totalitarianism will do anything more than soften the edges of this controlling force, improve its PR, and take some of the extreme sting out of the pain it causes. Still, in that case, the pain will only get worse. And ultimately one of the greatest experiments in human possibility will have slipped through our fingers — for the simple reason than that we allowed it to. Because they put us to sleep. Because they numbed our outrage. Because they sedated our conscience.
And thus they will have won. Or not. This is the generation that gets to decide.
