The corporate logic

In American politics today, corporations reign supreme. Powerful corporations control American politics through Big Money and Big Data. Donald Trump and the Republican-led Congress represent the ultimate corporate play, with the powers of the executive and legislative branches turned over to the most destructive corporate special interests.

We are reminded daily of unchecked corporate power.    The New Yorker       this week put a corporate and a family face to the nation’s opioid epidemic. The epidemic is heavily the result of Purdue Pharma, the producer of OxyContin. The company is privately owned by the Sackler family, widely known and admired for its philanthropic largesse but virtually unknown heretofore for its reckless marketing of addictive opioids, using high-powered Madison Avenue persuasion and making aggressive commissions to doctors who have prescribed the addictive drugs.

The other major economic news this week was the continuing profit surge of Big Data, with the       combined market cap    of Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft topping $3.2 trillion. We are gradually coming to understand how these Big Data companies earn mega-fortunes and mega-power through the processing and sale of the personal data they collect on all of us without our knowledge or real consent. Our private data, suitably processed through machine learning algorithms, are used to micro-target consumers and voters to manipulate both markets and elections. Consumers in this case, as has often been pointed out, are not the customers of Big Data, but the product.

The most powerful people in the United States are the billionaire corporate owners of these companies, who finance political campaigns, deploy lobbyists, and threaten members of Congress who fall out of line. They warn members of Congress that a “wrong” (anti-corporate) vote will lead to negative ads and a primary challenger, thereby making automatons of most members of Congress, especially the Republican Party. Those who buck the tide, such as Arizona’s Senator Jeff Flake, survive politically only long enough to resign.

The power of Big Money combined with Big Data is still only dimly understood. Trump’s leading billionaire backer, right-wing hedge fund owner Robert Mercer, together with Steve Bannon, backed the Big Data operation Cambridge Analytica, which claims to have private data on more than 230 million Americans. How did the company amass this vast data trove of personal information? Did it buy it? Did it benefit from hackers? Did it use the data to help Vladimir Putin’s agents to target their fake news via Facebook, Google, and Twitter? Will we ever know?

Some of the most powerful companies are privately owned, and therefore especially secretive. That is true of Purdue Pharma and   Cambridge Analytica, and of Koch Industries, the notorious oil and gas firm owned by the right-wing brothers David and Charles Koch, who have used their $100 billion combined net worth to buy up university departments, fund libertarian think tanks, and finance the PACs of politicians like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senator majority leader Mitch McConnell.

The ability of companies to hide their tracks was grotesquely abetted by the notorious Supreme Court decision in       Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which permits unlimited secret corporate and individual giving to political action committees. We have no comprehensive accounts of the political machinations of billionaires like Mercer, the Koch brothers, and Sheldon Adelson. Yet we do know that total campaign spending now adds up to several billion dollars each political cycle, and we also see the effects clearly in our politics. On every key issue, corporate interests now dominate the public interests.

Why does America suffer from the highest-priced health care in the world? The health care lobby.

Why does America suffer from a fast-food obesity epidemic, literally dying at the hands of a food industry that is killing Americans with obesigenic concoctions that pass for food? The fast-food lobby.

In every case, public opinion screams out for the public interest, yet in every case Congress delivers the corporate interest. Americans want universal health care coverage; an end to US involvement in overseas wars; a shift to renewable energy; online privacy, and higher taxes on companies and the wealthy. Yet in every case, the opinions of the American people are discarded by Congress and the White House like so much nuisance.

The situation is rapidly deteriorating, not improving. Trump has turned the keys to the kingdom over to the lobbyists. What to do?We will have to mobilize to save American democracy itself, before corporate taxes are gutted, online privacy is irreversibly routed, and the arms industry leads us into new wars. There is no single way to fight such vast corporate power.

This article has been excerpted from: ‘Big Data and Big Money Have Subverted Our
Democracy’.

Courtesy: Commondreams.org