"What makes this moment important isn’t that it swung any votes, but that normal Democrats must finally reckon with the political danger of concentrations of wealth and power.
"Amazon,” wrote pundit Matt Yglesias [corporate rule apologist], “as far as I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.” Bezos liked that line so much he quoted it in an investor letter.
From Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, to Hollywood’s refusal to distribute a pro-union documentary, to Google’s censorship of negative information about Republicans, Democrats are going through the same process Republicans did over the 2010s when they realized that the cultural power centers of America are hostile to their political vision. Democrats are realizing that market power is political power."
Matt Stoller @ (Too Damn ) BIG!
I'm just a poor retired school teacher, on the sidelines, fringy margins, out of it, but seems like the Dems have known this or should have known this since the 1980s, at least, when the political establishment, of both parties, more or less capitulated to corporate rule.
What's changed now is the Dems have assumed their own inclusive, civil rights expanding, globalizing values aligned it with corporate growth and expansion goals in a way the GOP's exclusionary culture war bigotry never could. Corporations, Dems could reason, want bigger markets, want to reach more consumers, not smaller markets or fewer consumers, excluding those consumers the GOP doesn't like.
But what the Dems did not anticipate, apparently, is that when it came to facing serious democratic pressures for more taxes and regulations on the rich and on the wealthy, an increasingly likely outcome of democratic majorities in government since 2020, corporations and their Billionaire donor class leadership would align with Grump/MAGA's violent bigotry and Handmaid's Tale morality over whatever "woke" Green New Deal and worker prosperity plans the Dems come up with.
What's most surprising or even galling to me is the Lucy and the football routine familiarity of all this and how something like it has been incrementalizing towards the current crisis for decades. Every time environmental reforms or worker protections or health care affordability reforms have been squelched because of their so-called "anti-growth" implications over the past thirty or forty years has been a political surrender to market power and the austerity economics TSEBC is calling for now again, should Trump be elected and he take an official role in the government.
We know the economic model Grump stands for, TSEBC continues to promote, and Yglesias defends, generates Billionaires, what we haven't fully come to grips with yet is the corrosive and obstructive effects unfettered market power has on public infrastructure, sustainable technological innovations, and the environmental crisis pushing the earth's life support systems to the brink.
Or, perhaps most galling of all, we haven't even come to grips with the fact this "free market" fundamentalist model isn't even the most pro economic growth; for that, see the New Deal order, 1930-1980, much higher taxes on rich corporations, better growth rates, and more widely shared prosperity. Corporate rule doesn't promote widespread economic prosperity but instead monopolizing, wealth hoarding, Billionaires.
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