The Oligarchy Riseth: Greed is King

It didn’t take long. It’s now just over six weeks after the election, and the once and future king is fully in charge.

The (barely) bipartisan bill to keep the government running for only three months more is dead. And it’s hard to tell who killed it: Elon Musk, who has never been elected to anything, or our President-Elect. A roster of fellow oligarchs, known today as billionaires, cheered the bill’s demise mightily from the sidelines.

If you think all this came out of the blue, you haven’t been paying attention. Over nine years ago, before Trump ever rode down his escalator, I wrote an essay describing how corporations, collectively, are coming to rule the world, and governments are assuming a secondary and even subordinate role.

The reasons are simple but profound. First, business corporations have all the money. The example I used at the time was Apple Computer having more cash reserves than France. And while the United States was still digging itself out of the Crash of 2008, US corporations collectively had a $ 2 trillion cash hoard, much of it stashed abroad (awaiting tax relief at home).

Second, corporations do virtually everything that matters in modern life. They make our food, clothing, houses, furniture, streets, cars, railways, trains, planes, boats, cruise ships, computers, mobile devices, and all the raw materials for them. With Musk’s Space-X and Boeing slowly supplanting NASA, they even make our space ships.

What does government do? It makes and tries to enforce rules, puts rule-breakers in jail (the less so the more powerful they are), prints money (except for crypto), and “provides for the national Defense.” (The latter involves protecting us or starting wars, depending on how you look at it.) After a glance at these lists, which do you think is more important to your own personal life: corporations or government?

The third and final reasons are a bit more subtle. Diversity matters: corporations are not yet individually so big or powerful that when one falls so does the nation. They are constantly being born, growing, dying or combining, just like evolving biological creatures. Finally, and partly consequently, corporate CEOs are, by and large, better educated, smarter, more pragmatic (and, if not so, far easier to remove) than the average pol, let alone a President.

So in that essay, I surmised that our species is undergoing a slow but relentless and radical transformation from rule by governments (including democracies) to rule by corporations. It’s much like the transformation from rule by Church rule to rule by monarchy and later democracy that gripped the West during the Second Millennium. Our species is now trying to figure out where corporate “governance” ends and where secular government begins, with taxes the primary battleground.

Rights, you say? Personal rights? Government is supposed to enforce and protect them. But isn’t government doing a terrible job at that, as least vis-a-vis corporations?

Did you ever actually read one of those “click here” agreements (or their paper counterparts) that you have to accept these days to buy goods or services, or to subscribe to any online service? In a few short paragraphs, these “contracts of adhesion” take away your right to a trial by jury, your right to a civil trial at all, and your right to a class action (which makes suing for small swindles possible).

If anything goes wrong, you have to accept secret arbitration, by individuals (not necessarily trained judges) chosen in whole or in part by the corporation, to resolve your dispute. Did it ever occur to you that those few paragraphs take away all the legal rights that English and American law (including our Constitution) have developed to protect individuals in the 809 years since the first Magna Carta?

Yet in my nine-plus-years-old essay, I was strangely positive. I pointed to the diversity, achievements and innovation of our American business corporations, plus the generally good quality of their leadership. I was impressed.

But that was then. This is now. In the intervening years another megatrend caught up with us and changed the picture. It had been slowly brewing for decades, but I had failed to foresee its speed or its consequences.

We Americans no longer make much of anything. China is our factory floor, with a little help from Mexico and Vietnam. Services now comprise about 70% of our economy. Increasingly, they consist of intermediary profit grabbing, advertising, promotion, and the development of software, which does some or all of the foregoing. In other words, the vast majority of our current national enterprise— and increasingly what makes our oligarchs rich and powerful—consists of direct profit-seeking fluff, often by means of software, which produces nothing tangible or of great benefit except to the profit seeker.

Consider Internet searching, for example, for a piece of information on Google or Bing, or for a product on Amazon. In the not-so-old days, if you knew Boolean search logic, you could find exactly the information or product you wanted with a single search. Likely as not, what you sought would appear as the very first search “hit.”

Not so today. Try the same trick today and you will get instead a dozen or more “sponsored” or promotional hits. Most of them will have little to do with your detailed request besides the appearance of one or more isolated search terms or the same general product category.

Thus, in less than a decade, the Internet has morphed from a search tool of great precision to an annoying exercise of mindless distraction, promotion, marketing and advertising. Today, even a search for a business corporation by its own precise name will produce several self-promoting leeches before the corporation itself.

This may sound like a small thing. But the Internet is where a huge and growing part of commerce takes place. If you have a little longevity with it and you think a bit, you can see that its precision, usefulness and efficiency are taking a bigger and bigger daily hit from mindless and intrusive advertising, distraction, promotion and marketing. And I haven’t even mentioned the ubiquitous moving and noise-making video distractions that use various ploys to grab your attention away from what you think you’re doing, and use additional ever-changing ploys to make it hard to get the distractions to stop or go away.

So are the quality and value of the output of corporate business decreasing even as its oligarchs grow rich beyond the dreams of Genghis Khan? You decide.

But I’ll leave you with one question. Can you name a single corporate product, introduced for the first time in our new century and new millennium, with the value and positive impact on human life of, say, Edison’s electric light or phonograph, the telephone, radio, television, X-rays, CT or MRI scans, the digital computer, the personal computer, or the cell phone?

The only one I can think of is the much-maligned mRNA vaccines. They were developed over more than a decade and first used for Covid-19. Their technology allows vaccines to be “programmed” for new viruses, without including any of the pathogenic parts of the viruses, thereby precluding direct infection (although perhaps permitting side effects like allergies and unanticipated intracellular reactions). Of all the stuff developed for mass production in our new millennium, those vaccines are the only tangible things that I can recall that made a big and unambiguously positive impact on human life.

This is what scares me most of all. Except perhaps for Elon Musk, who has absolutely no sense of his limits, nearly all the oligarchs who are now teeming and swarming to Trump’s side made their billions in software with ambiguous or dubious human value. They made most or all of their money on things that distract, delude, deceive, divide and even addict people, especially impressionable youth. And so far, our antitrust laws and our government have done little or nothing to curtail the patently negative effects of what has made them wealthy, seemingly on the theory that what makes money must ipso facto be good.

So we have a modern conundrum. The apotheosis of profit that is our United States once built the strongest, happiest, healthiest, and soundest society and democracy in human history. Now it is self-evidently going off the rails, under “leadership” bent on exploiting all the distractions, divisions, delusions and discontents that easy and thoughtless profit-seeking brings.

What could possibly go wrong? We are about to find our how hidden “leadership” by oligarchs who made their money in this way will remake human society in the Third Millennium.

I’m no longer optimistic. Even Henry Ford made cars that people actually drove. He never meddled much in government, although he did publish some pretty awful ideas.



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