The Safety Net and Corporate Tyrants

[kanethenotorious]

The Safety Net and Corporate Tyrants

The abuses of Corporate power could be offset with a large safety net.

gb819.substack.com

"The Safety Net and Corporate Tyrants
The abuses of Corporate power could be offset with a large safety net.



Corporations have the power to invalidate Constitutional rights. They invalidate the Declaration of Independence's unalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” They take away freedom of speech. You have the right to speak freely, until you get fired (and then another corporation will not hire you). It is called “background checking.” They raise the cost of living to make a job necessary to live off of, then dangle that job as a threat where you can be fired “for any reason” except for discrimination (and “political views” is not a protected category). That is called “at will employment.”
Corporate power inherently forms oligopolies and monopolies. The only way to grow (if one factors in scarce resources) often is to take someone else down. This leads to a system with few profiteers who can all collaborate together. Since there are a relatively controlled number of large corporations, they can all get their act together and collude against both workers and free speech. They do this by controlling the political process and it is a bipartisan control system in the United States. I am sure corporations still control political parties outside of the United States, but the two party system is especially easy to control.
What if jobs and income were guaranteed through the state? Suddenly corporations could not lord over us with obsessive power because there would be alternative streams of income for most people. This would do more for free speech and freedom than anything else. Some forward thinking politicians like Andrew Yang (Universal Basic Income) and Bernie Sanders (Job Guarantee) have proposed ideas that would seriously undermine corporate dictatorship. Note that UBI and the Job Guarantee could coexist, with the Government job paying more than UBI does alone.
Benefits of the Government Job Guarantee and UBI:

1. Increased free speech and ability to organize labor because getting fired no longer ruins your life.
2. Increased ability to hold off-the-job political views because again, getting fired is something you can absorb.
3. Upwards pressure on wages in corporate jobs because the jobs would now have to compete against the safety net.
4. Elimination of extreme poverty.
5. Reduced crime (tied to number four).
6. Ability of people to commit to long term housing, because the need to jump around to stay relevant in a given career would no longer be a reality.
7. Government run businesses (that employ through the guaranteed job) would counter inflation through competition.
8. The Government run businesses could be Green.
9. Pumping more money into the bottom of society would allow more people to buy products.
10. People could get initial experience through a Government job, when otherwise they do not have a job because they do not have experience - yet cannot get the experience without the job.
11. Generally speaking, some people do not get a first chance yet alone a second chance. The safety net would fix that.

The interesting thing about this is that people on the extremes of politics are clearly marginalized by corporate power and there may be a bit of a far left / far right synthesis that supports these big safety net reforms against mainstream corporate America (and other countries too, for non-American readers). That is, if far right people do not stupidly go the Reagan Route and side with the very corporations that disenfranchise and exclude them.
How could the social safety net be funded? It could be funded through taxation, but it could also be funded through currency creation. The concern with directly pumping money into society is inflation. The answer to that is that businesses still have to compete against other businesses, so the prices cannot indefinitely inflate. The Government run businesses that employee beneficiaries of the Job Guarantee operate would also add to competition (point seven). We could inject money directly into the bottom rung of society instead of funding everything through banks and The Federal Reserve. It is the exact opposite of Trickle Down Economics.
These ideas are very popular with Millennials and Generation Z and to an extent Generation X. This is the case even though Sanders himself is of the Silent Generation. It is largely Baby Boomers that pushed Trickle Down Economics and guess what - they are still here. Even today, Boomers are the voting block that deny people like Sanders and Yang and instead get behind Biden and Trump. Boomers need the votes of Generation X, Z and Millennials in the main election though - especially Democrats. So while one party is almost completely dominated by Boomers, the other relies on younger generations to push an agenda that is friendly to Boomers.
People go on and on about the totalitarianism of Big Government. However, at least in America and The West, the bigger problem right now is Big Corporations and their abuses of power. We have previous generations to thank for screwing this up, because of the Red Scare and Cold War. The Democrats are guilty of not representing the Working Class and taking center left positions of identity politics instead, while the Republicans are guilty of more blatantly siding with Corporate America. The end result is that nobody really takes on big business because the “left” in America is really Center Left and the right misrepresents this Center Left as an existential threat, when in fact the Center Left is only reforming things to make the agenda of Corporations more palatable to the masses. The only solution is an active social safety net to take on the Corporate Tyrants."

 

[Lord Osmund de Ixabert]

Corporations remain bound to law and subject to peremptory sanctions, a reality obstinately milt to the spleen of your thesis. Sans such subjection, the corporate entity would become an helpless vessel of peroral decree. The dispend of colluding to manipulate political outcomes--verecund though such action may be--nonetheless encounters the raucity of public discourse & the scrutinous eyes of a suspicious clerisy.

To opine that Universal Basic Income or state-guaranteed employment serves as a panacaea that could expunge the malebolge of corporate tyranny is to is to err per aliud, and lapse into temerarious philosophastry.

Such suggestion, which amounts to the subtitution of one form of potential vastation for another, betrays an intrinsic caducity and might merely obvolve resources from domains of more pressing concern. Even within such schema, the same corporate monopolies would perdure, howbeit as traducted forms.

Any action so severe would be met with icor, the rutilant rage of righteous public sentiment, and quickly disjected into the annals of corporate mumpsimus. Thus, the suggested solutions would create unperceived perils, dictating a volte-face from extasiant reforms to something cautiouslier astute.

Your assertions, pregnant with the celsitude of idealism, are in no wise void of value, yet they perpend on premises discerpent from my own.

To disemburthen ourselves of your brumous asseverations, steept in philosophastry though they be, we must presume to vivamente ponder the intricacies of corporate power dynamics, acknowing the inherent bibacity for autonomy that dwells within the human breast.​

 

[kanethenotorious]

That post set a record. I never had to look up so many words in a post to read it. Ixabert wrote that post on a whole different level of English.

However, after I patiently went through it, I basically see that it's not strongly disagreeing with what I said, but saying we must understand corporations better but that my thesis makes sense but differs from your way of thinking.

That was quite a read.