November 25, 2020 at 12:57 p.m.
The unholiest of all alliances
The unholiest of all alliances
Together this broad globalism poses a threat to the nation's standard of living, to its cultural values and democratic standards, to its sovereignty, and, most of all, to personal freedoms and constitutional guarantees.
In one sense, it does seem like an unholy alliance, and an unlikely one at that. After all, as we report in today's edition, the left loves to skewer millionaires and billionaires and evil multinational corporations in their political campaigns.
It makes for good political theatre, and semi-effective political proselytizing, but the idea that the left thinks multinational corporations are really evil is a fiction. In fact, they are partners.
When you think about it, such a partnership makes ideological sense. The left in all its various manifestations preaches a globalist approach, from its environmental policies (think Paris Accords) to its anti-war agenda to its immigration platform.
We see it even in their slogans: Think Globally, Act Locally. That's nothing but a modern update of Workers of the World Unite!
Not surprisingly, multinational corporations share many of these tenets. By their very definition, they possess no national allegiance. They are for sure for open borders, too, so that low-wage immigrants can flow easily from one work site to another, where needed and without fear of deportation.
After all, while turning illegal immigrants away at the border would surely be an obscene act by white privileged policy makers, there obviously would be no better way to dispense social justice than to let corporate America put them to work picking peas in scorching hot fields for less than the minimum wage, or to work in sweltering sweat shops and dwell in inner city drug-infested hovels.
It's enough to make a liberal cry tears of social-justice joy.
Multinational corporations love the Paris Accords, too, which allows them to shutter high-wage, high-cost factories in the developed world, hence gutting the standard of living in those places, and move to developing world countries where they can continue to pollute and pay workers paltry wages.
(Cue the scorching hot fields, sweltering sweat shop scene again.)
Not to mention, all that income redistribution also redistributes political power to the developing world and their tin-pot dictators.
It's a win-win situation. The planet is saved, the developing world controls political power in their regions and world power through the United Nations, and, oh yeah, corporate profits are better than ever.
Meanwhile, the affluent and the elite political left of the West gets to impose its own cultural agenda on people everywhere. In this world, everyone will drive small electric cars and drink small sodas and take small showers and live in tiny houses. Everyone will think small scripted thoughts because it's not real thought that counts. Those will have been banned.
Bigness will be preserved for government, corporations, and - maybe - unions.
The multinational corporations don't mind all this. For one thing, the elite left runs many of those corporations these days, and, in any case, the only value the corporatists care about is the value of the bottom line.
So everybody is happy in globalist land.
Mind you, none of this is capitalist by any stretch of the imagination. Capitalism is free markets, the free flow of capital, the free flow of ideas and thought. It is entrepreneurship. It is freedom, simply put.
Multinational corporations hate all that. They do what they can to destroy free thought and free trade. They seek to monopolize markets, not preserve and grow free ones. And multinational corporations seek to promote the identity politics of the left, precisely because the fragmentation of society into so many identity groups represents just so many more opportunities for corporate branding.
Just watch Nike commercials.
In sum, multinational corporations transform politics into commodities, while their ideological partners churn out identity-template consumers, ready to buy the products and equally ready to buy into the propaganda.
All of which brings us to Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
As we report today, millionaires and billionaires, the high tech honchos of Silicon Valley, the owners of super corporations such as Amazon, even Wall Street banker barons and financiers bolted in vast numbers to the Democratic Party this year.
This massive move to the left side of the political divide allowed Biden to overwhelm President Trump financially in the campaign, not that that alone made the difference. But it's perhaps surprising, given, once again, the Democratic Party's public hostility to those very corporations and people.
Upon further reflection, though, their interests are all aligned, just like those of multinational corporations and the globalist political left.
Take those higher corporate taxes Joe Biden is promising, for instance. He promises to close corporate tax loopholes, raise taxes on the rich and the wealthy corporations, and not to raise taxes on anybody making less than $400,000.
It sounds pretty good until you think about it. For one thing, corporations know very well they will be able to pass along the bulk of any tax increases to their consumers, who will bear the brunt of actual tax hikes.
But it's more than that. The corporations also know they can pull back from investing in jobs and infrastructure and that, along with passing tax increases along in the form of higher prices, will pretty much mitigate any increase at all.
But the question remains, why support Biden if all it means is to have to go to all that trouble to avoid higher taxes?
Well, it means a lot more, for the corporatists know they can make real big money with a Biden presidency.
For one thing, Biden will increase deficit spending and that's a treasure trove for big corporations, which will not only offset higher taxes but make them even more money.
While deficit spending won't lead to economic recovery at the retail level - too much inflation and not enough Main Street stimulus to do much for the huddling masses - for the very poor and for the wealthiest of corporations it will be a bonanza.
The problem for the very poor is that their compensation will be emotionally confining and economically debilitating welfare, not liberating work, and for the corporations, well, hey, corporate welfare is no problem at all.
Government agencies will rake in dollars to spend on climate change, the environment, health care, education, and cultural and regulatory compliance, and corporatism will be there, hands out, waiting for more than their fair share of the contracts. There will be public-sector jobs created, to be sure, but not nearly enough to offset potential employment losses in the private sector.
But the big fruit for big business in a Joe Biden presidency is trade. President Trump's assault on the multinational trade infrastructure didn't just upset China; it upset multinational corporations that had made billions of dollars on the backs of American workers in an era when they could just move jobs overseas while shipping cheap products back to this country.
Trump's transformation and reversal of those policies were not complete, but they were steps in the right direction. Now expect a full reversal that could complete the depletion of the heartland of America.
Among other things, whispers have it that Biden will jumpstart the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement with Asia that would have been like NAFTA on steroids. From there Biden will likely move to reset trade relations with China - in other words, China will be able to resume its plundering of American markets.
At the very least, look for a Biden administration to agree to pacts that severely limit American sovereignty in areas of civil rights, protected classes, and workplace rights. Placing such matters in the hands of international tribunals, not American law, is the goal of such agreements.
Indeed, in all areas of public policy, from immigration to trade to taxation, the goals of the left are increasingly to undermine American sovereignty and subject American citizens not to the nation's laws and constitution but to the dictates of a global coalition of multinational corporations, bureaucrats, developing world bullies, and global leftists.
For them it's a match made in Heaven. For the rest of us, it's the unholiest of all alliances.
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