Plutocratic Insurgency Note

For many years, multinational corporations have been playing revenue starved liberal-democratic states off against one-another in a ‘race to the bottom,’ driving tax rates down, leveraging tax havens, and engaging in complex transnational tax avoidance schemes. In response to these ongoing corporate profiteering excesses and attempts at achieving extra sovereign impunity, the finance ministers of the G7 states recently gathered together in London and reached an historic agreement on a global minimum corporate tax rate.

The COVID-19 pandemic has both exacerbated and accelerated the ‘hollowing out’ of the American liberal democratic state’s ability to provide public goods to its citizens while at the same time greatly benefiting its richest families and the multinational corporations under their ownership and control. With the pendulum shifting in the recent presidential and congressional elections from one major political party to another, US federal governmental (and the governed’s) economic interests are now in a direct collision course with plutocratic privilege and prerogative. While the state now seeks to revitalize the public infrastructure—for the American people—family dynastic and plutocratic interests seek to increasingly maximize their economic profits and, in the process, further defund and commoditize such public goods.

On the surface, while such low levels of unemployment may appear to represent the triumph of unfettered capitalism and the belief in the benefits of a globalized—and supranational—liberal economic order, something far more ominous for the Western middle classes is taking place. Full-time jobs with benefits and secure retirement packages are increasingly being replaced with low-paid and part-time “gig economy” positions as a new involuntary labor model. This labor model not only benefits predatory (i.e. hyper efficient extractive) capitalism but may also be considered a component of the larger transition to human worker replacement by robotic automation and artificial intelligence (AI) systems and the continued hollowing out of the Western welfare state by the plutocratic class.

This plutocratic trifecta focuses upon the increasing global wealth concentration of the world’s billionaires—as well as the falling tax income tax rates on the rich and their corporations—discussed in a new Oxfam report, the fact that a record number of private (multi-million dollar+ jets) are ferrying global elites to the Davos meeting this year, and that a majority of the U.S. poor (per a World Economic Forum commissioned poll) now recognize that they and their children have little hope of working hard and, as a result, ever becoming rich in American society.

The vast majority of the US populace—the proverbial 99%—just witnessed the blatant crossing of a class warfare ‘red line’ to the benefit of the American plutocracy.

Artificial intelligence algorithms built into business applications software is increasingly changing how multinational corporations interface with their customer base.

Like “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", Apple Incorporated is a beloved ‘American’ company by day and a ‘stateless’ behemoth after hours when it is time to pay taxes.

This situation removes public spaces from the commons and places this territory in the hands of corporate or plutocratic elite rather than under state control.