Confronting Corporate Tyranny
By J. Jeff Toler for Shenandoah Christian Alliance j.toler@sca4christ.org
Over the last 50 years at least, with regard to America’s liberty, there has been a colossal transformation that most have either ignored, or more likely, simply didn’t realize has happened. Great changes to any society, require ample time to impact. Otherwise, the change will be resisted or blunted. But once it has been determined that new goals and objectives are desirable, change becomes all but unstoppable. This puts the people who managed to pay attention in a precarious position to say something meaningful and persuasive—or better yet, do something even more meaningful and persuasive, and then become targets and for scorn and derision, knowing that just watching is not an option.
For the rich and powerful, who are highly incentivized and well equipped to overcome resistance and debate, will stop at very little, or at nothing at all, to transform the social contract most Americans had come to take for granted. Barak Obama was not a genius to figure this out when he made America’s transformation the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. That conversion was all but completed by 2008 when he pledged “fundamental transformation” for America when he was elected. Everyone heard it. Very few were alarmed.
Socialists, particularly “leftist” socialists like Obama, have made their messaging alluring for a very long time. Two notable socialists who preceded him to the White House—although they are rarely called that by most historians—had already been very effective transforming America in their own way. We can easily make the case that Woodrow Wilson ushered in the administrative state after Teddy Roosevelt opened the way for him, followed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, (FDR) who was his fifth cousin once removed, had begun in earnest the process of fundamental transformation of elevating the presidency far beyond the intent of the framers of the Constitution. This was the very thing they warned against in no uncertain terms. As is often the case, dire circumstances and existential threats go a long way in dampening resistance.
It was FDR who promised America the New Deal. “In his speech accepting the Democratic Party nomination in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt pledged ‘a New Deal for the American people’ if elected. Following his inauguration as President of the United States on March 4, 1933, FDR put his New Deal into action: an active, diverse, and innovative program of economic recovery. In the First Hundred Days of his new administration, FDR pushed through Congress a package of legislation designed to lift the nation out of the Depression. FDR declared a “banking holiday” to end the runs on the banks and created new federal programs administered by so-called “alphabet agencies.” [https://www.fdrlibrary.org/great-depression-facts]
History now shows that many of these programs were in fact burdens to all the people who were still struggling to make ends meet, clinging to the last threads of a battered middle class. Samuel Staley, Research Fellow with Reason Foundation, explains this in his essay, “FDR Policies Doubled the Length of the Great Depression,” writing, “Many saw Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency and the New Deal as the salvation of the American economy. [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal] In fact, recent empirical evidence by UCLA economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian suggests that FDR’s economic policy added [seven] years to the Great Depression.” [https://reason.org/commentary/fdr-policies-doubled-the-lengt/] Now, we, the American people, find ourselves in same the situation once again. Unwittingly, we are being prepared for another socialist master plan.
The history of America, and by extension, the rest of the world, is facing issues that amount to the extinction of the middle class, and certainly the average wage earner.
John J. DiIulio, Jr, in his review of “Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About it” by Sohrab Ahmari, (pictured) writes, “Ahmari calls out the ‘right-wing politicians and pundits… in one way or another on the payroll of economic elites.’ We have, he insists, ‘succumbed to a generational effort, mounted by some of the world’s wealthiest individuals, most powerful corporations, and their ideologues for hire, to make us forget… that unchallenged market power can impair our rights and liberties.’ Private tyranny’s ‘apologists,’ he insists, dogmatically defend privatization, deregulation, free trade, right-to-work laws, and other neoliberal nostrums.” Available on Amazon:
This might explain how the progressive bureaucrats running Washington, are relying heavily on huge US-based international corporations and equity firms to do the heavy lifting in cramming down workforce policies designed to deprive these Americans, on top of the current social climate that’s disenfranchised anyone desiring to maintain traditional marriage, family, and community autonomy.
We failed to see this when giants like BlackRock and Vanguard pushed the DEI mantra. DEI is the new socialist tyranny, orchestrated by the uber rich and powerful. This is expected to only make things worse. [https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dei-training-harmful-phony-and-expensive/]
Since the 1980s, wages have stagnated and income inequalities have grown in staggering proportions. Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early, authors of “The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debates” (2022), noted flaws in the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics’ measuring of economic well-being. They claim, “that Americans have not received a raise in almost fifty years,” and they blame the rise in “earned-income inequality” on increased “government transfer payments.” These transfers would include welfare programs, social security insurance programs, and subsidies. They are never included in the GDP (gross domestic product) because they don’t represent production.
Over time, these programs, intentionally or otherwise, have contributed to the erosion of real earned income. Hourly wage earners—which include almost every retail employee, service employee—and that catch-all class, the blue-collar worker—all representing 60% of the total workforce, have borne the brunt of these legalized forms of redistribution, as many CEOs continue making hundreds of times more than they do.
Ahmari isn’t saying that de-unionization is not the “deliberate strategy,” but it’s not coincidental that “waves of anti-worker laws,” have created among the “downwardly mobile Americans…hurtling toward deaths of despair, poisoned by what Ahmari terms “precarity”—a state of persistent insecurity with regard to employment or income.
If both political parties are paying any attention, this is the issue that can, and will, shape the outcome of the 2024 elections—at every level. The Democrats are going to lose these people at the polls; the Republicans are going to struggle and falter if their messaging doesn’t capture their allegiance with an honest effort to return to post-war (1945-1965) era employment models.
The unions that hold power today are highly politically driven, and federally subsidized. The top four in ranking include: National Education Association, (NEA) Service Employees International Unions, (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. (AFSCME) Do we see anything ominous here?
I’m inclined to reject a second New Deal. Likely, the social and cultural climate would render it a grotesque caricature of its namesake anyway. What I would hope for is a return to a Contract with America. [https://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/the-contract-america-implementing-new-ideas-the-us] I confess though, there is a cynical side to me that neither party has learned anything from these uniquely American ideas. In simple terms, we would benefit from small businesses, smaller government, and bigger Bible.
- There is nothing better than that all should enjoy their work, for that is their lot. (Ecclesiastes 3:22)
Photo by Sean Pollock on Unsplash
