Denationalization: The Rise of the Stateless Corporation
Is Frances Haugen, the alleged Facebook “whistleblower”, just Alexander Vindman in drag?
Something many people overlook is that the Constitution is a pact between the people and their government. It clearly and distinctly notes what government cannot do to the people.
For example, the First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
As the Constitution is our protection from government’s encroachment on individual rights, it is assumed that the greatest danger to our rights comes from government.
I am not at all sure that is true. As a matter of fact, I do not believe that is true at all.
I had a chance to watch clips of Frances Haugen, the alleged Facebook “whistleblower”, last night. Many saw an intrepid and principled former Zuckerberg disciple who just yanked the emergency stop cable on the Social Media Express to Hell.
I saw something else – I saw a plant, a bias confirmer, someone who was sent by a Democrat backed coalition. Haugen is represented and advised by the firm of the greasy Bill Burton, the former Obama PR flack, and backed by Democrat activists. If you think this is about free speech or protecting 13-year-old girls from body shaming, you are terribly mistaken.
You might ask why Facebook would not stringently oppose such testimony. Why in the world would they want regulation and bans? Some of you already know – why does any corporation invite regulation? It is because they can use that regulation to eliminate troublesome priests while getting and giving exemptions from those same regulations.
Why add more regulations when just removing the Section 230 carve outs would fix the problem?
It is a massive head fake.
Boxers routinely commit to showing a particular weakness in hopes their opponent will take the opportunity and will realize too late that they have just been set up for a hard right hook to the chin. As I watched the testimony yesterday, I saw a Congress thirstily leaning into Facebook’s right hook. Facebook has set them up perfectly for the knockout. The glass jaw of this Congress is obscenely exposed.
This brings me back to something by which I am intrigued - the idea (reality?) of the stateless corporations that have arisen because of globalization. It is a form of “denationalization” where corporations choose locations for personnel, factories, executive suites, or bank accounts based on where regulations are friendly, resources abundant, and connectivity seamless.
It certainly seems the world is entering an era in which the most powerful law is not that of national sovereignty but that of giant meta-national, stateless corporations that use various governments as enforcement mechanisms of their strategic plans. These “denationalized” entities have created their own systems of governance that incorporate all the power of government without the interference of pesky things like constitutions, elections, and people.
The First Amendment of our Constitution means the government cannot curtail speech. Lord knows we have courted danger by allowing speech codes and letting terms like “hate speech” to survive, but in general this is a people vs. government thing. What it isn’t is a way to force Facebook or Twitter to leave people alone. As much as it might seem we should have an open forum – because that is what Zuck and Stoner Dorsey promised – the First Amendment does not apply to a private business.
During the dearth of new entertainment wrought by the Covidic Era, I re-watched the first season of the dystopian series, Altered Carbon, on Netflix (I really liked it) and (as it was in Season 2), their world was run by evil corporations and shocker of all shockers, these evil corporations ran the governments.
There is a historical basis for such future fiction. Huge private trading companies (like the East India Company of England, founded in 1600) have long exhibited powers normally associated with governments – and often with the imprimatur of the rulers of their home nation (the East India Company had the blessing of the Crown). The reality of a “company town” or a “company store” is another example of a corporation acting with the capacity of a government. I can’t help but think of Tennessee Ernie Ford singing “16 Tons”:
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store…
People will recognize the evil corporation as a common theme in many dystopian science fiction books, movies, and TV shows. You probably can name several off the top of your head – Blade Runner (Tyrell Corporation), the Terminator series (Cyberdyne Systems), RoboCop (OCP), Alien (Weyland-Yutani), the Resident Evil franchise (Umbrella Corporation), come to mind.
Perhaps the most egregious error science fiction authors have made is that all are uniformly assumed to be evil capitalist entities, all with governmental powers to trample the rights and lives of people for profit. We are now being taught an object lesson in why that assumption is a fallacy because the problem isn’t right-wing, profit driven corporations, without exception, the most dangerous companies in America today are leftist and power driven.
We can agree that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google lean so far left, they look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. We can also agree that these private sector behemoths control a very large percentage of our public discourse and access to news and information – and we can also agree that, even though the free speech provision of the First Amendment does not apply to them, they are willfully and brazenly violating the concept of free speech. They are censoring posts, tweets, and videos – as well as throttling and blocking web traffic and access to information. Like the evil corporations of fiction, they also have their government enablers – like Senator Ed Markey and other Democrats in Congress, who think that the problem is not censorship, but that they don’t censor ENOUGH.
Of course, the social media companies are easy targets, but corporations like Walmart, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are in that mix as well.
The real danger is not from government or capitalism, it is from the leftist private sector companies that engage in statist, public/private “partnerships that give them a monopolistic, market dominating, quasi-governmental rung on the ladder of society. The truth is that, even in the fictional world of science fiction, the “evil capitalistic” corporations look far more like collectivist dictatorships than true free market participants.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google look a lot like those dictatorial corporate villains of science fiction, and it is quite possible that Congress will make them even more powerful by passing a raft of new regulations these stateless companies will simply use to further their objectives.