In the 1990s and for years into our century, it was common to ridicule the Government for being technologically backwards. We were all gaining access to fabulous things, including the internet, apps, search tools and social media. But Governments at all levels were stuck in the past using IBM mainframes and large floppy disks. We had a great time poking fun at them.
I recall the days of thinking Government would never catch up to the glories and might of the market itself. I wrote several books on it, full of techno-optimism.
The new tech sector had a libertarian ethos about it. Its denizens didn’t care about the Government and its bureaucrats. They didn’t have lobbyists in Washington. They were the masters of the new technologies of freedom and didn’t care much about the old analogue world of command and control. They would usher in a new age of people power.
Here we sit a quarter-century later with documented evidence that the opposite happened. The private sector collects the data that the Government buys and uses as a tool of control. What is shared and how many people see it is a matter of algorithms agreed upon by a combination of Government agencies, university centres, various nonprofits and the companies themselves. The whole thing has become an oppressive blob.
Here is Google’s new headquarters in Reston, Virginia.
And here is Amazon’s, in Arlington, Virginia.
Every major company that once stayed far away from Washington now owns a similar giant palace in or around D.C., and they collect tens of billions in Government revenue. Government has now become a major customer, if not the main customer, of the services provided by the large social media and tech companies. It is an advertiser but also a massive purchaser of the main product too.
Amazon, Microsoft and Google are the biggest winners of Government contracts, according to a report from Tussel. Amazon hosts the data of the National Security Agency with a $10 billion contract, and gets hundreds of millions from other governments. We do not know how much Google has received from the U.S. Government, but it is surely a substantial share of the $694 billion the federal Government hands out in contracts.
Microsoft also has a large share of Government contracts. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Defence awarded the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract to Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Oracle. The contract is worth up to $9 billion and provides the Department of Defence with cloud services. It’s just the beginning. The Pentagon is looking for a successor plan that will be bigger.
Actually, we don’t even know the full extent of this but it is gargantuan. Yes, these companies provide the regular consumer services but a main and even decisive customer is Government itself. As a result, the old laughing stock line about backwards tech at Government agencies is no more. Today Government is a main purchaser of tech services and is a top driver of the AI boom too.
It’s one of the best-kept secrets in American public life, hardly talked about at all by mainstream media. Most people still think of tech companies as free-enterprise rebels. It’s not true.
The same situation of course exists for pharmaceutical companies. This relationship dates even further back in time and is even tighter to the point that there is no real distinction between the interests of the FDA/CDC and large pharmaceutical companies. They are one and the same.
In this framework, we might also tag the agricultural sector, which is dominated by cartels that have driven out family farms. It’s a Government plan and massive subsidies that determine what is produced and in what quantity. It’s not because of consumers that your Coke is filled with a scary product called “high fructose corn syrup”, why your candy bar and danish have the same, and why there is corn in your gas tank. This is entirely the product of Government agencies and budgets.
In free enterprise, the old rule is that the customer is always right. That’s a wonderful system sometimes called consumer sovereignty. Its advent in history, dating perhaps from the 16th century, represented a tremendous advance over the old guild system of feudalism and certainly a major step over ancient despotisms. It’s been the rallying cry of market-based economics ever since.
What happens, however, when Government itself becomes a main and even dominant customer? The ethos of private enterprise is thereby changed. No longer primarily interested in serving the general public, enterprise turns its attention to serving its powerful masters in the halls of the state, gradually weaving close relationships and forming a ruling class that becomes a conspiracy against the public.
This used to go by the name ‘crony capitalism’ which perhaps describes some of the problems on a small scale. This is another level of reality that needs an entirely different name. That name is corporatism, a coinage from the 1930s and a synonym for fascism back before that became a curse word due to wartime alliances. Corporatism is a specific thing, not capitalism and not socialism but a system of private property ownership with cartelised industry that primarily serves the state.
The old binaries of the public and private sector – widely assumed by every main ideological system – have become so blurred that they no longer make much sense. And yet we are ideologically and philosophically unprepared to deal with this new world with anything like intellectual insight. Not only that, it can be extremely difficult even to tell the good guys from the bad guys in the news stream. We hardly know anymore for whom to cheer or boo in the great struggles of our time.
That’s how mixed up everything has become. We’ve clearly travelled a long way from the 1990s!
Some might observe that this has been a problem far back in time. Starting with the Spanish-American War, we’ve seen a merger of public and private as involving the munitions industry.
This is true. Many Gilded Age fortunes were wholly legitimate and market-based enterprises but others were gathered from the nascent military-industrial complex that began to mature in the Great War and involved a vast range of industries from industry to transportation to communications.
Of course, in 1913 we saw the advent of a particularly egregious public-private partnership with the Federal Reserve, in which private banks merged into a unified front and agreed to service U.S. Government debt obligations in exchange for bailout guarantees. This monetary corporatism continues to vex us to this day, as does the military industrial complex.
How is it different from the past? It’s different in degree and reach. The corporatist machine now manages the main products and services in our civilian life including the entire way we get information, how we work, how we bank, how we contact friends and how we buy. It is the manager of the whole of our lives in every respect, and has become the driving force of product innovation and design. It has become a tool for surveillance in the most intimate aspects of our lives, including financial information and inclusive of listening devices we’ve willingly installed in our own homes.
In other words, this is no longer just about private companies providing the bullets and bombs for both sides in a foreign war and obtaining the rebuilding contracts after. The military-industrial complex has come home, expanded to everything and invaded every aspect of our lives.
It has become a main curator and censor of our news and social media presence and postings. It is in a position to say which companies and products succeed and which ones fail. It can kill apps in a flash if the well-placed person does not like what it is doing. It can order other apps to add or subtract to a blacklist based on political opinions. It can tell even the smallest company to comply or face death by lawfare. It can seize on any individual and make him a public enemy based entirely on an opinion or action that runs contrary to regime priorities.
In short, this corporatism – in all its iterations including the regulatory state and the patent war chest that maintains and enforces monopoly – is the core source of all the current despotism.
It obtained its first full trial run with the lockdowns of 2020, when tech companies and media joined in the ear-splitting propaganda campaigns to shelter in place, cancel holidays and not visit grandma in the hospital and nursing home. It cheered as millions of small businesses were destroyed and big-box stores thrived as distributors of approved products, while vast swaths of the workforce were called nonessential and put on welfare.
This was the corporatist state at work, with a large corporate sector wholly acquiescent to regime priority and a Government fully dedicated to rewarding its industrial partners in every sector that went along with the political priority at the moment. The trigger for the construction of the vast machinery that rules our lives was far back in time and always begins the same way: with a seemingly inauspicious Government contract.
How well I recall those days in the 1990s when public schools first started to buy computers from Microsoft. Did alarm bells go off? Not for me. I had a typical attitude of any pro-business libertarian: whatever business wants to do, it should do. Surely it is up to the enterprise to sell to all willing buyers, even if that includes governments. In any case, how in the world would one prevent this? Government contracting with private business has been the norm from time immemorial. No harm done.
And yet it turns out that vast harm was done. This was just the beginning of what became one of the world’s largest industries, far more powerful and decisive over industrial organisation than old-fashioned producer-to-consumer markets. Adam Smith’s “butcher, baker and brewery” have been crowded out by the very business conspiracies against which he gravely warned. These gigantic for-profit and public trading corporations became the operational foundation of the surveillance-driven corporatist complex.
We are nowhere near coming to terms with the implications of this. It goes way beyond and fully transcends the old debates between capitalism and socialism. Indeed that is not what this is about. The focus on that might be theoretically interesting but it has little or no relevance to the current reality in which public and private have fully merged and intruded into every aspect of our lives, and with fully predictable results: economic decline for the many and riches for the few.
This is also why neither the Left nor the Right, nor Democrats or Republicans, nor capitalists or socialists, seem to be speaking clearly to the moment in which we live. The dominating force on both the national and global scene today is techno-corporatism that intrudes itself into our food, our medicine, our media, our information flows, our homes and all the way down to the hundreds of surveillance tools that we carry around in our pockets.
I truly wish these companies were genuinely private, but they are not. They are de facto state actors. More precisely, they all work hand-in-glove and which is the hand and which is the glove is no longer clear.
Coming to terms with this intellectually is the major challenge of our times. Dealing with it juridically and politically seems like a much more daunting task, to say the least. The problem is complicated by the drive to purge serious dissent at all levels of society. How did American capitalism become American corporatism? A little at a time and then all at once.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared.
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Governments ( aside from the Swedes and the odd few other exceptions ) and TPTB never and still do not give a stuff about kids’ welfare, development or education. This is evidenced due to school closures, urging to get a toxic jab they never needed and the sexually explicit and inappropriate material ( as well as woke tosh that states you can identify as anything you want ) being taught in class. Kids are being targeted on multiple levels and the buck stops with the parents because the threat is not going to go away any time soon and it is all under the guise of ”public health”.
”The World Health Organization’s broad definition of health embraces physical, mental and social well-being. Expressed in its 1946 constitution alongside concepts of community participation and national sovereignty, it reflected an understanding of a world emerging from centuries of colonialist oppression and the public health industry’s shameful facilitation of fascism. Health policy would be people-centered, closely tied to human rights and self-determination.
The COVID-19 response has demonstrated how these ideals have been undone. Decades of increasing funding within public-private partnerships have corroded the basis of global public health. The COVID-19 response, intended for a virus that overwhelmingly targeted the elderly, ignored norms of epidemic management and human rights to institute a regime of suppression, censorship, and coercion reminiscent of the power systems and governance that were previously condemned. Without pausing to examine the costs, the public health industry is developing international instruments and processes that will entrench these destructive practices in international law.
Public health, presented as a series of health emergencies, is being used once again to facilitate a fascist approach to societal management. The beneficiaries will be the corporations and investors whom the COVID-19 response served well. Human rights and individual freedom, as under previous fascist regimes, will lose. The public health industry must urgently awaken to the changing world in which it works, if it is to adopt a role in saving public health rather than contributing to its degradation.”
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajes.12531
As I’ve said all along TPTB don’t give a shit about children, infact I think the whole idea is to damage children as much as possible. Any one with half a brain cell could see the negative impacts lockdowns would have on society and yet people still want to cannonise the evil or compromised or both Valance and Witty. This is just another study for the white wash enquiry to ignore.
Another government created problem that the w**kers who promoted lockdowns now want money throwing at.
Yep, ”we’re coming for your children”, well they did warn us. I say the buck stops with the parents but the problem is when the parents are fully paid up members of the Woke Brigade themselves.
”The city council is sponsoring a five day drag camp which offers 14-year-olds the opportunity to become “divas”.
Oxford City Council is supporting a week long “Drag Camp” which offers 14 to 18 year olds the chance to “create their own daring stage persona”.
The camp, which starts on Monday on Magdalen Road, will be run by T(ART) Productions, which is a queer not for profit community events company, alongside Pegasus theatre group and Doris Field Charitable Trust.
The company promises to help children find their “drag voice” and to introduce them to the “world of drag as a performance art”.
Stephanie Davies-Arai of Transgender Trend told the Daily Mail said: “Why is Oxford City Council encouraging children to participate in the world of adult entertainment?
“The aim of queer activists is clear in the blurb: to subvert and destabilise boundaries, under the guise of being empowering for children.
“Encouraging children to create a ‘daring’ stage persona means only one thing in the drag world: to push sexual boundaries.
“Blurring the boundaries between adult and child in this way is a safeguarding red flag.”
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23692650.oxford-council-sponsors-week-long-drag-camp-children/?ref=socialflow&fbclid=IwAR28kUZ0biGeQcMUHpr921MJFyAVYRuz6kXN5a8a3afwkXeHOdQM3FttJZQ_aem_ARKgzhZudJp-IHuWWqlmq017KDJYXZphsVrcAiR8JW_RrLGWiROWEsS3ItThhpqDlh0
Kids are doomed when the parents are woketards. Case in point. Presumably this is a boy;
https://twitter.com/againstgrmrs/status/1686372574467690496
Well, the report is here:
https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/2023-07/WP202321-parental-labour-market-instability-and-childrens-mental-health-during-the-pandemic_0.pdf
Not sure what to make if it. Much of the text is given over to explaining the statistical methods used to analyse the multiple choice questionnaire responses and compute the outcomes.
Children are very sensitive to their parents’ emotions. I don’t doubt many experienced an impact on their social and emotional wellbeing. But quantifying it like this … I’m not persuaded.
I fear for children growing up in modern Britain. The COVID debacle was only one of many factors deleterious to their mental wellbeing.
Stuck record, I know, but please:
“Just as the dust begins to settle from the fallout of the Government’s response to the Covid pandemic…”
There. Was. No. Pandemic!
England and Wales, 2020-2021:
Average age at death overall: 81
Average age at death “FROM COVID”: 82!
Imagine a vaccine so safe you must be threatened to take it, to protect you from a virus so deadly you need be tested to know you have it!
When I’m with my children and the “pandemic” gets mentioned on TV or the radio, I repeat ‘there was no pandemic’. The same goes for the so called “climate emergancy” I repeat ‘there is no climate crisis it’s a scam’. Three sets of ‘oh dad’and eye rolls. I’m not going to let the constant propaganda get to my family.
I know how it’s affected me… and I’m in my late 40s. I can’t imagine the effect on youngsters. By using something so extreme on them so young, I guess it makes it easier to force ‘global boiling’, ‘climate catastrophe’ on them, because they’ve already been softened up by the powers that be.
Well they haven’t softened up our two. We are taking all of this abysmal episode in human history as a very valuable “teaching moment”.
With my 16yo (14 at the start of the plandemic) ’lockdown’ was very damaging to his development; although he was fully inoculated by his parents against bullshit and manipulation – and poisoning – it came at a point in his life when he needed routine and to knuckle down and work. Despite the fact I’m a teacher, I am well aware of the evils of state education, but the discipline and routine it brings are, I think, important, particularly for boys in their mid-teens. He struggles now to do anything reliably, and I put that down in part to the PTB shitting on his adolescent years.
Yeah. I’m 48 and I’m not as good as I used to be. I used to be super-organised. Now I find I either go like the clappers to get things done or have no energy even to read – it’s one extreme or the other. I work from home now, living like a recluse, and haven’t even seen anyone I work for since the start of 2020.
Get to your local Wetherspoons mate
That’s because you’re ‘one of us.’ How many kids live in homes where parents say the ‘anti-vaxxers’ belong in jail?
Significantly fewer than one year ago. They’re more likely to live in households where you can’t even bring up Covid because everyone’s too embarrassed!
So true! The husband of my Mum’s best friend was saying a year ago that people who refused the vaccine should be locked up. That would include me, who has cooked for him and his wife in my home and has eaten with him and his wife at theirs. When people pontificate like that – as we saw through the scamdemic – they forget the individual human face, which might be one they know!
Now my Mum’s best friend believes the vaccines are killers, in no small part due the the fact that my Mum now has a defibrillator-pacemaker in her chest because she developed a serious heart condition following the third booster jab.
I’ve got mixed feelings about all these impressive (and expensive) sounding studies.
I think they might serve to obscure rather than enlighten.
There was no pandemic. Respiratory viruses cannot be stopped by humans. We are social animals. Life must go on. Any extraordinary measures are harmful on their face – no complicated studies or cost benefit analysis required. To me this is orthodoxy – to most it’s now considered heresy, I think to this day.
Can you imagine if the human race behaved like this when TB was still an issue? We’d still be in the pre-industrial era!!
Seems like some people want us to go back there…
Shock.
And all to protect the poor vastly underpaid bloody teachers. How many actually “caught covid” from kids and died.
Long gone are the days when they actually cared about kids.
Didn’t they realise all they had to do was chop 6″ off the bottom of the doors to Stay Safe.
Cowardly and selfish doesn’t even begin to describe the majority of them.
Supermarket workers, delivery men etc. kept working
Ah yes, the vaccine that only works if others get vaxxed too. It’s always been the unjabbed people’s fault, the scapegoats of society, despite the fact if you had a vaccine that actually worked then why do you give a crap if anyone else is jabbed or not?? You’re allegedly ‘protected’ because Fauci, Biden et al said so, and they assured us repeatedly! Same non-logic can be applied to masks. And on and on the unfunny comedy sketches would go. My philosophy was always; my immune system is 100% effective with zero side-effects and it hasn’t got me killed or hospitalized yet. I’ll take my chances!
Very similar story in the Telegraph today….”Lockdown’s severe damage to children”..this is brilliant Bob’s reaction…
Bob Moran
@bobscartoons
Thank you, @telegraph
, for firing me when I tried to defend children against those who wished them harm through lockdowns.
Great to see such ethical consistency.
LOL! …..has anyone done any studies showing the way all the green zero zealots and their ideas will affect children?….thought not…..so no lessons learned then??
This new pro-narrative, vax-pushing, fear-mongering paper is crap, and the fact it has passed peer-review makes it double crap. Not to worry. The HART team have done a stellar job of extensively taking it apart and highlighting its shortcomings;
”The usual covid high priests who have been wheeled out repeatedly in front of the television cameras to fear-monger about covid without any debate, are at it again. Several members of Independent SAGE and others have written a paper assessing the impact of covid on children over the course of the last three years. It is not the paper they wanted to write.
Imagine you were them and had got hold of the data ready to write your paper. What might you want to show? I would suggest their priorities would have been to show:
They were unable to demonstrate any of those points using the actual data, as we shall see.
The paper was published in the BMJ but it seems the peer reviewers did not actually do much reviewing. Campaigners who have repeatedly demanded children be vaccinated and who even now are demanding boosters for vaccines (see figure 1) might not be in the best place to provide a dispassionate assessment of the evidence, and indeed they did not.”
https://www.hartgroup.org/yet-more-fear-mongering-over-covid-in-children/
My brother got a new dog during lockdown. It didn’t socialise properly as a puppy and is quite aggressive with other dogs.
The Conspiracy Against The Children , Was NOT a Theory. Do NOT be Fooled that They didn’t know, enough scientists spoke up ALL of whom were accused of being ignorant or censored . THEY KNEW Lockdowns were devastating. The EVIL thing about it is that they are getting away with it at the expense of your children