“I have to say, in my opinion, he is one of the most dangerous men on the planet… He is accountable to nobody, he has vast wealth at his fingertips and he uses it for some of the most wicked evil I’ve seen.”
Scotland’s former first minister, Humza Yousaf, on Elon Musk and his X media site, August 8th, after Musk posted the inevitability of a civil war in the UK over immigration related riots… and then doubled down.
“Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.”
William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham and former Prime Minister of England from 1766-1778.
India banned TikTok, decimating hundreds of thousands of businesses there that relied on that pervasive site to market their products and services. Claiming “national security concerns” over TikTok’s Chinese ownership, despite measures purportedly designed to limit sharing personal information on users with China, the United States is considering a similar move, one that would tank a whole lot of equally dependent businesses.
Multinational corporations have long used diverse venues, subsidiaries, joint ventures and off-balance-sheet financing to move profits to low-tax countries, shifting costs to high tax countries to maximize the overall economic impact. Globally, regulators and taxing authorities have reconfigured their tax laws to chase those revenues, but there are plenty of countries that “wink-wink” flaunt those efforts with banking secrecy laws. The ability of those multinationals to play those games is significantly based on phalanxes of highly specialized accountants and lawyers, situated where needed, to dodge and weave to their economic benefit.
In much of the world, bribery is standard practice. Whether it’s clearing customs or generating business by lining the pockets of government officials as buyers or enablers. For example, from the 1950s into the 1970s, the iconic aerospace manufacturer, Lockheed Corporation, lubricated the palms of many governmental officials in many countries to secure lucrative contracts, selling lots of aircraft. Hey, that’s the way business was done, and everybody does it… Lockheed claimed. Could they deduct those bribes as a business expense? Were there any criminal ramifications, even if the local country did not care? According to Wikipedia: “In 1976, it was publicly revealed that Lockheed had paid $22 million in bribes to foreign officials in the process of negotiating the sale of aircraft, including the F-104 Starfighter, the so-called ‘Deal of the Century’.” The dollars spent continued to rise. Recipients included governmental officials from Saudi Arabia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, etc.
Most countries tolerated “bribery as normal” and looked the other way. The US was one of the first countries to attempt to regulate corporations doing business domestically if in their overseas operations, they engaged in bribing governmental officials. “Lockheed chairman of the board Daniel Haughton and vice chairman and president Carl Kotchian resigned from their posts on February 13, 1976. The scandal also played a part in the formulation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act [FCPA] which President Jimmy Carter signed into law on December 19, 1977, which made it illegal for American persons and entities to bribe foreign government officials.” Wikipedia. Other governments followed suit, but such laws took time to gain traction. After all, in some countries, if you did not bribe, you could not do business.
In 2011, the United Kingdom raised the stakes with its Bribery Act, very much resembling the American FCPA with one huge add: it became a crime to bribe officers and representatives of non-governmental commercial companies as well. There was no double or triple jeopardy if a bribing individual or entity was criminally charged in the US, UK and the nation where the bribe took place. Yet with many of these companies having economic power that often exceeded the local country’s entire governmental budget… or even that nation’s GDP, multinationals wielded massive “influence” with their ability to support local elections or referenda on issues near and dear to their wallets. Europe clamped down on these practices as the 2010 Citizen United vs FEC Supreme Court decision (unleashing political contribution caps) created the opposite effect in the United States. This ruling is one of the most significant contributors to a highly polarized, dysfunctional Congress, particularly with the House of Representative where elections are held every two years.
But nothing has terrified governments the world over like big tech, and particularly social media. While the European Union began to stare down these social media behemoths – focused on privacy, size, undue influence and disinformation – the battles in the United States were torn apart by partisan politics and malign actors hiding behind the First Amendment. The above quote from the former Scottish First Minister is one of many underscoring the same theme. Technology has imbued mega-rich actors, through their mega-sized and controlled social media corporations, with the ability to wield undue influence, on steroids, to change or lead public opinion, even if their mass social media communications prove false. Governments struggle to deal with such power, usually ineffectively.
Contrary to a very naïve belief of many Americans, the United States, between the First Amendment and very flexible corporate laws, is particularly vulnerable to novel forms of corruption, allowing those with vast corporate wealth to buy their way into almost incomprehensible political power. As tales surfaced of extraordinary “gifts” to members of the United States Supreme Court from ultra-conservative corporate power brokers, with issues before the highest court in the land, the obvious hue and cry from so many citizens were slammed by the fact of a lack of ethnical restrictions applied to that court and an unwillingness by conservative members of Congress to pass necessary rules.
But in recent years, novel and legal ways to pay top government officials de facto bribes, came into play. For example, Donald Trump’s Washington, D.C. hotel was heavily used by foreign dignitaries – clearly intending to curry favor with the President – at exorbitant rates. It gets worse. Trump Media (which owns Trump Social, his social media platform) recently went public with a mega-billion-dollar valuation even as it was hemorrhaging tens of millions of dollars of losses annually with no realistic path to profitability. Writing for the August 4th Vox, Abdallah Fayyad observed: On Monday [7/29], after the company reported more than $58 million in losses against a mere $4 million in revenue last year, the stock went tumbling down, plummeting by some 21 percent in a single day… But even so, when stocks closed on Wednesday [7/31], the company was valued at around $6.6 billion, putting it in a similar league as social media giants like Reddit. (When Trump Media first went public, its market capitalization peaked at roughly $10 billion.)
“The long answer, however, is that while Trump Media’s valuation is entirely illogical from a financial perspective — as one finance professor told CNN, ‘The stock is pretty much divorced from fundamentals’ — its early success in trading can be boiled down to one simple fact: Donald Trump is running for president, and there’s a decent chance that he’ll be back in the White House this time next year.
“Truth Social, in other words, is a way for Trump’s supporters to personally offer him financial support at a time when he desperately needs it. That might be why the company’s volatility looks similar to meme stocks for now. As one analyst told my colleague Nicole Narea, people might buy up Trump Media stock so ‘they can express their beliefs and commitment.’… For those with deep pockets, it’s also an opportunity to curry favor with the former president.” Foreign or domestic. When did we turn America, the land of opportunity, into the land of opportunists?
I’m Peter Dekom, and the transnational power of wealth, the likes of which the Earth has never seen before, is creating a new economic oligarchy that truly does appear to govern us all.
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