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economic inequality
No Kings, No Corporations: Rejecting Authoritarian and Corporate Rule
As we protest authoritarianism this Saturday—and legitimately condemn the many anti-democratic and unjust actions of Trump—let us also remember the tyranny of our corporate overlords who have been—perhaps more quietly but not less aggressively—eroding our democracy.
Jun 11, 2025
The “No Kings Day” mass rallies and marches this Saturday across the country will be, hopefully, a political and cultural affirmation of the democratic vision that we should be a self-governing people, a vision that has never been fully realized. The events must not only reject the reemergence and expansion of authoritarianism of Trump from his previous administration. They should also acknowledge the much longer tyranny and authoritarianism of corporate rule.
Speeches, signs, chants, and petitions will undoubtedly address the numerous authoritarian actions by the Trump administration since the election. These include pardons and immunities for loyalists, the use of federal agencies against political opponents, use of disinformation and threats against elected officials, mass deportations and family separation, executive orders that trump local and state governments, government loyalty purges, crackdown on the media and dissent, and militarized response to protests – such as the overreacting deployment of the Marines in response to the largely peaceful protests against ICE immigration raids in Los Angeles.
As we protest authoritarianism this Saturday—and legitimately condemn the many anti-democratic and unjust actions of Trump—let us also remember that tyranny has many symbols. One is a red hat. The other is a corporate logo.
The No Kings Day actions are just the latest and important public resistance to Trump’s tyrannical actions that have included other nationwide demonstrations and civil disobedience, legal challenges, whistleblowers and leaks, mutual aid, sanctuary networks, state and local government pushback, worker and union actions, and campus resistance.
Yet the reality is that Trump and his Project 2025 playbook represent one form of authoritarianism that, while distinct in some respects, intersects with another deeply entrenched form: corporate domination.
Unlike Trump’s style of blatant and unapologetic brute force, intimidation, and open defiance of the rule of law, corporate rule has been a slow, legalistic, never ending, and largely invisible seizure of power — not by individuals, but by artificial legal entities with little public accountability.
Corporations today define nearly every aspect of our lives:
- Our values: Consumerism and its emphasis on profit-first “logic” and primacy of property protection over human rights and the rights to a livable world.
- Our labor: Work hours, wages, and benefits are dictated by corporate interests.
- Our environment: Corporations control production, pollution, extraction, and destruction.
- Our food system: From seeds to supermarkets, agriculture is consolidated and chemically dependent.
- Our technology and data: AI, surveillance, and algorithms are driven by profit and privatization.
- Our politics: Elections, legislation, and regulation are shaped by lobbying and campaign contributions.
- Our culture and information: Entertainment, education, and news are filtered through corporate lenses.
How did this happen? The sword and shield of corporate rule is the U.S. Constitution. Despite corporate entities being originally created and defined by the government as a public tool to provide goods and services, the Supreme Court declared them to be private institutions, out of bounds to public definition and control. What had originally been the state providing mere “privileges” via the granting of charters or licences that could be withdrawn via the revoking of charters that violated the law became constitutional rights deemed beyond the reach of legislatures or individuals.
The Supremes have anointed corporations the constitutional rights of natural persons for more that a century, including:
- First Amendment rights — to spend unlimited money on elections (Citizens United v. FEC being the latest decision), to not to speak, to lie, and even to some extent religious rights
- Fourth Amendment rights — to block health, safety, and environmental inspections.
- Fifth Amendment takings rights — to challenge local and state regulations under the Takings Clause that affect profit.
- Fourteenth Amendment equal protection — to avoid differential treatment in the law, even when such laws protect local businesses and communities over chain stores and other businesses.
Corporate “personhood” is an absurdity, yet humanly, environmentally, and democratically lethal.
While there have been frequent mass actions over single corporate abuses, we don’t see mass protests in the streets about the totality of corporate rule. Why does corporate tyranny go unchallenged?
Corporate rule has been normalized. It is:
- Cultural: So embedded that we barely notice it — from Amazon to Apple to Exxon to BlackRock. Call it the “fish discover water last” syndrome in which it's so much a part of our daily lives that it’s hardly recognized..
- Gradual: It’s happened over a century, one Court decision at a time, which is challenging to understand given the legal complexity and, of course, rarely covered by the corporate press.
- Justified: We’re told corporations bring jobs, innovation, and prosperity — even as economic inequality soars and corporate entities are increasinbly able to shift capital where and when they want to other states or nations.
- Powerful: We’re told that the economic and political power of mega-corporations is inevitable and irreversible – so public focus should remain on elections, statutes, and regulations that merely manage corporate harms and impose minimal guardrails, keeping us perpetually on the defensive, opposing one corporate abuse or company at a time while censoring ourselves from demanding structural change.
- Feared: To criticize corporations is to risk being labeled “anti-American,” a “socialist,” a “Luddite” or worse.
Move to Amend exists to expose and abolish corporate constitutional rights and the doctrine of money as speech through the We the People Amendment (HJR54). This is not about regulating corporations better. It’s about breaking the illegitimate foundation of their power and declaring that we should have the power and right to define corporate actions.
As we protest authoritarianism this Saturday—and legitimately condemn the many anti-democratic and unjust actions of Trump—let us also remember that tyranny has many symbols. One is a red hat. The other is a corporate logo.
So let us all turn out on No Kings Day not only to oppose authoritarian rule, but also as an opportunity to oppose corporate rule, which will remain long after Trump is gone.Keep ReadingShow Less
C. J. Polychroniou on Socialism, Left Internationalism, and the Climate Crisis
The return of Left internationalism inspired by the vision of socialism needs a dramatic turnaround on the global ideological and political landscape.
May 28, 2025
Has neoliberal globalization run its course? Should the Left be on the side of tariffs or protectionism? Can Left internationalism be revived? Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou tackles these questions in an interview with the independent French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri.
Alexandra Boutri: In a recently published essay, you argue that the Left should endorse a new vision of globalization and fight accordingly for a new world order. Can you briefly spell out the pitfalls of neoliberal globalization and why the current world order is a failure?
C. J. Polychroniou: The first thing that stands out about neoliberal globalization is that it has led to an extremely high degree of economic inequality by altering patterns of income distribution and resource allocation while at the same time undermining economic and social rights. As Miatta Fahnbulleh put it a few years back in an essay that appeared in Foreign Affairs, the system “is not working in the interest of the majority of people.” The actual record of neoliberal globalization on economic growth has also been quite dismal, with postwar “managed capitalism” outperforming the neoliberal model on every count. On top of that, under the form of globalization prescribed by neoliberalism “the average global temperature has risen relentlessly,” as Robert Pollin has pointed out. Neoliberal globalization has been bad for people and the environment alike.
Trump’s domestic agenda is the most neoliberal since the onset of neoliberalism.
As far as the current world order is concerned, it would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic. We have a world in permanent crisis literally since the end of the Second World War, with the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over humanity’s head. The Doomsday Clock is now closer than ever to midnight. The current war in Ukraine, the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza and the seizing of land in the occupied West Bank by violent religious extremists under the protection of the Israeli army speak volumes of the dramatic failure of the United Nations and the so-called international community. There is no lawful world order. International law only applies when it suits the strong.
Alexandra Boutri: Has neoliberalism’s model of globalization run its course?
C. J. Polychroniou: The current system has been in a terminal state since the outbreak of the global financial crisis of 2007-08. The resurgence of right-wing nationalism across the globe is interrelated to the profound contradictions built specifically into the neoliberal version of globalization. The backlash against globalism by the likes of U.S. President Donald Trump and his MAGA faction needs to be understood in connection with the changes that are occurring in the world economy. Trump is using protectionism as a means of altering the global supply chain in favor of U.S. production and imposing tariffs to reduce the U.S. trade deficit but is simultaneously unleashing the most vicious form of neoliberalism inside the country. He is attending to the mythology of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny by trying to reassert the dominance of the United States in the world economy while destroying functioning government as part of a plan to axe safety-net programs and letting corporations run roughshod over labor. Trump’s domestic agenda is the most neoliberal since the onset of neoliberalism. It constitutes an open war against working people and social rights, against the poor and the environment. It’s all about making the rich richer and the poor poorer. It’s a domestic agenda based on the politics of astonishing greed and shocking cruelty. Trump’s election therefore does not mean the end of neoliberalism or of globalism.
Alexandra Boutri: Free trade or protectionism? Is this an actual choice for the Left?
C. J. Polychroniou: It depends on what one means by the “left.” You have left-wing liberals, social democrats, left-wing socialists, communists, and anarchists. Left with capital L tends in some circles to refer to the anti-capitalist, socialist-communist-anarchist camp. Personally, I don’t consider the Democrats in the United States or the Social Democrats in Europe as part of the Left. Their loyalty is to capitalism. Hence, they are not agents of transformational change. They want to maintain the existing socioeconomic system but with some modifications in place to make it less disagreeable. The social democratic tale was about capitalism with a human face. It was a popular political program for the first few decades after the end of the Second World War, and it was of course an improvement over laisses faire capitalism and a bourgeois state that catered exclusively to the interests of the capitalist class. Nonetheless, we should be reminded of an old radical dictum: There cannot be democracy, social justice, and equality as long as power belongs to capital.
It may have taken voters quite a long time to realize that the parties of the establishment left had sold out to global capitalism, but when they did, the consequences were cataclysmic in their impact.
The debate regarding free trade versus protectionism is as old as political economy. For what it’s worth, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels confronted this issue back in the 1840s, in the struggles over the Corn Laws. Marx saw free trade for what it is—i.e., “freedom of capital,” and mocked the claim of free-traders that the absence of tariff barriers would abolish the antagonism among classes. But this does not mean that Marx took the side of protectionism, which he saw as a system to defend the status quo. Thus, as he put it, “One may declare oneself an enemy of the constitutional regime without declaring oneself a friend of the ancient regime.”
Interestingly enough, though, Marx ends up in the end endorsing free trade but purely on political grounds because he saw the free trade system as accelerating the prospects of radical change.
The goal of the Left is to move beyond capitalism by constructing an equitable and sustainable economy and a just world order. Rudolf Hilferding, in his book Finance Capital, published more than a century ago, wrote: "The proletariat avoids the bourgeois dilemma—protectionism or free trade—with a solution of its own; neither protectionism nor free trade, but socialism, the organization of production, the conscious control of the economy not by and for the benefit of the capitalist magnates but by and for society as a whole."
Alexandra Boutri: Until recently, antiglobalization was exclusively associated with parties and movements of the Left. However, internationalism has historically been a core component of the Left’s ideological worldview. What happened to Left internationalism but also to social democratic parties whose collapse coincides with the collapse of the antiglobalization movement and the emergence of right-wing antiglobalism?
C. J. Polychroniou: The antiglobalization movement came to life in the 1990s and peaked during the early 2000s. It was inspired mainly by so-called far-left ideologies which saw free trade agreements, multinational corporations, and international economic organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank promoting a new version of colonialism. During those years, millions of people turned out across the world to raise their voice against global corporate power. Center-left and reformist left parties in general did not join the protests against global capitalist expansion for the simple reason that they had embraced neoliberalism and were being showered in turn by campaign cash from big corporations and the financial sector. In a word, they had betrayed the working class in the same manner that the socialist parties had betrayed internationalism in 1914 at the start of the First World War.
The history of European social democracy may be summarized as follows: a period of rather impressive achievements on the social, political, and economic fronts during the first few decades following the end of the Second World, which were made possible because of the role of different actors in the emergence of a social democratic consensus, and capitulation to neoliberal capitalism in the latter part of the 20th century, especially after the end of an era where you had leaders like Willy Brandt in Germany, Bruno Kreisky in Austria, and Olof Palme in Sweden who were undeniably dedicated to the struggle for social justice and economic democracy. The leaders that came after them across the European continent took the position that Keynesian economics no longer had applicability in the new world economic order that had emerged following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and that fiscal orthodoxy was the way to go. In the 1980s, the so-called socialist governments of Francois Mitterrand in France, Bettino Craxi in Italy, Felipe González in Spain, and Andreas Papandreou in Greece not only failed to carry out even the minimal set of promises they had made to voters during the pre-electoral period, but their economic programs followed the neoliberal prescriptions proposed by the IMF and the World Bank.
The antiglobalization movement of the 1990s was associated with far-left politics and was attacked as such by mainstream media and the establishment parties across the political spectrum. In the eyes of many citizens across Europe, the “left” was still represented by social democratic and socialist parties. It may have taken voters quite a long time to realize that the parties of the establishment left had sold out to global capitalism, but when they did, the consequences were cataclysmic in their impact.
In 2000, 10 out of 15 countries in the European Union still had social democratic or socialist parties in government even though they had abandoned all the traditional social democratic ideas and policies. Nearing the end of the second decade of the new millennium, we could find social democratic parties in government in only two countries in Europe. Even the euro crisis did not help the parties of the traditional left to make a comeback. What was happening instead is that far-right parties were gaining ground across Europe and around the world. The far-right was reinventing itself with a backlash against globalism. The European far-right even adapted the language of the left to its own ends. Of course, it succeeded in doing this by taking advantage of the betrayal of center-left parties as well as of the left’s fractiousness and disunity—issues that have long plagued the left worldwide. Defeating the far-right is, of course, of paramount importance for the future of democracy and of the Left.
The history of Left internationalism is too long and complex to discuss here. Suffice to say, though, that it has both positive and negative aspects. The Second International betrayed the cause of socialism. The Third International, which was created by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in 1919, was a powerful force toward world revolution, a major step toward world socialism. However, under Josef Stalin, it became purely an instrument of Soviet state policy to advance the Stalinist view of “socialism in one country.” And the Red Lord officially dissolved the Third International in 1943.
It's hard to revive Left internationalism when the left is fractured and there is so much confusion about what the left even represents in today’s world. Of course, there is a plethora of progressive social movements at the forefront for social change, but the return of Left internationalism inspired by the vision of socialism needs a dramatic turnaround on the global ideological and political landscape.
In the postwar era, Cuban internationalism stands virtually alone as an alternative form of globalization. Still, the Left needs a new internationalism that combines solidarity and the quest for social justice and equality with a global climate change policy. The latter is by far the most important issue facing humanity in the 21st century, and nothing would be of greater importance than if the new Left internationalism was built around taking on the greatest challenge of our times—i.e., preventing Earth from becoming unlivable.
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A House Tax Break Would Help the Rich at the Expense of the Rest
Extending or increasing a deduction for pass-through businesses is likely to exacerbate economic inequality, while delivering no economic benefits in the long run.
May 22, 2025
House Republicans’ tax plan would expand a tax break in the 2017 tax reform for “pass-through” businesses that has overwhelmingly benefited high earners. “Pass-throughs” are entities structured so that profits are not taxed at the business level but instead at the owners’ individual income tax rate.
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act introduced a 20% deduction for Qualified Business Income (QBI) for pass-through businesses. House Republicans want to extend this tax break and increase it to 23%.
Contrary to proponents’ claims that the QBI deduction stimulates economic growth, economic research suggests a more nuanced and challenging reality. Recent analysis from our team at American University’s Institute for Macroeconomic and Policy Analysis (IMPA) reveals that extending or increasing the QBI is likely to exacerbate economic inequality, while delivering no economic benefits in the long run.
Extending the QBI deduction would systematically redistribute economic resources in ways that amplify existing inequalities.
Importantly, extending the QBI deduction would reduce government revenue significantly—by approximately 1.9% annually in the long run. Permanently increasing it would reduce revenue by 2.2% annually. These revenue losses represent a substantial fiscal challenge that cannot be overlooked.
Understanding Pass-Through Businesses
Traditional C corporations must pay the federal corporate income tax. Shareholders then pay individual income taxes on any profits distributed as dividends. In contrast, sole proprietorships, S corporations, and partnerships, as well as certain other types of businesses, are called “pass-throughs” because the businesses themselves do not pay taxes; instead, profits are passed through to individual owners, who then are taxed at their own individual tax rate. The QBI deduction reduces the amount of income from pass-throughs that is taxed.
According to Internal Revenue Service data, the number of nonfarm businesses organized as pass-throughs grew by 15% between 1980 and 2015, at which time more than 95% of all businesses were pass-throughs. But pass-through income is highly concentrated among top earners. Congressional Budget Office data show that, while income from pass-through businesses represents more than 20% of total household income for the top 1%, it accounts for merely 3% of income for the bottom 80% of households.
Think high-powered law firm partners or private equity fund executives. Without this tax break, they might owe the top marginal income tax rate of 37%. Under the current Republican proposal, they would owe just a 28.49% pass-through rate.
How Would Extending the QBI Deduction Affect the Economy?
Economic theory suggests that such tax deductions on business income have very little direct effects on real business activity if investment costs can be deducted from taxable income. And that is the case for pass-throughs. Because they can use accelerated depreciation provisions, taxes on their business income don’t change their investment decisions.
It’s not just theory: A recent study using tax record data finds no clear impact on investment, wages, or employment among pass-throughs that got an earlier tax break. A separate study found no impact on wages.
Even if tax breaks for businesses have no effect on individual business decisions, they can have negative effects on the economy as a whole. For example, such tax breaks reduce government revenue. If the revenue shortfall is financed by government borrowing, it can crowd out private investment. If the revenue shortfall is matched by reduced spending on public investment, such as scientific research, it is likely to reduce our standard of living in the long run. Such tax breaks also increase the after-tax required return to investors, which could cause businesses to distribute more profit, leaving less for investment.
We find that extending the QBI deduction would decrease government revenue by about 1.6% annually after 10 years and 1.9% in the long run.
Finally, such tax breaks increase after-tax profits and the market value of businesses, which raises the wealth of already-wealthy owners.
Our estimates using the IMPA macroeconomic policy model confirm that making the QBI deduction permanent would not boost economic activity, as is commonly claimed. Instead, we find that there would be a small decrease in GDP of 0.07% in the long run. Increasing the deduction to 23% would magnify the negative impact on economic activity.
Extending the QBI deduction would systematically redistribute economic resources in ways that amplify existing inequalities. Extending the QBI deduction would increase the share of the wealth owned by the top 1% by approximately 1.1%, while the bottom 50% would see their share fall by approximately 2.4%. Increasing the deduction, of course, redistributes even more wealth from the lower half of the distribution to the top.
Finally, we find that extending the QBI deduction would decrease government revenue by about 1.6% annually after 10 years and 1.9% in the long run. Increasing it permanently to 23% would reduce revenue 2.2% in the long run. How much is that? In the 2023 budget, 2% was enough to cover about three-quarters of the annual cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Or it would support 12 years of cancer research at 2023 levels.
To sum it up: QBI deduction costs taxpayers a lot, does not stimulate growth, and has regressive distributional consequences. There is no economic justification for its continuation.
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