Just because it has happened literally everywhere else there has been one party rule, that doesn’t mean it will happen here!
3 Likes
This is pure rich person hubris. The overriding attitude of today’s rich Americans is that they are fuctional monarchs, just selected by the Capitalism Gods to rule instead of by the Big Guy In The Sky God. They worry about losing their status the way we worry that maybe gravity will start pulling up tomorrow instead of down.
1 Like
Yes. Some very classic “lining up behind the bully” playground dynamics as well.
that’s not exactly how putin started, and russia simply doesn’t have the same corporations as the west. us government is more likely to be shaken down by exxon, facebook, or haliburton, than the other way around.
Letting women die of preventable stuff and forcing them to have babies they can’t take care of is terrible for business but Bezos isn’t going to call up the SCOTUS and ask them to knock it off. The billionaires are not coming to save us, they’re going to run off to private islands and let all this shit burn.
1 Like
What a terrible precedent. This is completely fucked.
This is just plain wrong. Without rule of law, the government will just shake them down with bogus legal actions, enforceable by the military.
3 Likes
It’s already started:
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy warned a group of private companies that Republicans will “not forget” if they comply with a request to preserve documents from the House select committee investigating the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
“If these companies comply with the Democrat order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States,” he said. “If companies still choose to violate federal law, a Republican majority will not forget and will stand with Americans to hold them fully accountable under the law.”
1 Like
I think they’ll only do that if the corporations don’t pay their bribes.
lol
not sure which part you are disagreeing with. putin needed the power of security forces behind him, he then spent years bribing judiciary which wasn’t itself an institution yet, then he started killing journalists and promoting state tv, and only then he could start eliminating media and oligarchs he considered rivals.
in also took a very deep voter pessimism and a voting fraud apparatus that could falsify just enough votes to sell parliamentary and gubernatorial seats. not to mention he installed a puppet who removed term limits and stepped aside, and only after all that did he have enough power to just plain shakedown big oil/gas producers of trillions in wealth.
we both agree that usa is on the path to authoritarianism, but let’s not underestimate how many steps it takes to get there.
They got a servile court that will let any state that wishes to trample any constitutional right they wish to without even having the decency to make a ruling on the subject. With the Texas model in place for writing laws that trample rights in a way that no one can sue over, why not enact laws that let citizens seek bounties on people who post supposed critical race theory in social media? Or publicize videos of cops murdering Black people? Or who block traffic in a protest? Or who give aid to suspected illegal immigrants? Or attempt to vote while being non-white? Or find trans people in a public bathroom?
2 Likes
It was Putin and his predecessors who picked who was going to become a wealthy oil/gas/anything producer.
Yeah, this.
It’s gonna be just like Trump trying to be pro-vax at his rally and getting booed. Except when that time comes, it’s going to be a lot worse for the corporations than just booing.
putins friends can run multiple oil companies into the ground better than trmp. Yukos was the most successful oil company in russia, and putin had to seize it for pillage and plunder.
putin only had one predecessor and it’s mostly believed that that yeltsin government stayed out of biz way in the 90s which brought a fair amount of wealth to the industry.
It’s been less than a year since Donnie Dumb Dumb, the most popular Republican since Reagan, and open admirer of totalitarian dictators, was actually the President. Seems pretty crazy that we still have people insisting that totalitarianism can’t happen in America. It’s been happening since 9/11.
1 Like
it is happening here, but don’t expect that it will exactly the same way as it did in russia. totalitarianism in america is the long game.
also, there’s elections in russia in 3 weeks and putins puppet party is looking pretty panicky right now.
The GOP is telling telecom companies to not turn over phone records from Jan 6, because a “GOP majority will remember”. I think you might be underestimating how compliant corporations will be to just say on the fascists’ good side.
Fascism and corporate interests are natural allies anyway. Considering the huge % of American corporate leaders that are pure uncut sociopaths, they may prefer an active partnership with fascists. Not because it’s good for the company or shareholders, but because a fertile environment for power seeking, wealth extracting monsters.
lol