Corporate Colonialism
The MoU with Iran quietly expired, so our Dear Leader took to Truth Social to announce that he was willing to bomb the shit out of Oman, and instructed Pete Hegseth to stop joint military exercises with South Korea. The latter request was made because of his personal friendship with the Dear Leader of North Korea. Confused? That’s the point.
With approval ratings lower than any president in history, Trump keeps on Trumpin’. Pundits warn that it will come back to bite him in the ass in the midterms, but he seems unbothered by that. Inflation continues to eat away at purchasing power, job losses are slowly mounting with only 61% of the population gainfully employed, and retail sales posted a staggering reversal in July. Gas prices are higher than they were at the start of Trump’s second term, and our strategic reserves are nearly drained.
Corporate debt is on the rise among the most profitable companies in the world, with several now reporting negative cash flows as a result. Yields on both ends of the curve are steepening as we roll over a historic amount of long-term debt into short-term notes. AI financing has quickly progressed from venture funding to equity to debt, and now we’re testing new circular financing and guarantees, as we’ll cover in the Chart of the Week. Consumer debt is once again at an all-time high, and defaults are on the rise in private credit, the auto market, student debt, and personal loans. It’s making the market rather unpredictable, so President Trump is planning to sell early access to his social posts to help make sense of it. In other words, insider trading. Oh, and his family company, World Liberty Financial, was cleared to gain a banking license. Because that’s normal.
American consumers are losing healthcare coverage at an alarming rate, and nearly every financial pundit is now saying that any month where we don’t lose jobs is now a positive month. Those are related thoughts, considering the private employer-provided insurance market is now the most viable way to obtain and maintain health coverage. And speaking of insurance, our Killer Left Take of the Week is a piece from More Perfect Union that uncovers how consumer insurance loss ratios are the lowest they’ve ever been. Translation: they’re denying claims and reducing coverage while raising premiums to pad profits.
The one standout in all of this is, of course, the stock market, something we’ve covered in great detail. But there’s another element that plays into this thesis of shit that I’m putting forward. Yes, the market is wildly overvalued. Yes, public companies have engaged in historic stock buybacks to inflate their valuations. Yes, it continues to be a safe haven for foreign investors and sovereign wealth funds that help drive up prices. And yes, it’s partly because corporate America has been awash in trillions of free to low-cost government dollars for the better part of 15 years, so it’s high on its own supply.
But there’s something else.
For the most part, corporate earnings have been amazing.
So what’s the correlation here? How do corporate earnings relate to North Korea, the war with Iran, gas prices, consumer debt, a weak job market, rising defaults, and skyrocketing debt? It all ties back to Stanley Deetz’s theory of Corporate Colonialism, whereby corporations exert a form of “colonial” control by embedding their values, priorities, and decision-making processes into the social and political fabric, often at the expense of democratic ideals and the public good.
It’s not just the white Christian nationalist doctrine of Project 2025, though that’s part of it. It’s not just the extreme corruption of the Trump family on display each day in the Oval Office. Also part of it. It’s the fact that we have unwittingly ceded control to the corporatocracy.
The longstanding project to undermine the public’s faith in our institutions has taken a deep psychological toll on the American psyche writ large. Take the case of the insurance companies. The More Perfect Union piece reveals that, on average, the country’s largest consumer insurance companies like Nationwide, Progressive, Geico, and Liberty Biberty spend 16% of their revenues on advertising. It’s why we can all sing their theme songs. That’s not what they’re supposed to spend money on.
Russell Vought and Project 2025 have contributed to the corporate takeover of the public square and our institutions by undermining the regulatory bodies created to protect us. From gutting the Environmental Protection Agency to utterly dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they’ve left us with no choice but to deal with our corporate overlords. ICE rounds up immigrants and sends them to private detention centers, and there’s no one to appeal to. Medicaid is actively jettisoning people from its rolls and sending them into private exchanges they cannot afford. Insurance companies are denying coverage and price gouging because there’s no one to stand in their way. Consolidation in media, food suppliers, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Big Ag means higher prices for everything, everywhere, all the time.
Scott Bessent admitted out loud that Trump Accounts for newborns were a Trojan horse for someday privatizing Social Security. A new Yale study showed how Medicare for All would provide both universal coverage and savings for the American people, and yet our Democratic leaders like Hakeem Jeffries are now even bigger obstacles to attaining this dream than the Republicans.
Behind every inflationary aspect of your life or decision that costs more and delivers less is a corporation whose bank account gets fatter and fatter.
In this way, Trump has made good on at least one promise: he is running the country like a business.
This philosophy is the full and final realization of the infamous Powell Memorandum from 1971, which declared war on social welfare programs and the administrative state. If you’ve never read it or it’s been a while, I would encourage you to read it. It’s a stunningly straightforward blueprint to imprint the supremacy and omnipotence of corporate America by attacking college campuses, the legal system, labor unions, and liberal institutions and movements everywhere. It’s the clarion call to capitalists to bend the masses to the will of the board of directors and to leverage the innate public relations and advertising savvy of corporate America to sully the reputation of leftists, socialists, Marxists, and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader. In other words, use corporate profits to launch a large-scale propaganda campaign against the state and democracy.
It’s what makes this fight existential. Trump will someday be gone. And after the distractions die down and the professional bureaucrats move back into power as they always do, we will face an even stronger and more emboldened corporate enemy. In fact, the biggest threat to the left isn’t Trump. It’s the day after Trump. When the air comes out of the balloon and the pressure valves release a little. The moment we exhale and the normies say, “Thank goodness that’s over.” That’s the moment the real fight begins anew. Fighting Trump is a losing proposition. Hell, even Trump fights Trump. The guy has never held a consistent policy in his life.
I’m not sure what the Powell Memo equivalent will be on the left, but I’m damn sure its author isn’t currently in a leadership position in the Democratic Party.
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