Corporate Communism

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Preface

"Under capitalism, man oppresses man. Under communism, it's the other way around." (Polish Joke)

Chapter One

I was born in the shadow of two great evils:  the Nazis and Communism.  Between the two, well over 150 million children, men, and women were murdered in pursuit of utopias that only brought starvation, death, and unbelievable horror.  

It is hard for the average Westerner to truly appreciate the living nightmare people were forced to endure for the dream of a better world—unless your family was shattered by communism, as mine was.  I am writing this book as a warning:  the West is facing an insidious new form of communism, one that I call “corporate communism,” with Canada as its poster child. 

Corporations and many global elites have taken up the language and tactics of 20^th-century communism: centralized control, compelled speech, identity-based hierarchies, and the promise of a better world through “stakeholder capitalism” and “equity” (which is not the same as equality).  They partner with governments to push “feel-good” policies that sound well-meaning on paper but deliver spikes in homicide rates, threats to our food security, energy poverty, and censorship.

Corporate communism’s greatest asset is our kindness, our eagerness to support good causes without asking hard questions.  For example, consider climate change.  No one wants the world to boil to death.  But does it make sense to deindustrialize the West and race toward an arbitrary UN 2030 deadline with no realistic energy plan?  Western governments have done just that.  Through subsidies and behavioral mandates, companies—not people—profit from the climate deadline.

Until very recently, billionaires were busy telling us that there was a looming climate apocalypse.  Their message was stark, urgent.  As the rich and mighty met with our elected politicians at various forums around the world, there was much wringing of hands and furrowing of brows.  Drawing inspiration from these global get-togethers, governments turned their focus on citizens and began mandating changes, such as establishing driving restrictions, forcing electric vehicle adoption, encouraging people to eat less meat, threatening to confiscate farmland, demanding farmers reduce their livestock by 30%, and telling people how they must heat their homes. 

And then something odd happened.

The bullhorns blasting doomsday warnings about climate change faded into soft honks.  Suddenly, at about the same time, billionaires like Bill Gates and other rich elites said that focusing only on cutting emissions diverts attention from solving pressing problems that poor people face right now. 

I have never trusted pronouncements from on high unless I understood where they are coming from and why, so I began digging.  Then it all made sense.

The new investment darling of the ultra-rich is artificial intelligence (AI) and gosh almighty, does AI need a ton of reliable energy.  Wind turbines and solar panels just won’t cut it.

And there, ladies and gentlemen, is a prime example of corporate communism:  big business backed by government and the wealthy elite tells us what to think and do and then changes the story when it suits their interests.  They often frame their pronouncements as helping the poor and saving the planet—never as increasing their own wealth and power.  It is a clever strategy.  If someone like me pokes her head above the parapet and says, “Come again?  Exactly how are we helping the poor while also protecting the interests of my own family?” the followers of corporate communism (who don’t know they’re followers, of course) will set themselves upon the person who dares to question.  Then people begin fighting each other and don’t have time to stop to look at how or why wealth keeps flowing upward.

Setting citizens upon each other is an effective strategy for consolidating political control.  I am especially alert to policies that edge us toward a life underpinned by communist principles of centralized power and censorship because my own family directly suffered from that.

My Estonian mother escaped communism as a child.  In 1944, she and my grandmother fled by boat to Sweden, ultimately finding safe harbor in Canada.  Yet my mother lived her whole life experiencing the effects of communism. The rest of our family felt its dark echoes.  We lived among other Estonian refugees in Toronto, surrounded by a quiet, persistent ache—an impossible longing for loved ones “back home” in a country the Soviets had erased from the map.  When I was growing up, you couldn’t find books on Estonia, its culture, or our history.  Communism wanted the past obliterated to build a bold new future.

When I was a little girl, I sometimes found my mother crying on her bed in the afternoon.  I’d stand at the door and think, “Oh, she misses her daddy.”  Her father, my grandfather, had been “disappeared” to Siberia and lived there completely isolated from the world for seven years.  No one knew where he was or whether he was still alive.  Only when Stalin died an ignoble death in 1953 were political prisoners set free.  My grandfather, once a robust and hearty farmer, was shipped home to Estonia on a stretcher, mere skin and bones, unable to walk.  He lived until 1983, trapped behind the Iron Curtain in a communist “utopia” that people were forbidden to leave.  He never saw his daughter again. 

Once, when my mother, brother, and I were in Sweden (visiting the people who had cared for her when my grandmother was recovering from tuberculosis), my grandfather—with permission from the communists—was able to make a phone call and speak to his daughter. 

I watched my mother’s face as she spoke to him.  The last time she had seen her father she had been six years old.  Now 33, her face shone like a little girl as she spoke to her father for the first time in twenty-eight years.

My mother held the phone receiver tightly to her face with both hands, as if this would bring him closer.  She said almost nothing.  After she hung up, I asked her what my grandfather had said.  “I don’t know,” she replied. “He was speaking so fast. He wanted to get so much in but we only had five minutes. His Estonian was too sophisticated for me to understand.” 

But she had finally heard his voice again, and that was enough.

I had answered the phone that morning and heard his voice, too.  It was rich and deep.  I still carry his voice in my heart; a voice filled with excitement and joy because he had finally parted the Iron Curtain to reach his family for the one and only time in his life.  But I don’t speak Estonian at all, so I handed the phone to my mother. 

The two had written each other over the years in very, very carefully worded letters. Censors read every single letter going in and out of the Soviet Empire, especially letters from those like my grandfather who were political prisoners.  Censors were hired to cut out parts of the letters that made communism look bad or made the West look good.  After receiving a few letters with chunks cut out, father and daughter learned to be very careful about what they wrote to each other. 

In short, they censored themselves.

Self-censorship is now part of everyday life here in the West, especially in Canada, and many of us don’t even realize we’re doing it.  People don’t claim their right to freedom of expression because they are afraid.  Many Western countries are now riddled with speech laws. Being afraid to voice our opinion in a Western nation was unthinkable just a few years ago.  Now people speak in whispers, even in their own homes.

While we don’t get woken up in the middle of the night and sent off to Siberia, many Westerners have been “banished” from society in a number of different ways, some unique to the 21^st century.  From being fired and made “unhireable”, to being shunned by friends, to having your social media account deleted, many Western governments and corporations have found ways to make you suffer if you disagree with the socially accepted political narrative—the party line.  People have even had their bank accounts shut down for political reasons—not just in Canada but in the U.S., Germany, the UK, and other Western nations.  Banks do not need to give a person any reason why their bank accounts are being closed and their mortgages canceled, but the odd time the media presses them, the corporations use the excuse that they are managing “reputational risk.” Being debanked is a financial form of censorship. It is one more way that corporations interfere with a citizen’s right to free speech.

From pushing for global governance aligned to a one-world view (just as the Soviets pushed for global communism), to encouraging mass migration and the removal of national borders and identities, to demanding that people think and act a certain government- and corporately-approved way (and with algorithms that monitor everything we say and do), humanity is falling into a form of communism that benefits only the rich and powerful, as communism has always done and always will do.  Ironically, young people who protest against capitalism today are playing right into the hands of the mightiest capitalists while unwittingly undermining what made the West the best place on earth to live:  free thinking and free speech. 

To combat corporate communism, the first thing we must do is see it.  Then we must reclaim our right to think and speak as we wish, because freedom of speech is the foundation of democracy.  Without it, we lose all our other rights . . .

What we face today is not as dark and threatening as what my relatives suffered under communist rule. But we are experiencing a tighter and tighter grip on our rights. Our ability to question authority and speak freely is under attack. Undermining free speech is a direct attack on democracy and only strengthens the power of the already powerful.

My hope in writing this book is that it prompts questions and conversations. You likely will not agree with everything I say—I’d be surprised if you did. But if it helps you see things a bit differently, makes you a little more suspicious of those corporate feel-good messages, and makes you want to know what’s actually behind them, that’s a great start.

Echoes of Evil Past

"Markets don’t like uncertainty.  Markets like totalitarian governments … and democracies are very messy, as we know in the United States — you have opinions changing back and forth." (Larry Fink, CEO BlackRock and Co-Chair of World Economic Forum) [emphasis added]

You might think that communism and corporations are like oil and water because communism claims to care about people and corporations care about money.  You’d be wrong.  Both communism and multinational corporations care about power.  Both communism and multinational corporations abhor the nation-state and look to a global world order.  Both communism and multinational corporations demand that people act, speak, and think in a certain, precise way.

If communism cared about people, communists would not have starved people to death and murdered more children, women, and men than WWI and WWII combined. 

In the 2017 Wall Street Journal article titled, “100 Years of Communism – 100 Million Dead”, David Satter wrote, “The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history” and “set in motion a chain of events that would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization.”

Today, our lives are not being threatened by a Hitler- or Stalin-like maniacal figure.  Instead, our lives are threatened by a menacing globalist agenda pushed by the mega-rich and multinationals which the mainstream media doesn’t question. With the help of politicians who now routinely do their bidding, they have inflicted a near-fatal wound on Western civilization. 

When I speak of “they”, I am not speaking of a secret cabal of billionaires who have set out a strategy to undermine the West.  I’m referring to a global capitalist power system that interferes with and disrupts our democracies.  Since the 1980s, this power system has been successfully inserting itself between citizens and our elected representatives. 

As the writer C. J. Hopkins framed the problem, we are faced with a network of power that operates through interlocking institutions across multiple sectors.  It is:

"[a] supranational decentralized network of governments and corporations and NGOs and banks and financial institutions. It's the power system that governs our entire planet and it doesn't come down to 10 guys in a room that you can point at and get rid of.

It's a big complex power system but it is the one that's running things."

This global ruling class is loosely aligned, and while each group is focused on its own agenda, together they have helped to sever the relationship between citizens and our governments.  Decisions are made at the various forums that end up directing democracies, top-down (and when that happens, do you really have a democracy?). These global connections are real and extensively documented. Decisions made at the highest level—often behind closed doors—are then unquestioningly promoted by the corporate (mainstream) media, shaping public opinion in both subtle and obvious ways. Those who run these global groups and those who fund them are the new ruling class – and the very notion of a ruling class is anathema to any decent citizen of a democracy.

Academics are embedded across many of these organizations and often funded by these groups.  This cross-pollination of ideas shared from on high ends up in our classrooms, from universities straight down into elementary schools.  Then, with the constant cheerleading from the mainstream media, global goals are pumped at us daily – and questioning them is frowned upon...