Corporate Communism

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Preface

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

I was born in the shadow of the Soviet Empire. Ordinary people who believed in the noble notions of communism ended up living under a soul-destroying ideology that claimed to deliver a better world but only brought starvation, death, and unbelievable horror.

It is hard for the average person living in the West 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.

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.

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. My mother lived the rest of her life inside its aftershock. The rest of our family felt the dark echoes of communism, too. 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 easily find books on Estonia, its culture, or its history. Communism always wants the past obliterated to build a bold new future.

Once, when my mother returned to Sweden with my brother and me—visiting the people who had cared for her while our grandmother recovered from tuberculosis in the late 1940s—my grandfather, with permission from the communists, was able to make a telephone call and speak to his daughter. I watched my mother’s face as she spoke to him. The last time she had heard her father’s voice, she had been six years old. As she stood there listening to him, my mother’s face shone like that of the little girl who had played in the fields at the family farm before she was bundled up and placed on the horse-drawn cart, forced to say goodbye to her father forever.

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 couldn’t understand what he was saying, 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 had been 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 of us have been “banished” from society in a number of different ways, some unique to the 21st century. We have been unjustly fired and made “unhireable,” shunned by friends, and deleted from social media. Many Western governments and corporations have found ways to make us suffer if we 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.

Being debanked is a financial form of censorship, and a very powerful one.  It is one more way that corporations interfere with a citizen’s right to free speech.

By corporate communism I mean the merger of state power and concentrated capital that uses the language of equity, safety, and the common good to narrow what citizens may question. It is not the gulag. It is a system that rewards compliance and punishes dissent while claiming to be kind. I define the term fully in Chapter One.

Corporate communism’s greatest asset is our kindness—our eagerness to support good causes without asking hard questions. For decades, our democracies have been steered toward the interests of major corporations, banks, asset managers, and very wealthy individuals. Young people who believe they are dismantling capitalism often strengthen the very firms and funds that profit from the new rules.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.

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.It may feel overwhelming, and it may seem that there is little we can do. I disagree, though as a child I felt the same hopelessness about the Soviet occupation of my mother’s homeland. After holiday meals, my brother and I would be sent to bed, but we’d sneak back down for a pickle and then sit on the stairs behind the railings and listen in on the grownups. Dinner guests who also had family trapped behind the Iron Curtain would sit drinking vodka into the night speaking passionately in Estonian. I still understood a bit of the language then, but my brother didn’t. Turning to me, pickle in hand, he looked up and said, “What are they talking about?”

“They’re talking about when Estonia will be free again,” I said, adding with a mix of despair and disgust, “Silly old people!” It was hopeless. Didn’t they understand that? Hopeless.

But I was wrong.

On August 23, 1989, two million Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians stood together, arm in arm, forming the longest human chain in history—and sang for their freedom and independence. Weaving across the three countries through each of their nations’ capitals, the chain stretched for 420 miles (675 kilometers). And they won, exposing a visible crack in Soviet power. Months later, the Berlin Wall came down and soon the world could see that the Soviet Empire was crumbling.

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 not “nice” no matter what some people claim. It is a direct assault 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.

Pure communism involves the state’s seizure of business assets. Corporate communism does not. It is capitalism on steroids using the tools of communism—speech control, one accepted narrative on a given topic, and severe consequences for those who disagree. Moneyed and multinational interests tightly align with politicians to shape society. The result is a disempowered citizenry growing poorer, hungrier, and less secure. Powerful actors set the direction at the global level, national governments implement it, the media shapes public consent, and ordinary citizens are left reacting to decisions already made.

When the rich and powerful shape both our conversations and government policies in such a way that we are permitted only one way of seeing the world or else we face personal consequences, voilà, say hello to corporate communism. 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 ultra-rich and multinationals, an agenda that has evolved over the years and absorbed the communist tools of speech control and forced narratives. Mega corporations have convinced governments that big problems must be solved by big people at a global level. Mega corporations, the politicians who now routinely do their bidding, and the mainstream media, which promotes globalism, have together inflicted a near-fatal wound on Western civilization.

Throughout this book, I speak of “they” but note this: 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 us as citizens and our elected representatives. Over the years, I’ve noted a pattern of decisions and activities where groups of wealthy people and/or their well-funded NGOs have sought global policies that serve them while pretending to serve the common good.....