The Corporation As Tyrant

I've been watching the series Continuum on Netflix the past couple days.

The time travel, police drama and action aspects are fun, but every time I'm forced to think about the political assumptions in the series, I have to shake my head in disbelief and frustration.

The concept is that sometime in the near future, the governments of the earth became so ineffective and debt-ridden that they had to be bailed out by corporations. The corporations then took over the government and imposed a repressive fascist state.

The economic and historical ignorance on display here is so great that I feel daunted to even address it. I know that there are plenty of leftists who think that something like this is plausible, but I hesitate to even delve into discussion with them because it essentially means educating them on extremely basic principles of world history, economics and human nature. And that's even more tedious than it sounds with an unreceptive student who is convinced of the rightness of his beliefes.

Suffice it to say, for the not aggressively ignorant:

There have only been a couple brief times in human history that a corporation has acted as a government (probably in part because the "corporation" is a relatively new concept) and in neither case did corporate control result in a government that was notably repressive for its time period. The next closest thing was probably the very merchant-centric Republic of Venice, which was, arguably, one of the more enlightened societies of the post-Roman world.

The idea of corporate control breeding fascism is almost entirely a fictional, Hollywood construct. In fact, in the actual fascist states of the 20th century: Italy under Mussolini (the originator of Fascism), and Nazi Germany (a socialist state generally classified as fascist), far from the corporations taking over and controlling the government, the government suborned the corporations to serve government ends. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini could in any sense be classified as corporate stooges. Both were populist leaders.

The idea that if the board of directors at AT&T got its hands on the reins of power it would even want to turn the U.S. into a fascist state is ... well ... bizarre. And it's not at all clear how such a thing could happen in the first place.

Continuum's "corporations bailed out the government" story is ludicrous on its face. The amount of debt the U.S. (and other governments world-wide) is racking up dwarfs the gross revenues of the largest world coporations. Plus, the government controls the money supply. I'm not even sure what "bailing out the government" means. The U.S. government already is trillions of dollars in debt to corporations, citizens and foreign governments. The idea that some huge infusion of non-existent and probably worthless money from some corporations would be rewarded with control of the political system is, just really, really strange. We have many, many examples of what happens when government gets themselves in that deep. We really could only wish that something as benign as a corporate rescue could happen. What usually happens is utter economic collapse, and the corporations don't fare much better than anyone else, as they're among the ones raided to try to keep the ship of state afloat a bit longer.

Of course, even in Continuum, they may be trying to be fair-handed. It's the anti-corporatocracy group Liber8 that is made up of ruthless monsters that kill innocents with no hesitation. The cop serving the corporation, and what little we see of her world, seems to live a comfortable, prosperous existence and be a moral, caring person. We're told that freedom of speech and assembly is gone, but we're not really allowed to see it (at least so far -- I'm in episode 3). So maybe corporate government is a great thing (likely closer to the truth), or maybe they'll try to demonstrate and explain the downsides of corporate rule more in subsequent episodes.