Time for TR-Style Trust-Busting

The America First movement must focus on principles of subsidiarity, on the diffusion of power.

“Big Business and Conservatives Are Headed for a Divorce.” So declares a new headline from Bloomberg News, the media platform of Oligarch Mike Bloomberg. Truth be told, we are not “headed” for a divorce. It’s all-out open field combat at this point, a political and economic War of the Roses.

Now, make no mistake, these are salad days for Big Business. The year 2021 saw the highest jump in corporate profits since 1950. At the same time, real earnings for workers, adjusted for soaring inflation, have crashed on a monthly basis for over a year now.

Little wonder this widening chasm, this disparity, fuels a persistent and pervasive doom over the country’s mood. This chart shows Consumer Confidence melting to below the Spring 2020 lockdown lows, per the widely watched University of Michigan survey.

In stark contrast to gloomy consumers, Big Business struts. With a globalist toadie in the White House, mega-cap multinational conglomerates enjoy almost unchecked power. They feast at the federal trough as government borrowing and spending explode. Their credentialed class K Street lobbyists make certain that the exorbitant federal largesse – the inflationary profligacy that strips American workers of their buying power by the day – flows disproportionately into corporate coffers via contracts, carve-outs, and generous legal protections.

Small businesses enjoy no such advantages. Instead, small operators suffers the most immediate ravages of runaway inflation while trying to cope with the onerous government regulations and mandates that Big Business operatives gleefully ghost-write for their elected political puppets. As evidence, consider the latest findings from the National Federation of Independent Business, the largest group representing independent enterprise in America. NFIB reports overall small business confidence just slumped to below the long-term 48-year average of the survey.

The culprit? Inflation, of course.

As the chart below details, the percentage of small businesses reporting prices rising rather than falling has rocketed higher since Biden took office, reaching the most extreme levels for the survey since 1981.

So, as consumers and small enterprises struggle, Big Business dominates as never before. The lockdowns were amazing for America’s emerging Oligarch class and the monopolistic silos they control. The total wealth of the 10 wealthiest men in America more than doubled during the virus due to tyrannical mandates. Per OxFam analysis, these moguls jumped from a combined net worth of $700 Billion to over $1.5 Trillion in assets.

This unprecedented concentration of economic power naturally leads to political and cultural tyranny as well. The Oligarchs of Big Tech erected a digital iron curtain to control information to install their selected candidate, Joe Biden, in the White House. Specifically, a clear plurality of voters now concede that truthful reporting on the Laptop from Hell would have swayed the election against “Big Guy” Joe Biden had the story been uncensored, including 38% of Independent voters.

In addition, Oligarchs successfully exploited the virus as a beard to engage in a de-facto corporate takeover of the public election operations of key swing cities and counties, using unscrupulous and often unlawful methods to procure a pro-Biden vote. Mark Zuckerberg was especially aggressive on this front, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to successfully rig the vote in battleground states, ensuring his dependable stooge Biden prevailed.

More recently, these corporate behemoths insist upon forcing their toxic cultural Marxism upon America, especially traditionally minded families. Disney represents just one example of companies using the monopolistic platform channels – Google, Twitter, Facebook, cable TV – to insist that Americans normalize deviant behavior and indoctrinate children.

For many decades, Big Business seemed to actually guard American families, and mostly acted to protect social mores. Their motivation was surely corporate image rather than common decency. Nonetheless most traditionally oriented conservatives regarded large enterprises as allies. Now, there is no greater threat to America’s future than unchecked Big Business. How did this situation reverse to quickly, and what should be done?

First, recognize that Big Business made a tactical profit-motivated decision. As Vivek Ramaswamy, author of Woke, Inc observed: “Big business uses progressive-friendly values to deflect attention from their own monolithic pursuit of profit and power.” In other words, multinational CEOs made a devil’s bargain with the Left. The effective deal is: ‘we’ll support your cultural secular humanistic imperialism, and you give us free reign to operate soulless oligopolies and monopolies in concert with government.’

This arrangement, incidentally, forms the actual classic definition of fascism. The quasi-private sector still exists, but it functions only in accord with the overbearing state. The Oligarchs and the permanent political class dance in unison. Regular citizens, small enterprises…be damned.

How should the Right react? How do we fix this mess?