How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It
June 15, 2023
A political journalist examines the assault on liberty at the hands of profit-seeking entities from Amazon to Zillow. Ahmari opens with a series of stories in which Russian, Chinese, and Iranian workers are subjected to indignities ranging from being blacklisted to unemployability to being required to attend a Putin speech or lose a day's pay. None of the events happened in those countries, he reveals, but instead in the U.S., where workers were required to attend a Trump rally and some seeking safer working conditions wound up unemployed. In theory, we freely consent to such abuse via the employment contracts and service agreements we sign. That consent, writes the author, serves as "the fig leaf covering over the sheer power of private individuals and entities to coerce us as consumers, workers, and citizens." The manipulation of working hours as a means of enforcing precarity is just one tool, but corporations have many more, including the fact that state governmental authorities are "prone to capture by narrow, private cliques and class interests at the expense of society as a whole." The dismantling of more or less protected or relatively high-paying work by the wreckers of private equity is largely protected by at-will laws and an ethos that if a worker doesn't like it, they can just get another job. As Ahmari shows, no corner of the economy is safe. For example, much of the work of rural firefighting and medical care is now controlled by private companies, most news sources are in the hands of monopolies, and most big firms--a case in point being the Sackler opioid empire--have the wherewithal to shop for judges who permit them to act without consequence. All this adds to "a political crisis that therefore requires a political solution"--one that has yet to materialize. A trenchant critique of neoliberal capitalism that offers pointed remedies.
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