How’d we get here?

This morning, I woke up to the news that Congress had officially passed the big bad budget bill, sending it to Trump to sign this afternoon. You probably know the basics: It’s unprecedentedly cruel, it gratuitously screws our climate, it makes the rich richer by making the poor poorer.

It’s also a corporate wishlist decades in the making.

Coincidentally, today Corporate Accountability posted a blog I’ve been drafting for a while. It’s pretty timely. It’s about how this government of and by corporations and billionaires, which feels like a sudden coup, has actually been a project of years, if not decades, if not centuries. Check it out below, and if your interest is piqued, head over to Corporate Accountability’s blog to read the whole thing.

Robbers in the (White) House: A brief, outrageous, and true history of corporations & U.S. democracy

Originally written for Corporate Accountability

The image on the cover of TIME Magazine was striking: Elon Musk sits behind the desk meant only for the president of the United States, staring into the camera lens, a half frown-smirk playing across his lips.

For TIME, the image was meant to illustrate a “War on Washington” waged by Musk—the wealthiest person in the world, at the helm of billion-dollar corporations like X and Tesla.

But it signifies much more than that: the image is a tidy encapsulation of how the corporate drive to reshape the U.S. government has reached a new high water mark, even as Musk himself steps back.

Corporations are no longer simply interfering in, influencing, or lobbying the government; corporations have taken over the government.

How did we get here?

When you think about the corporate takeover of democracy, what comes to mind first?

Perhaps it’s the Koch Brothers and their shadowy network of well-funded, pro-corporate, anti-democracy think tanks and PACs.

Perhaps it’s the moment in 2017 when Trump chose the CEO of ExxonMobil as his Secretary of State, all but saying the quiet part out loud: that the U.S. government prioritizes Big Oil’s interests over all others abroad.

Or perhaps it’s Citizens United v. FEC, the notorious Supreme Court decision in which the justices ruled 5 – 4 that spending money is a form of speech and that corporations can’t be limited in “independent” political spending—meaning corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections.

There’s no question that all of these are manifestations of an increasingly brazen corporate coup. But the roots of corporate power over our democracy were planted much farther back—not years, not decades, but centuries ago.

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Read the rest of this post on Corporate Accountability’s blog.