Corporate congress

Dystopia rarely arrives by force. It builds itself incrementally, normalising each compromise until the structure is complete and resistance feels utterly futile.

In a report released to coincide with the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, "Resisting the Rule of the Rich", Oxfam notes that in 2022 nearly half of the world's population, 48 per cent or 3.83 billion people, lived in poverty. One in four people worldwide faced moderate or severe food insecurity, a figure that rose by 42.6 per cent between 2015 and 2024, including 92 million people in Europe and North America. This deprivation coexists with unprecedented concentration at the top: more than 3,000 billionaires now control over $18 trillion in wealth, a dominance that increasingly translates into informational and political power.

Over half of the world's largest media companies are billionaire-owned; nine of the ten largest social media platforms are run by just six billionaires; and eight of the ten leading AI companies, overlapping with media platforms, are billionaire-controlled, with just three commanding nearly 90 per cent of the generative AI chatbot market. A 2023 study cited by Oxfam found that more than 11 per cent of the world's billionaires have held or sought political office, making them at least 4,000 times more likely than ordinary citizens to do so, a perception echoed in the World Values Survey, where nearly half of respondents believe the rich routinely buy elections in their country.

But after recounting these troubling facts, the report collapses the distance between the astute and the naïve with surprising speed. It embraces "limitarianism", calling for a ten-million-dollar cap on individual wealth, and urges global resistance, even while conceding the rising body counts such resistance has recently produced. This is where intellectuals reveal their blind spot: an inflated sense of their own agency and a failure to grasp the depth of the rot. Moral urgency is mistaken for political power, and leverage. Who will bell the cat, and how?

Let us now turn to an illuminating speech delivered at the World Economic Forum. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney took the forum by storm. What stood out to me was this rare admission: "We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works."

By the last line, I assumed the bargain no longer works even for those who were once privileged. Western political theory was never blind to exclusion; it assumed distance. In Political Order in Changing Societies, Samuel P Huntington framed mass political participation itself as a source of instability rather than a democratic good, a position he later reinforced in Who Are We? by treating cultural homogeneity, not popular agency, as the condition for political order. For the people outside the tiny bubble of privilege, this bargain hardly ever worked. Want examples? Here are some: Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), the Dominican Republic (1965), British Guiana (1953/1963), Chile (1970–1973), Haiti (2004), Venezuela (2002), Honduras (2009) and Bolivia (2019).

Now, let us focus more closely on the growing influence of wealth itself. If the Oxfam report has one tragic flaw, it is that it counts billionaires while largely neglecting millionaires. If billionaires function as today's superpowers (three thousand and counting), then millionaires increasingly operate as middle powers, capable of shaping outcomes, narratives, and institutions below the threshold of outright domination. Mr Carney, however, still assigns that role to state actors like his own, an assumption that already feels outdated.

In the sci-fi thriller series, Continuum, a corporatocratic and oligarchic business elite overthrows the governments of the North American Union, ostensibly to combat instability and anarchy, and installs a Corporate Congress in their place. The result is a technologically advanced, high-surveillance police state, justified by efficiency and enforced through cutting-edge technology. The premise is blunt: when politics fails, corporate power does not merely influence the state; it can overthrow it.

Now, the right question to ask, in the immortal words of Shrek's donkey: are we there yet? The reaction to President Trump's return to office, his choice of wealthy cabinet members, and policies such as tax exemptions suggest that we may be. That impression deepens amid the current uproar over his Board of Peace, approved through a UNSC resolution, even as critics warn that it could one day rival or supplant existing multilateral institutions. What is noteworthy here is not the board itself, nor the plausibility of such claims, but the casual inclusion of billionaires across its various tiers, as if their presence requires no justification at all.

But how did this come to pass? Were these stakes not clearly highlighted by people like this scribe before the 2024 US presidential election? The debate about competition versus national champions was repeatedly raised. But what did the democratic elite (read the Democratic Party elite, the media and the pundits) do? Evict their own democratically chosen nominee, maim and gag the other. Obama knew, Pelosi knew, CNN knew what they were doing. So why all the song and dance now? And Obama's responsibility goes beyond the immediate. His light regulatory touch fostered this new elite. I have mentioned how Elon Musk became a billionaire from a millionaire during his tenure. The same is true for most of them. Obama is living proof that politics no longer works as a check on the elite but is instead a vehicle of elite formation. Once he was part of the Sanctum Sanctorum, his priorities changed.

Tell the disaffected of the world that a dystopia has arrived and they will ask you: when did it ever leave? The people of this part of the world have always known that they need to dance to the tunes of the powerful to get their bread. When power is a hundred storeys above your reach, what difference does it make who sits in the corner office at the top? They are best suited to adapt. If that was not enough, there is China, with a model of sovereign equality and remarkable patience. Why should the children of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine or elsewhere bombed by George Bush and Obama miss such an order? Keep your elite dystopia to yourself. It does not sadden us. For us, it has been the corporate congress since the days of the East India Company.