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Informationen zum Autor Sohrab Ahmari Klappentext "The inside story of how our political class enabled an era of unaccountable corporate might that left ordinary Americans isolated and powerless-and how we can fight back-from the acclaimed author of The Unbroken Thread. Over the past two generations, U.S. leaders deregulated big business on the faith that it would yield a better economy and a freer society. But the opposite happened. Americans lost stable, well-paying jobs, Wall Street dominated industry to the detriment of the middle class and local communities, and corporations began to subject us to total surveillance, even dictating what we are, and aren't, allowed to think. The corporate titans and mega-donors who aligned themselves with this vision knew exactly what they were getting: perfect conditions for what Sohrab Ahmari calls private tyranny. Drawing on original reporting and a growing chorus of experts who are sounding the alarm, Ahmari chronicles how private tyranny has eroded America's productive economy and the liberties we take for granted-from employment agreements that gag whistleblowers, to Big Finance's takeover of local fire departments, to the rigging of corporate bankruptcy to deny justice to workers and consumers-illuminating how these and other developments have left millions feeling that our livelihoods are insecure. And he shows how ordinary Americans can fight back, by restoring the economic democracy that empowered and uplifted millions of working-class people in the twentieth century. Provocative, original, and cutting across partisan lines, Tyranny, Inc. is a revelatory read on the most important political story of our time"-- Leseprobe 1 The Rise of Private Tyranny It’s a favorite pastime of Americans, and American conservatives especially, to keep watch for various evildoers scheming to seize the public sphere and rob us of our historic liberties. But it’s the private sphere that occupies most of our time on earth. It’s where we toil, shop, socialize, and increasingly try to make ourselves heard. We tend to be much less vigilant toward the threats we face in that sphere. It wasn’t ever thus. Our Founding Fathers showed a keen awareness of how class interests might undo our highest ideals about liberty and checks and balances, even if they couldn’t foresee the magnitude of the problem today, writing as they were before the Industrial Revolution’s consequences had fully unfolded. Once the young republic of yeoman farmers gave way to an industrial powerhouse, it forced generations of American thinkers and statesmen to consider national ideals in light of material reality: What could “liberty” mean when chasmic gaps divided workers and their bosses, grasping small-time entrepreneurs and huge trusts? Would “limited government” necessarily yield a society free from coercion amid such eye-watering inequalities? Elite recognition of the painful gaps between ideal and reality, combined with pressure exerted by mass movements for labor and civil rights, culminated in a set of reforms in the twentieth century aimed at empowering the economically powerless. These reforms—chiefly, the New Deal—were sometimes half-formed and haltingly implemented. Even so, they gathered a great deal of prestige and became the subject of bipartisan consensus in the immediate postwar decades. More recently, and for reasons we will explore in depth much later in this book, these reforms have been undone partially or in full. In many ways, we have returned to the conditions of the pre-reform nineteenth century, characterized by vast disparities in power between the wealthy few and the asset-less many. Accompanying this material regression has been an intellectual one: The critical traditions of economic realism that gave rise to the previous century’s reforms have faded from memory and been replaced by today’s vacuous political rhetoric. To wrap our...
