Big brother is coming and its NOT the government.

In 1967, sociologist William Domhoff published a best selling work, Who Rules America. It was based on extensive research and on previous works, such as C. Wright Mills The Power Elite. It concluded that there was a dangerous concentration of power and wealth in the American upper class. More recent editions have brought the discussion up to date and include the rise of Donald Trump, and the trend toward overt appeals to white supremacy by the Republican Party. 

The book was widely read by adherents of the New Left, and helped many to understand that capitalism inevitably led to the concentration of wealth, and therefore power, in the hands of fewer and fewer very rich white men. I imagine that it was also read by corporate CEOs, bank presidents and their flunkies in academia. They saw the need to counter these ideas in order to crush the left and preserve the benefits (to them, that is) of their economic and political system.

The Powell Memo, written in 1971 by Lewis Powell to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was a blueprint for maintaining corporate domination of American democracy in response to the modest working class gains of the New Deal and Great Society. Linking up with the continuing resistance to school desegregation and revived white supremacy, it laid the basis for what has come to be known as neoliberalism.

The very rich, led by the Koch brothers, began funding all kinds of "academic" institutions to promote their economic, political and social perspective and change the narrative on issues from government regulation, anti-poverty programs, taxes, etc. They revived some of the core ideas from 19th century liberalism (often taken out of context), fell back on red baiting from the 1950s (in slightly more nuanced ways) and promoted the idea that the unfettered market should rule. They attacked unions as a major source of political opposition to their plans and moved to "privatize everything". And in the late 1970s they found the perfect shill for their neoliberal program in a grade B movie actor, Ronald Reagan.

Neoliberalism refers to market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating prince controls, deregulating capital markets and lowering trade barriers, and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, government influence in the economy. It was put forward as the solution of the economic problem of the 1970s, stagflation (the persistence of high inflation during a period of economic stagnation). 

Neoliberalism came to dominate US politics after 1980 as the Democrats joined with Republicans in accepting its basic premises. Neoliberals talked about "freeing" individuals from the yoke of government and how this would allow from massive productivity growth with the benefits "trickling down" to the working class.

The truth is that exactly the opposite has occurred over the past 40+ years. Productivity continued to grow at approximate the same relatively slow rate as it had in the 1960s and 70s (for reasons that I hope to write about soon) and the working class reaped none of the benefits of this meager growth. Instead the rich got richer and richer (runaway inequality) and the poor got mass incarceration and deaths of despair. And, as if it was throwing a finger at the neoliberals, the economy began experiencing deeper recessions (or depressions) primarily as a result of speculative growth in the now dominant financial sector. 

It's getting worse day by day. The "leadership" of the Democratic Party (local, state and national) has declared war on the progressives, despite the fact that it is the rightwing which is doing everything to thwart even modest reforms that the Party leadership supposedly wants. This war, combined with the failure to implement campaign promises (cancelling all student loan debt, for example) is leading to more and more young people and people of color to leave the party. The leadership seems to think that taking a stance on abortion rights will be enough to win in November. I'm afraid they are in for another surprise, just like in 2016.

All this as a lead to the article below. On my Facebook post I titled it "Danger Will Robinson, Danger" but since I already used that title twice for blog posts, I left it off this time.

From the Wilmington StarNews (with minor edits for brevity)

From what you buy online, to how you remember tasks, to when you monitor your doorstep, Amazon is seemingly everywhere. And it appears the company doesn’t want to halt its reach anytime soon.

In recent weeks, Amazon has said it will spend billions of dollars in two gigantic acquisitions that, if approved, will broaden its ever growing presence in the lives of consumers.

This time, the company is targeting two areas: health care, through its $3.9 billion buyout of the primary care company One Medical, and the “smart home,” where it plans to expand its already mighty presence through a $1.7 billion merger with iRobot, the maker of the popular robotic Roomba vacuum.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a company known for its vast collection of consumer information, both mergers have heightened enduring privacy concerns about how Amazon gathers data and what it does with it. The latest line of Roombas, for example, employ sensors that map and remember a home’s floor plan. “It’s acquiring this vast set of data that Roomba collects about people’s homes,” said Ron Knox, an Amazon critic who works for the anti-monopoly
group Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

“Its obvious intent, through all the other products that it sells to consumers, is to be in your home. (And) along with the privacy issues come the antitrust issues, because it’s buying market
share.”

Amazon’s reach goes well beyond that. Some estimates show the retail giant controls roughly 38% of the U.S. ecommerce market, allowing it to gather granular data about the shopping preferences of millions of Americans and more worldwide. Meanwhile, its Echo
devices, which house the voice assistant Alexa, have dominated the U.S. smart speaker market, accounting for roughly 70% of sales, according to estimates by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Ring, which Amazon purchased in 2018 for $1 billion, monitors doorsteps and helps police track down crime – even when users might not be aware. And at select Amazon stores and Whole Foods, the company is testing a palm-scanning technology that allows customers to pay for items by storing biometric data in the cloud, sparking concerns about risks of a data breach...

Even consumers who actively avoid Amazon are still likely to have little say about how their employers power their computer networks, which Amazon – along with Google – has long dominated through its cloud-computing service AWS.

And Amazon – like any company – aims to grow. In the past few years, the company has purchased the Wi-Fi startup Eero and partnered with the construction company Lennar to offer techpowered houses. With iRobot, it would gain one more building block for the ultimate smart home – and, of course, more
data....

For companies like Amazon, data collection is for more than just data’s sake, noted Kristen Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame. “You can almost see them just trying to paint a broader picture of an individual,” Martin said. “It’s about the inferences that they’re able to draw about you
specifically, and then you compared to other people.”

Amazon’s One Medical deal, for instance, has sparked questions about how the company would handle personal health data that would fall into its lap. Lucia Savage, a chief privacy officer at the chronic care provider Omada Health, said that (could allow) One Medical to be able to get data from other arms of Amazon’s business that could help it better profile its patients.

Unlike Meta and Google, whose focus is mainly on selling ads, Amazon might benefit more from collecting data because its primary goal is to sell products, said Alex Harman, director of competition policy at the anti-monopoly group Economic Security Project. “For them, data is all about getting you to buy more and be locked into their stuff."