A Commoners’ Manifesto 2. How corporations capture the state, part 2: determining what’s thinkable

Setting the agenda via think tanks, media and social connections

Tufton Street, Westminster, think tank epicentre. Image: Matt Brown/, CC BY 2.0

Contents

1. Think tanks

2. Corporate infiltration of education

3. Ownership of mass media

4. Astroturfing

5. Social connections and shared values

6. Conclusion
   

‘We can have democracy or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few. We cannot have both’ – US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (1933)

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This is one of a series of 24 articles that I hope to compile into a book – working title, The Commoners’ Manifesto: Neither Capitalism nor Communism. Here’s an introduction to the series. Comments welcome, including disagreement and debate.

In the previous article I showed how states were involved (and essential) in the formation of corporations, and how they’ve been entwined ever since.

This article covers the various ways that corporations set the political agenda, including what is and isn’t thinkable (i.e. what’s in the ‘Overton Window’). The next is about the more aggressive ways in which corporations have captured states.

I want to argue that corporate dominance wouldn’t be possible without states, and that their dominance has allowed them to capture and control the states that created them. But first, let’s look at the tools and strategies that corporations use to set the agenda and control what can and can’t be discussed.

The author finding himself in the Overton Window for a change.

Think tanks

A think tank is an organisation that conducts research and provides advice, with the aim of influencing policy. In the UK, ‘Tufton Street’ is a term used to describe the ecosystem of right-wing think tanks centred on said street, on Parliament’s doorstep. Examples include:

• The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA)

• The Adam Smith Institute

• The Taxpayers’ Alliance

• The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)

• Civitas

• Policy Exchange

• The Centre for Policy Studies

There are also global, corporate-funded, highly-influential think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations; and some don’t call themselves think tanks at all, like the Pacific Legal Foundation in the US, which exists to defend corporations against environmental, health and workers’ rights activism. Many call themselves ‘free-market’ think tanks, but I argue that if they’re promoting corporate interests, then they’re nothing of the sort.

Think tanks are infamous because of the way they translate corporate interests into policies that help subservient politicians gain office. I’ve underestimated their influence in the past, but I was wrong, which is why I’ve listed them first here. We now have right-wing activists boasting that the IEA ‘incubated’ a British prime minister.

This is how think tanks operate:

1. Corporations and billionaires fund them and give them their agenda.

2. They combine public opinion and corporate agendas to deliver voter-friendly policies.

3. Corporate media promote their policies and influence the public.

4. Political parties adopt the policies because they know they’re voter-friendly.

5. Just to be sure, politicians appoint think tank staff as special advisors.

6. The politicians get elected and implement corporate-friendly policies.

Here’s more detail on those steps:

1. Corporations and billionaires fund them and give them their agenda

Most critics focus on ‘Dark Money’ – political spending meant to influence elections or public opinion, where the original source of the funds is hidden from the public. Because the donor’s identity is shielded, wealthy individuals, corporations, or even foreign entities can spend large sums of money to influence politics without public accountability.

But I’d argue that it doesn’t matter if the source of funding is opaque or transparent – it’s still a vehicle for corporations to get their way.

See Who Funds You for how transparent think tanks are about where they get their funding. More here.

2. They combine public opinion and corporate agendas to deliver voter-friendly policies

Think tanks conduct research to understand the public mood, build a case for their agenda, and ultimately give politicians the confidence to act. They don’t have to push for policies that benefit particular corporations – just for policies that create and maintain a corporate-friendly environment. Conclusions of studies and drafts are often discussed with donors, whose opinions help shape the final report.

3. Corporate media promote their policies and influence the public

If public opinion doesn’t match the corporate agenda, corporate media, including social media, are used to tweak public opinion, helping shift the Overton Window towards their preferred policies. Think tank staff are interviewed in the media, including, of course, the state broadcaster in the UK, and presented as if they’re impartial. News outlets constantly use them as sources of information in articles and editorials.

It’s a very cosy relationship, as revealed by the head of the Adam Smith Institute: ‘Every Saturday, in a wine bar in Leicester Square, staff from the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs would sit down with Conservative researchers and leader writers and columnists from the Times and Telegraph to plan “strategy for the week ahead” and “co-ordinate our activities to make us more effective collectively”. The Daily Mail weighed in to help the lobbyists refine their arguments and ensure there was a supportive article on its leader page every time they published a report.’

4. Political parties adopt them because they know they’re voter-friendly

Think tanks that deliver policies that please corporate donors (securing fundraising) and can be sold to the public as popular (securing votes) gives politicians a ‘win-win’. For example, a tax cut for an industry becomes ‘job creation’, and a deregulation bill becomes ‘cutting red tape to lower prices’. When a politician cites a think tank study, they’re not admitting to helping a donor; they’re claiming to be following expert evidence.

Because think tanks have already done the research, written the policy papers, drafted the legal language and tested the public messaging, adopting the policy requires almost zero effort from the politician’s staff. When a bill is that easy to pass, raises that much money and pleases that many voters, saying ‘no’ becomes a politically risky choice. Politicians aren’t being duped. They’re fully aware of the game. They willingly adopt these policies because the system has aligned their survival instincts perfectly with corporate interests.

5. Just to be sure, politicians appoint think tank staff as special advisors

This is extremely common. George Monbiot used Liz Truss as an example. Her chief economic adviser, Matthew Sinclair, was formerly chief executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance; her interim press secretary, Alex Wild, was research director at the same organisation; her health advisor, Caroline Elsom, was senior researcher at the Centre for Policy Studies; her political secretary, Sophie Jarvis, was head of government affairs at the Adam Smith Institute. More examples in the FT and UCL about this.

6. Sure enough, the policies are voter-friendly, so they get elected and implement them

And they throw in a few more corporate-friendly policies too, like making corporate donations to think tanks tax-exempt if they’re registered charities, as many are (e.g. the IEA), but I guess it’s allowing the IEA to be registered as an unbiased ‘educational’ charity that’s the problem here. Corporations can then write off their donations to think tanks as charitable contributions on their taxes. And of course they make sure that there’s no legal requirement for think tanks to reveal their funders.

Corporate infiltration of education

The various ways that corporations influence state policies, as outlined in this article, also apply to the education system. States comply in shaping curricula and rules so that kids are compelled to wear a uniform, turn up on time, do as they’re told and accept the status quo. That way, it can be ensured that the education system produces passive consumers and reliable corporate employees who won’t rock the boat.

There are more direct ways that corporations infiltrate education. Funding is the obvious one. Corporate funding of university departments helps tailor research for corporate profit (or worse: militarisation and corporate profit) rather than the public good, and to shape student opinion and what’s seen as ‘common sense’. See here and here, and there are many more that you can easily find.

In the UK, universities are ranked according to what percentage of their graduates are in professional and corporate managerial positions with high salaries one year after graduating – amplifying the idea that the purpose of the education system is to produce successful capitalists. We’ll look at the ‘revolving door’ between corporate and state employment (including academia) soon.

It happens outside higher education too. Corporations provide education packages for schools on their topics of interest – for example, analysing NAFTA – but the materials provided will be pro-NAFTA. Packages contain some good stuff, maybe on recycling or fuel efficiency, but never any discussion of how an excellent public transit system might be better than over-reliance on the private car. The materials will probably be accurate, but biased; a prime example is the financial literacy programme provided by the Council for Economic Education, that is ‘primarily focused on measuring students’ grasp of neoclassical economics’. No wonder: have a look at their funders.

Packages often contain corporate advertising aimed at children. Corporations provide equipment for the school, but only if the school makes sure the kids watch the advertising – during lessons! They also pressure schools to install vending machines full of unhealthy fizzy drinks and sweets. See it in action in this policy for Chicago schools.

Ownership of mass media

As with most sectors of the economy, ownership of media outlets is becoming concentrated in a few mega-corporations, and radical alternatives to corporate control get almost no coverage in that media, for reasons that should be obvious. Apart from the fact that mainstream media is owned by corporations, it’s also funded by corporate advertising, and of course they’re not going to publish content that’s inimical to their own and their advertisers’ interests.

Specific corporations often fund sponsored content in the mainstream press to push on a particular issue that’s important to them, but mainly, it’s about shaping public opinion on what’s ‘common sense’, generally.

But ignoring alternatives is just the first stage. As Gandhi (maybe) said, ‘first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win’. In that case, when the corporate media is attacking commons, we’ll hopefully be well on the way to winning (we can but hope).

Jeremy Corbyn (ex-leader of UK Labour Party) knows about the media’s attack phase. This was the only genuinely anti-corporate potential prime minister in my lifetime, with a lifelong commitment to anti-racism, and yet even some of my right-on friends believed the corporate and zionist lobbies’ BS about his purported antisemitism. Zack Polanski (Green Party leader for England & Wales) will receive similar treatment, although at least they won’t be able to use the antisemitism approach with him (as he’s Jewish).

This corporate stranglehold had a counterweight: the arrival of social media meant that independent journalists, grassroots organisers, dissident economists and the rest of us heretics could bypass the big boys, reaching audiences that sometimes rivalled mainstream media. That window is now closing, if not already shut. The platforms – themselves corporations funded by the same advertising oligopolies – have transitioned from ‘open town squares’ to algorithmic gatekeepers. Their censorship isn’t about overt bans (although that happens); it’s about shadow suppression: demoting posts with ‘unverified’ corporate-critical content, reducing reach for anti-capitalist hashtags, and demonetising creators who deviate from corporate orthodoxy. On the same day, a misleading pro-corporate post about tax cuts might stay up, while a factual post about a case of corporate price-gouging is flagged as ‘misinformation’ because an advertiser complained. Worse, platforms outsource content moderation to AI and third-party contractors with no political accountability, causing activists to self-censor to avoid penalties. The result is that radical alternatives are algorithmically buried before they can even reach the ‘laughing’ phase. The corporate media doesn’t need to attack what 95% of users never see.

Newspapers and private TV stations will pull stories with a negative slant on the corporate sector (although they’ll often expose individual corporations), and push stories that give a positive slant to the worldview of corporate advertisers, because their livelihood depends on it. Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model describes how the business model of the corporate media is not delivering news to the public, but delivering the public to advertisers.

Researching and understanding political issues today is expensive in terms of time and energy. Most people generally can’t afford this time and energy (especially if they’re working more than one job to make ends meet), and so can easily be swayed by ads designed by consultants with lots of time, energy and resources. It becomes just another consumer choice and habit – choosing political parties the way we choose breakfast cereals. And sure enough, data shows that politicians attach virtually no weight to the views of people with low (or even middle) incomes.

Electable parties in the West have become brands, with policies that are generally socially progressive and economically neoliberal. This is in the interests of corporate investors. Socially progressive policies have no impact on their profits, but veering away from neoliberal economic policies does. It’s all about return on investment in the end. If $x investment helps deliver legislation that makes you $2x, that’s just good business sense in a corporate world.

Astroturfing

This one seems somehow sneakier and nastier than the other approaches, but it isn’t really – it’s just less subtle. Astroturfing is a play on the word grassroots. It’s a plastic, pretend, sterile, corporate version of grassroots activism and opinion, in the same way that Astroturf is a plastic, pretend, sterile, corporate version of grass.

The aim is to manipulate the public into believing that there’s mainstream support for proposals, ideas or candidates, when in fact, the support is manufactured. The intention is to affect public opinion, voting intention and therefore government policy. This is done in various ways:

1. Paying people to write pro-corporate letters to the press.

2. Planting paid corporate stooges in public meetings, posing as concerned citizens.

3. Hiring freelance gig-workers (usually in poor countries) to like, dislike and share posts to support or oppose specific policies or opinions on social media.

4. Releasing swarms of bots / automated accounts to do the same thing.

5. Creating fake social media accounts (‘sockpuppets’) to post on behalf of corporate campaigns.

6. Flooding politicians’ phones and inboxes with manufactured outrage.

7. Founding and funding ‘citizens’ groups to ostensibly campaign for the environment, but with very different aims – for example, to remove legislation that prevents drilling for oil or building supermarkets in green areas.

PR and digital marketing firms are usually hired by corporations or super-wealthy individuals to carry out this work, but foreign governments and intelligence agencies sometimes join in too.

The fake grassroots hirelings don’t need to know or care about the actual agenda, and neither do the PR companies. They’re just doing paid work. The agenda comes from the sponsor – usually corporate, with enough secrecy and deniability built in to avoid blame if the astroturfing is exposed.

There are now many more public relations employees than journalists on both sides of the Atlantic, giving corporations unprecedented capacity to shape public narratives. AI is, of course, making many of these techniques cheaper, faster and harder to detect.

Examples include PR firm Freshwater Strategy gathering business sector support for a group called Australians for Natural Gas, an astroturf group set up by gas company Tamboran Resources; and PR firm Burson-Marsteller creating the National Smokers’ Alliance, which placed advertisements and paid young activists to campaign for ‘civil liberties’ on behalf of Philip Morris.

PR Watch do a good job of exposing many more; and Wikipedia covers it well – including one example in a Shakespeare play!

Social connections and shared values

This is connected to the ‘revolving door’ between corporate and political jobs that I’ll cover in an upcoming article. Here I just want to talk about the similarities and connections between political and corporate elites, which create groupthink and render some ideas and approaches unthinkable and taboo.

Backgrounds

C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite (1956) is the classic starting point on the similar social and educational backgrounds of elites. He argued that in the US the leaders of the corporate, political, and military worlds formed overlapping elite circles. His argument was not that they created formal organisations or secret conspiracies, but that they shared similar educational backgrounds, social networks, clubs, institutions and assumptions about society and power.

Pierre Bourdieu (in Distinction, 1979) developed a more detailed explanation of how elite groups reproduce themselves. His argument was that elite interactions transmit cultural habits (including manners and confidence), vocabulary, networks, credentials and familiarity with institutions of power, which generate a similar worldview, sense of competence and understanding of what counts as ‘serious’ policy.

US and UK studies have outlined the similar routes via private schools and elite universities to corporate and political leadership. For example, in the UK, Eton College has educated numerous prime ministers, cabinet ministers, financiers and CEOs, and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge have long been recruiting grounds for both politics and business. In the US, similar networks exist around Harvard, Yale and Stanford Universities.

Friendships

These institutions foster lifelong personal networks and friendships that are maintained and expanded via dinner parties, shared holidays, charity galas, sporting events, exclusive clubs, alumni associations and family connections. Elite groups also tend to cluster geographically, in neighbourhoods close to centres of political and financial power. Georgetown, Washington DC is a hotspot for elites in the US, for example.

In those circles, antipathy towards corporate power would be career suicide – although anyone who might hold those views wouldn’t get to be in those circles in the first place. Representatives of small businesses, NGOs, unions or citizens’ groups are not part of these networks and don’t have the ear of politicians in the way that corporate CEOs and majority shareholders do. They (and we) just don’t have the same levels of wealth that brings these elites together. When was the last time you had a former prime minister holiday on your luxury yacht?

Conferences and events

Possibly the best-known coming-together of corporate and political elites is the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, although there are many others, including the more secretive Bilderberg Meeting and the apparently drunken, wacky Bohemian Grove. As well as corporate leaders, Davos is attended by IMF and World Bank heads, prime ministers, presidents and senior military officials.

In Superclass, David Rothkopf writes about his experiences at Davos, mixing with global corporate CEOs, politicians, bankers, media moguls and military leaders. He sees them as a dominant class with no loyalty to any particular country, who run the world for their own benefit (and therefore the benefit of corporations). But there was no condemnation – quite the opposite. There was a lot of toadying, and talk of states as a counterbalance to corporate power, rather than the other side of the same coin. He considers corporate capitalism a given, and so the reformist solutions he outlines require these turkeys to vote for Christmas.

More on how the shared experiences of elites narrow the range of acceptable thought can be found in Colin Crouch’s Coping with Post-Democracy, Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void and G. William Domhoff’s The Corporate Rich and the Power Elite in the Twentieth Century.

Conspiracy?

Politics has become more about managing systems than debating alternatives. Alternatives aren’t generally understood or desired. In elite circles, you don’t have to ask if someone believes that unions or redistribution of wealth are good ideas. It’s just assumed that they’re not. Their money, friendships, interests, comfort, lifestyles, status and legitimacy all depend on support for the corporate status quo. And underneath the elites is a wannabe-elite layer of compliant middle class professionals who realise that their comfort and status depends on the status quo, and they defend it accordingly.

But is there conspiracy? Of course there is. Anyone who’s been part of any organisation knows that there’s corruption and conspiracy everywhere. Are the people who manage to claw their way to the top of corporate or state hierarchies likely to be different? No, I’d suggest that they’re likely to be worse, if you think about the qualities required to get them there. But conspiracy isn’t central to maintaining the corporate order. It can be done without explicit coordination. Don’t think of it in terms of corporate leaders bribing politicians to implement beneficial legislation, or doing anything that might put them in jail unnecessarily. Why would they, when everyone knows what sort of things need to happen to maintain the environment that produces elites?

Conclusion

In the last article we looked at how states formed corporations, and how states and corporations have been hand-in-glove ever since. In this article we looked at the various ways that corporations set the policy agenda and the limits to what can be discussed, and in the next we’ll look at the more direct ways that corporations capture and control states. After that, we’ll look more at what corporations get in return from compliant states.