Throughout my writing about fascism, capitalism, and climate catastrophe, I've worked pretty hard to focus attention on what I consider the most fundamentally important and horrifying reality of our time. That being that no matter how hard it may be for us to accept, the billionaire ruling class in the Pig Empire, and the governments they own, fully intend to kill billions of people to keep extracting capital on a boiling planet in the face of a climate apocalypse. Furthermore, given that democratic societies full of people who probably don't want to die so billionaires can keep doing capitalism as the planet turns to ash are highly unlikely to continue facilitating that behavior, this same ruling class is busy transforming our nations into fascist police states to facilitate that outcome.

Naturally, that sounds like a conspiracy theory to people who wouldn't want to believe it anyway even if they knew it was true, so until folks watched Elon Musk literally buy Trump's way to the White House this past fall, this idea was pretty hard to communicate to my readers; although I certainly kept trying. In my opinion, the evidence has been all around us for years now; from the funding behind fascist movements and political parties in the Pig empire, to the capitalist control of supposedly "liberal democratic" governments across the "West" that continue to facilitate the mass extraction of fossil fuels we cannot burn without murdering potentially billions of people, while professing to care about climate crisis. As far as I'm concerned the only plausible explanation for the ruling class and political actors to do absolutely nothing about climate crisis and fossil fuel dependency while simultaneously hardening borders, curtailing civil rights, and building out massive police states hell bent on squashing protestors, is because they intend to take humanity and a biosphere that supports 8B+ human lives right off the ecological cliff, and they know the folks doing the dying are probably going to try and oppose that.

As we crash through climate objectives and rocket towards an environmental apocalypses in the middle of a mass extinction event however, it turns out that banks and government bodies are more or less starting to admit this genocidal bullshit is the actual plan, out loud. As this April 8th article from Kate Aronoff writing for The New Republic demonstrates, portions of the banking sector and highly-respected bipartisan think tanks are now openly arguing climate targets are a joke and it's time for a new phase of aggressive climate imperialism as the planet descends into a warming-induced apocalypse because nothing, not even the end of the world, can get in the way of churning profits to enrich a ruling class that already owns everything around us.

https://archive.ph/0dvEn

The Bleak, Defeatist Rise of “Climate Realism”

"The brand of climate cynicism being voiced by the Council on Foreign Relations is more novel. In an essay outlining the founding principles of the Climate Realism Initiative, Varun Sivarum—the program’s director and a former top aide to Biden-era U.S. climate envoy John Kerry—describes a zero-sum, catastrophically climate-changed world where “other countries will single-mindedly prioritize their own interests” and the United States should do the same. Facing climate-fueled mass migration “of at least hundreds of millions of climate refugees [that] could upend the international order, and increasingly grisly natural disasters,” the U.S. “should provide the support it can, cooperate with countries on building resilience capabilities, and protect its borders,” as well as “prepare for global competition for resources and military positioning that is intensifying in the melting Arctic.”

Look folks, this isn't a partisan political question of which party is better, or worse, on the issue of climate crisis; this is about a billionaire donor class that controls policy and politicians in both parties, and why that reality means we were always speeding towards a hydra-headed crisis of capitalism, climate catastrophe, and fascist authoritarianism as the awful reality that nobody "in charge" is going to stop a crisis that will kill billions from happening, set in. The Trump regime certainly represents an acceleration of the process towards climate apocalypse, but it is also the product of that very same process; we are here because rich people mean to kill us all to keep getting richer, and fascism is how you create societies where that is possible. Not just because fascist ideology allows the construction of vast police states, but because the very same "us and them" hate-fueled logic that drives fascist movements to power, is also an absolute necessity for a climate imperialism political paradigm on a boiling planet with diminishing resources.

While its certainly true that part of why so much of the US mainstream establishment, particularly in the private sector, is willing to collaborate openly with the fascist Trump regime is because they prefer fascism to sharing, it's also true that there are clear material benefits to legitimizing and supporting the Trumpenreich regime. In what reasonable people would describe as "open corruption," Federal Election Commission data shows that the administration has dropped or frozen federal enforcement cases against "at least 17 corporations that donated to the president's inaugural fund."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-corporations-inauguration

'See How This Works?': Trump Drops Cases Against Corporations That Funded His Inauguration

"Public Citizen found that corporations facing federal investigations or enforcement lawsuits donated a combined $50 million to President Donald Trump's inaugural committee. Trump raised a record sum of $239 million for his second inauguration, the new FEC filings show.

"Corporations facing federal lawsuits and investigations aren't giving millions to Trump's inauguration out of the kindness of their hearts," said Public Citizen researcher Rick Claypool. "They are trying to buy good will. And when you're a corporation under investigation or facing prosecution, that means the government dropping enforcement actions against you. In some cases, it may even mean receiving pardons in cases in which guilty pleas have already been entered, or retractions of settlements already entered into."

Bank of America, Capital One, Coinbase, DuPont, and JPMorgan are among the corporations that donated to Trump's inauguration and subsequently had federal enforcement cases dismissed.

Public Citizen noted that Google, which donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural committee, could benefit from the Trump Justice Department's decision during an ongoing antitrust case to scrap part of a "proposed breakup plan requiring Google to sell off AI businesses."

As the article notes, dropped federal enforcement cases against corporations that paid millions to kiss the ring at the Klepto Kaiser's inauguration isn't the only way large corporate actors like Apple, Google, and Coinbase have directly benefited from fascist collaboration. Apple in particular must be delighted with Trump's decision to exempt most of its imports from his absurd tariffs; which seems like a ridiculously good return on its investment of a million dollars for Der Leader's inauguration. Finally, while I personally don't care that much about the regime's decision to monetize the Easter Egg Roll by accepting corporate sponsors, it does speak to the crass levels of greed and corruption the administration and its lawless president are willing to engage in.

On some level I understand that right now it's hard to care that much about bog standard open corruption between the Trump regime and corporate actors happy to normalize and facilitate fascism for five points a share. The Pork Reich is snatching protestors off the street, fighting a war that doesn't exist against a gang that isn't invading us while trafficking migrants to a torture prison in El Salvador, and Elon Musk is firing thousands of federal workers in a scheme to pay for billionaire tax cuts that will absolutely get people killed. There's a lot going on, and "rich capitalists are doing something terrible for their own financial benefit" almost doesn't rate as "news" in an environment like the one we're living in.

The fact is however, it's precisely because of all the other evil fascist shit is going on that private sector collaboration with the Trump regime is such an important story. As I've explained elsewhere: fascism costs American society a horrifying toll both financially and in terms of human suffering, but the installation and operation of a fascist regime can be quite profitable for some. These companies, many of whom also contribute to Republican election funds and political action committees, absolutely know what Trump is and what he means to do because Downmarket Mussolini and his minions say the quiet parts out loud on the regular. They just don't give a fuck, and are happy to help a fascist government normalize its authoritarian activities and odious ideology by touting the support they receive from respected American corporations; as long as doing so pays off on their bottom line.

There are many reasons for the rise of a successful fascist movement in an America that has always embraced what today we recognize as fascist ideology; trying to pin it down to one specific factor is a fool's errand. But if and when the history of this era is written, I'm willing to bet that rampant greed and a ruling class that lusts for power over the rest of us will rank pretty highly on the list of contributing factors to this political moment.

Archived: https://archive.ph/tXEjr