Item One: Netflix censors an episode of a show critical of Saudi Arabia and does not apologize for it.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is reportedly defending the company's decision to remove an episode of Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj from its Saudi Arabia service following a kingdom complaint. Hastings' remarks occurred at a New York Times DealBook conference Wednesday.
"We're not in the truth to power business, we're in the entertainment business," Hastings said, according to a tweet from NBC's Dylan Byers.
Item two: the CEO of Uber says the murder of a journalist by Saudi Arabia was a mistake on par with a coding error and should be eventually forgiven:
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has said in an interview with Axios that the murder of the journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia was a “serious mistake,” before comparing the incident to the death caused by Uber’s self-driving car and adding that “people make mistakes, it doesn’t mean that they can never be forgiven.”
The defining characteristic of the early twenty-first century is going to be the fight between democracy and oligarchy/fascism. Everything, including whether we can deal appropriately with the climate crisis, is going to be decided by this contest. So far, oligarchy has been winning hands down.
Income inequality, monopoly economics, corruption, etc. have either helped create the conditions that allowed right wing populism to thrive or have out right created right-wing movements in much of the world. One of the ways it does so is by corrupting the economies of democracies. Companies like Netflix and Uber find themselves compromised by Saudi money, money they need to complete in an oligarchic/monopolistic system. They thus become willing partners in defending indefensible actions or in compromising liberal values in order to retain that patronage. Corruption becomes normal, accepted. Saudi Arabia is hardly the only country that tries to leverage their wealth into this kind of influence. China, Russia and others do some version of this as well.
Capital controls would be one way to help prevent this. We normal think of capital controls as a means of keeping capital from fleeing and thus destabilizing a small country. But capital controls can also be used to keep money form flooding into a country. And in this case, money coming into US companies is obviously destabilizing. Whether it is through prior approval of certain investments (similar to the national security investment exceptions we already have in place in certain industries) or taxes on investment originating from certain locations, we can slow the influx of cash from governments or organizations aligned with governments that do not share our small-l liberal values. It is not enough by itself, of course, but it is a part of the solution.
And solutions we need. Under the misapprehension that a free market is the same thing as an unregulated market, we have allowed money to override the needs of a free society. Money is not money, not in the amounts that gather at the top of our economy. Money is power. And we need to reign that power in. Because right now, that power is destroying our free society, one investment, one company, one corruption at a time.