There has always been friction between corporations and democracy. As Rachel Maddow notes in her eloquent podcast Ultra, in the 1940s, it was good for certain large American businesses and the Congressmen who supported them to bolster Hitler’s murderous fascist regime—just as it was very good for certain German businesses, many of which benefitted from Jewish slave labor. Nothing has changed. Despite being creatures of the democratic state, big business didn’t care then that democracy had enabled its existence, and it doesn’t care now. The elite merchant class has always to a large extent seen democracy as an impediment to its power.