American Oil-Igarchy: How the Corporate Assault on Liberal Democracy and the Climate Are Connected

The new millennium has seen the maturation of a distinctly harsh brand of neoliberal transnational capitalism (Robinson 2018, 15). Facilitated by the decades-long expansion of the neoliberal agenda for global free trade (market liberalization), an end to most governmental regulatory practices that protect both people and the planet (deregulation), the takeover of former public services and state agencies by capital (privatization), and reductions in state spending on social and environmental protection programs (fiscal austerity), the result is an unmitigated ecological disaster. Some forty years and more of neoliberal capitalist development has resulted in nothing short of a worldwide environmental catastrophe, including a global climate crisis that threatens the very future of humanity and other species (Jamail 2019). It has also produced obscene levels of economic inequality and a vast “wealth defense industry” for the world’s ruling classes (Collins 2021), while vast sectors of the poor suffer major social dislocations (Faber and Schlegel 2017). These impacts have led to a wide range of popular struggles, strikes, mass protests, riots, and political mobilizations aimed at challenging the neoliberal agenda and unjust capitalist development models (Almeida and Martin 2022; Kalb and Mollona 2018). Some of the most dynamic actions are found in the increased use of grassroots organizing, civil-disobedience, land occupations and seizures, electoral strategies, ecotage, marches, rallies, and even direct confrontations by environmental justice (EJ), ecological, and climate change/justice movements all over the world (Dietz and Garrelts 2014; Huber 2022). The contemporary reinvigoration of more authoritarian neoliberal regimes of capitalist development is a response to the growing fury of these struggles. As stated by Ian Bruff (2014, 113), “...we are witnessing the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism, which is rooted in the reconfiguring of the state into a less democratic entity through constitutional and legal changes that seek to insulate it from social and political conflict.” The function of authoritarian neoliberal capitalism is therefore “to reinforce and rely upon practices that seek to marginalize, discipline and control dissenting social groups and oppositional politics rather than strive for their explicit