In The Nation: Ron Knox on Growing Anger at Corporate Power

For The Nation, Ron Knox dives into the growing movement of localized resistance to corporate power, and explains why the political establishment needs to take note. He writes, 

“It was a warm, late summer night, September 11, and hundreds of residents had packed the spacious chambers of City Hall in College Station, Texas, to collectively protest what has become a common occurrence in America: the corporate strip-mining of our resources, our communities, and our future.

Less than a week earlier, the city announced that it was considering selling 200 acres of city-owned land on the south end of town to a developer planning to build one of the largest commercial developments in the city’s history.

Data centers are notoriously bad neighbors; their massive banks of servers, generating the computational power needed to run generative AI or mine cryptocurrencies, require immense amounts of water and electricity to operate. Developers and city staff had struck the deal in back rooms without public input, and residents had just days to react to a plan that would, in effect, hand over much control of the city’s water and power to a privately run server farm.

So, on vanishingly short notice, residents packed the chamber. Nearly 80 folks spoke at the six-hour marathon meeting, the majority against what they saw as an unnecessary giveaway to a predatory developer, all for a scant 45 permanent jobs and a onetime, $30 million payout to city coffers. “I want the sale of property to do things that benefit me and my family and the community,” local resident Jeffrey Herron said at the hearing, according to local media. “It seems like this sale benefits a very few people. The timing was terrible. We only had four days to figure out a solution for this. We do not want this in our neighborhoods.” By the time the hearing ended after midnight, the city council had voted to kill the deal.

Scenes of public resistance like the one in College Station have played out in the halls of local governments around the country, where residents have organized to fight back against corporate invasions of their neighborhoods and communities. Resource-thirsty data centers, often backed by Amazon, Google, and other tech titans, have been a frequent target, for good reason. But pockets of people-led resistance have risen to fight Amazon warehouses, dollar stores, Live Nation concert venues, agriculture monopolies, private equity landlords and more—all outcroppings of what residents increasingly view as extractive corporate power that inflict real harms on communities and their resources.

The growing collective outcry against corporate control suggests there’s something far larger going on: Americans, fed up with decades of declining fortunes, have found a common and culpable enemy in the powerful companies that control so much of our lives and politics. While populism has been rising in America for years, this moment feels different. Resistance is happening everywhere, not just in liberal big cities or in communities known for their activism. The broad backlash against corporate power today bridges partisan lines and channels a philosophy that has been core to America since its founding. It is the worldview of anti-monopoly, brought to life in city halls and community hearings nationwide.”

Read the rest of the piece, including compelling stories from cities and towns across the country, here.

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