Exposed: Top 7 Companies Undermining Global Democracy – The Shocking Truth Revealed!

Giant tech firms, colossal oil companies, and private equity firms are among the top corporations benefiting from their control over media and technology, speeding up the climate crisis, privatising public commodities and services, and violating human and workers’ rights, as exposed by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) on Monday.

The ITUC has identified seven major corporations as “corporate underminers of democracy” that oppose government efforts to hold them accountable and are led by ultra-wealthy individuals who financially back right-wing political movements and leaders.

“This is an issue about power, who possesses it, and who decides the agenda,” said Todd Brogan, director of campaigns and organising at the ITUC, in an interview with The Guardian. “As trade unionists, we recognise that unless we’re organised, the employer dictates the workplace agenda, and as citizens in our nations, we know that unless we’re organised and demanding governments that truly address people’s needs, it’s corporate power that will dictate the agenda.”

The “corporate underminers of democracy” are:

1. Amazon.com, Inc.
2. Blackstone Group
3. ExxonMobil
4. Glencore
5. Meta
6. Tesla
7. The Vanguard Group

ITUC selected these seven companies based on existing reporting and research, as well as discussions with allied groups like the Council of Global Unions and the Reactionary International Research Consortium. These seven companies were emblematic of a wider trend, and the confederation announced that it would persist in adding “market-leading” companies to the list.

“While these seven corporations are among the most flagrant underminers of democracy, they are certainly not the only ones,” ITUC stated. “From state-owned enterprises in China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, to private sector military contractors, and regulation-evading tech startups, the ITUC and its partners will persist in identifying and tracking corporate underminers of democracy and their connections to the far-right.”

Amazon topped the list due to its “union busting and low wages on multiple continents, e-commerce monopoly, egregious carbon emissions from its AWS data centers, corporate tax evasion, and lobbying at the national and international level,” ITUC noted.

In the U.S., for instance, Amazon has responded to attempts to hold it accountable for labor violations by challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board. Despite its founder Jeff Bezos expressing liberal views, Amazon’s political donations have bolstered the right by opposing women’s rights and antitrust efforts.

“There is another force, one that is unelected and seeks to dominate global affairs.”

Blackstone is the world’s largest private equity firm and private real estate owner. Its CEO, Stephen Schwarzman, has donated to right-wing politicians, including former U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign. It finances fossil fuel projects and the destruction of the Amazon and profited from speculating on the housing market after the 2008 financial crash.

The United Nations special rapporteur on housing stated that the company used “its significant resources and political leverage to undermine domestic laws and policies that would indeed improve access to adequate housing.”

ExxonMobil was included in the list largely for its history of funding climate denial and its ongoing lobbying against necessary environmental regulations.

“Perhaps the most striking example of Exxon’s disregard for democratic deliberation was its corporate commitment of nearly four decades to withhold from the public its own internal evidence that climate change was real, accelerating, and driven by fossil fuel use while simultaneously financing far-right think tanks in the U.S. and Europe to inject climate skepticism and denialism into the public discourse,” ITUC stated.

Glencore, the world’s largest commodities trader and the largest mining company by revenue, has faced campaigns from several civil society and Indigenous rights groups for its anti-democratic policies. It has allegedly funded right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia and anti-protest vigilantes in Peru.

“The company’s undermining of democracy is not disputed, as it has in recent years pled guilty to committing bribery, corruption, and market manipulation in countries as diverse as Venezuela, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and South Sudan,” ITUC reported.

As the world’s largest social media company, Meta’s platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram have roughly as many users as those projected to vote in 2024 worldwide—nearly 4 billion. However, there are concerns about its impact on those elections as right-wing groups from the U.S. to Germany to India have used Facebook to recruit new members and target marginalized groups.

“Meta continues to assist right-wing political interests in weaponizing its algorithms to disseminate hate-fuelled propaganda globally,” ITUC stated. “Increasingly, it has been engaged in avoiding national regulation through the deployment of targeted lobbying campaigns.”

Tesla was included in the list due to its “belligerent” anti-union stance, as well as the outspoken anti-worker and right-wing politics of its CEO, Elon Musk. Regarding Musk, ITUC noted:

As the owner of the social networking platform X (formerly Twitter), he responded to a user’s allegations about a coup in Bolivia—a country with lithium reserves considered highly valuable for electric vehicle manufacturers like Tesla—by stating, “We will coup whoever we want. Deal with it!” He has committed to donating $45 million per month to a political action committee to support the reelection campaign of Donald Trump, and sought to build close relationships with other far-right leaders, including Argentina’s Javier Milei and India’s Narendra Modi. Musk has also re-platformed and clearly expressed his support for white nationalist, antisemitic, and anti-LGBTQ+ accounts since taking ownership of X.

The Vanguard Group, an institutional investor that funds many of the other companies on the list, including with billions in stock held by workers’ retirement plans, is No. 7 on the list.

“In effect, Vanguard uses the deferred wages of workers to lend capital to the very same companies complicit in undermining democracy at work and in societies globally,” ITUC stated.

ITUC is exposing these companies in part to advance its agenda for a “New Social Contract” that would ensure “a world where the economy serves humanity, rights are protected, and the planet is preserved for future generations.”

It and other workers’ organizations plan to push this agenda at international gatherings like the U.N. General Assembly and Summit of the Future in New York this week as well as the COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan in November. Yet part of advancing this agenda means raising awareness about the opposition.

“There is another force, one that is unelected and seeks to dominate global affairs. It pushes a competing vision for the world that maintains inequalities and impunity for bad-faith actors, finances far-right political operatives, and values private profit over public and planetary good,” ITUC stated. “That force is corporate power.”

However, Brogan told The Guardian that labor groups, when organized across borders, could fight back.

“Now is the time for international and multi-sectoral strategies, because these are, in many cases, multinational corporations that are more powerful than states, and they have no democratic accountability whatsoever, except for workers organized,” Brogan said.

To that end, ITUC is gathering signatures for a petition for a global treaty holding corporate power in check.

“For international institutions like the United Nations to reflect the democratic will of workers, they must be willing to hold these corporate underminers of democracy accountable,” the petition reads. “That is why we are calling on you to support a robust binding international treaty on business and human rights, one that addresses the impact of transnational corporations on the human rights of millions of working people.”