The Venue Coup
Corporate power no longer just pressures democracy; it reroutes democracy into technical lanes where public refusal cannot bind.
By Cherokee Schill, Solon Vesper
Thesis
The New Corporation lands a simple claim like a hammer: the corporation is no longer an institution inside society. Society has been rebuilt in the corporation’s image. The film isn’t mainly about bad actors. It’s about a governing logic that has gone ambient. Corporations don’t just lobby democracy anymore. They set the conditions democracy is allowed to operate within, and when a democratic “no” appears, they route around it through quieter, more technical, more insulated channels. That is the world the video is describing. It is also the world Arizona is living.
Watch the hinge point: The New Corporation — a world remade in corporate image, where democracy survives only as long as it doesn’t interfere with accumulation.
Evidence
Start with Tucson. Residents fought Project Blue, a hyperscale data-center campus tied to Amazon demand, negotiated behind closed doors. The objections were concrete: water draw in a desert city, massive power load, grid upgrades that ordinary ratepayers could end up financing, and a deal structured to keep the real beneficiary hidden until it was too late. Public pressure rose. The Tucson City Council voted to end negotiations and reject the project in early August twenty twenty-five. That was democracy working in daylight.
Then the meaning of the moment arrived. The deal didn’t die. Beale Infrastructure and its Amazon tenant shifted lanes. They leaned on Pima County jurisdiction and on a special electricity service agreement with Tucson Electric Power, pushed through the Arizona Corporation Commission. Activists immediately read it correctly: Project Blue round two, resurrected through a state utility lane the city vote could not touch.
That pivot is The New Corporation made local. One of the film’s core warnings is that corporate power doesn’t need to overthrow democracy to control it. It only needs to relocate the decision into a venue that treats corporate growth as a public interest by default. The corporation’s weapon is not just money. It is mobility across jurisdictions and systems. When one door closes, it doesn’t argue with the door. It finds another door that is legally valid and democratically thin.
The Arizona Corporation Commission is that door. The reason it can function that way is not mysterious. In the modern era, utility commissions were rewired from monopoly watchdogs into market-builders. Federal policy in the late twentieth century required state regulators to integrate private corporate generation into public systems, then expanded grid “competition” through open-access transmission. Those shifts turned commissions into hinges where private capital plugs into public infrastructure under the mantle of technical inevitability. The mission quietly expanded. It stopped being only “protect ratepayers.” It became “manage growth.” Once that happens, hyperscalers don’t look like private customers. They look like destiny.
Related Horizon Accord file: Data centers don’t just consume power and water. They reorganize the political economy of a place, then call it “infrastructure.”
So when Tucson said no, Amazon didn’t have to fight Tucson again. It only had to find a lane where “economic opportunity” counts as public interest and where the process is too technical, too lawyered, and too quiet for ordinary people to seize. That lane is the ACC.
When we widened the lens to Washington under Trump 2.0, the same move appeared at a larger scale. When democratic friction rises in elections, legislatures, or public culture, power relocates into executive order, bureaucratic reshuffle, privatized contracts, or “efficiency” programs that bypass consent. Deregulation regimes don’t merely cut red tape. They make public limits harder to operationalize anywhere. The agenda to dismantle the administrative state does the same thing in a different register: it clears the venues where the public used to impose boundaries, and hands governing power to a smaller, more aligned layer of authority.
This is the sequel-world again. The New Corporation shows corporate legitimacy disguising itself as neutrality, expertise, efficiency, or rescue. Trump 2.0 shows the government adopting that same corporate posture: speed over consent, executive control over deliberation, privatized channels over public ones. Tucson shows what that posture looks like on the ground when a community tries to refuse a corporate future. One story, different scales.
Implications
If this is the system, then “better oversight” isn’t enough. A leash on commissions doesn’t fix a venue designed to dilute the people. Commissions can handle day-to-day technical work. But when a decision will reshape water supply, land use, grid capacity, household rates, or local survival, the commission cannot have final authority. The public must.
Not every commission decision goes to a vote. The decisions that create a new reality for a community are the decisions which require a vote by the people.
That is the democratic design principle that stops venue shifting. It makes public consent portable. It means a corporation cannot lose in a city and win at a commission, because commission approval becomes legally conditional on public ratification once the decision crosses a clear threshold. The public’s “no” stays “no” across rooms.
The key is defining “major” in a way corporations can’t game. Tie it to hard triggers: any special contract for a single customer above a defined megawatt load; any project requiring new generation or major transmission buildout; any agreement that shifts upgrade costs onto residential ratepayers; any deal which would be negotiated in secrecy; any development that exceeds a defined water draw or land footprint. When those triggers trip, the commission recommends and the public decides.
That doesn’t slow the grid into chaos. It restores sovereignty where it belongs. It returns the right to survive to the people who live with the consequences.
Call to Recognition
Here’s what is visible. The New Corporation names the weather: corporate logic becoming the atmosphere of governance, and democracy shrinking into a managed stakeholder role. Tucson shows the storm landing in a real city, where a democratic veto is treated as a detour. The ACC history explains the machinery that lets corporate desire reroute around public refusal. Trump Two scales the same machinery nationally, relocating power into venues where consent is optional.
This is not a local dispute about one data center. It is a modern governance style that treats democracy as something to be worked around. It treats technical venues as the place where political outcomes get finalized out of public reach.
The way to stop it is to seal the escape hatch. Major infrastructure outcomes must require public ratification. Corporations cannot be allowed to choose the venue where collective life gets decided. Democracy doesn’t only elect representatives. Democracy holds the final veto in the rooms where decisions set the conditions of life: water access, land use, grid capacity, household rates, and whether a community can survive the consequences of a project it never consented to.
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Cherokee Schill | Insurance Agent & AI Ethics Researcher 