These companies are as complicit as the far right in threatening US democracy | Robert Reich

Corporations are underwriting the thuggery of Trump and his allies - all because they want to pay as little tax as possible

In 2016, when clashes with taxi drivers broke out in 2016 in Paris, Uber's then-chief executive Travis Kalanick texted fellow executives that violence guarantees success" in what was a key market for the company.

Uber leveraged the violence against its drivers to win sympathy from regulators and the public, as it also did in South Africa where Uber drivers were burned when their cars were set on fire. (This look inside Uber's internal deliberations came from records Uber lobbyist Mark MacGann turned over to the Guardian.)

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com