There are two distinct - yet interconnected - systems that are ruling over the people: the government system and the corporate system. These two systems behave as if two nations allied in a fight against a common enemy: the people. The goal of this war is not to destroy the enemy, but to achieve its surrender and subjugation.
With the government system, we have a democratically elected oligarchy. With the corporate system, we have a dictatorship within the ruling ranks, and an accidental style of "referendum politics" that lets consumers cast votes through the products and services they choose to purchase. But the people do not get to elect the rulers within the corporate ranks, nor do the lower ranks within corporations get to democratically choose their leaders: it's a strictly top-down approach to ruling. In extreme circumstances, shareholders and investors in corporations may get the opportunity to participate in remedial actions aimed at ousting an executive who has failed, but their influence is seldom more granular than that.
Now, because these two differently flavored systems are joined together in a fight against a common enemy, there is a good degree of cross pollination that is occurring. And the stronger the interdependencies grow, the worse off the people are and the more they become effectively disenfranchised. This leads ultimately to fascism - the collusion of government and corporation to subvert the will and interests of the people in order to further their own pursuit of power.
What is the inevitable outcome of a corporate system that is predicated upon the unfettered greed for wealth? The behavior of mankind - at a high level - can be seen to be akin to the behavior of a swarm of locusts that decimate a crop and then move on. This is evidenced in (1) the voracious appetite with which mankind is consuming all the resources of the Earth, and (2) the development of technologies aimed at allowing manking to depart from earth.
Of course, it is not sufficient to merely draw the comparison. We need to dig deeper and analyze the factors influencing this behavior of mankind. Does it have to do with the fact that we possess a primal urge - that is shared with all other life forms - to be as successful as a species as possible and to reproduce as effectively as possible so as to resist all environmental threats to the existence of the species, combined with the unique accident of the human species discovering powerful ways to resist and neutralize the population limiting environmental forces found in nature, and that we have also proven ourselves incapable of unlearning our ingrained primal behavior to multiply in the face of technological advances that we are not able to keep up with?
The wealthy have always wished to secure the power to rule the people. Democratic government, therefore, has to be seen by the wealthy as an obstacle for which a workaround must be sought. Indeed, aristocracy was never truly relegated to the dusty annals of human history, but has merely adapted to a new reality. The same insidious human urge still infects our modern world, and there are still those who dwell among us who publicly profess to support the institutions of democracy while privately entertaining the base belief that it is their manifest destiny to decide the fate of others. And these privileged elite hold the deluded conviction that what is good for them and their enterprises is good for all of man.
When the state of our world is understood from this perspective, then America's long war against communism can be viewed as not a war to secure the freedom of the people, but actually a war to secure the freedom of the corporations. Whether or not communism could be a viable system is another matter altogether, and I feel no inspiration to argue in its defence. But, one can no longer view America's vehemence in its war against Communism as being motivated by anything other than a fear by major corporations that a nation under Communist rule would severely spoil the long-term prospects for corporate rule over the American people.