Yes

“This, I think, for developed Western states, is pretty tendentious; governments could have regulated high finance if they’d chosen to, and it would have made a difference, for example.”

Ah, but could they? Easy to say in hindsight. And I don’t see any regulation on the horizon, just a windfall tax. But anyway, Schmitt’s point is surely that, regulated by government rules or otherwise, business decisions are likely to have a far bigger impact on many people’s lives than decisions made by politicians in a parliamentary legislature. (But note also that the “small committees” Schmitt talks about could quite easily cover business people and members of the executive discussing behind closed doors. We know this goes on in democracies…)

“The claim about popular opinion shaping, if anything, seems to cut against that claim, because why would you shape popular opinion, if you can do what the hell you want anyway?”

To cover all your bases, for a start. To maximise your advantage, for another. But mostly because, and to make the obvious Weberian point, no actor – state, individual or corporate – can ever “do what the hell they want to anyway”; the existing frameworks of legitimacy* serve to delineate what can and cannot be gotten away with. Hoever, if you find you want to do X but X is currently considered illegitimate, then you’ll be wanting to change the conceptions of X-legitimacy. How’d you do that? Well, changing popular opinion looks like a good bet…

-

*being slightly sloppy in terminology – but you follow the basic Weberian point, I’m sure.

I chose to frame this as ‘where the power lies’, but perhaps ‘where the significance lies’ would be more accurate (though the latter will have ramifications for the question of power).

However, if industry campaigns can actually shape popular opinion – and perhaps the climate example shows they can – then this does suggest that democratic institutions are in some sense threatened. We don’t need a naively simplistic model of corporations dictating to governments to hold that contention.

http://economia.unipv.it/pagp/pagine_personali/amajocchi/How%20big%20are%20the%20big%20multinational%20companies.pdf

“Multinational corporations are increasingly seen as excessively big and powerful, and as having dramatically increased in size and power. This perception has led to the view that the big corporations are threatening democratic institutions of the nation-states and that they pervert the cultural and social fabric of countries.

In this paper we analyse the size of large corporations and the recent trends in this size. Using value-added data (instead of sales) we find that multinationals are surprisingly small compared to the GDP of many nation-states. In addition, if anything, the size of multinationals relative to the size of nations has tended to decline somewhat during the last 20 years. Finally, we argue that there is little evidence that the economic and political power of multinationals has increased in the last few decades.”