Socialism is alive and well, and it is growing, though maybe not in the way you expect.

The federal government provides more than $700 billion in contracts to private sector corporations. It also forgoes approximately $1.5 trillion in tax receipts to provide tax breaks for corporations to encourage job-creating investments, or so we are told. The net result is that corporations avoid paying their fair share while we, the taxpaying public, make up the difference.

As if that public support for private enterprise isn’t enough, now President Trump is taking it to the next level by acquiring 10 percent of Intel’s stock in exchange for the $8.9 billion the government is providing the company via the Chips and Science Act.

From one angle, this certainly is an improvement over the big bank bailouts, where the taxpayer took all the risk but received none of the upside once the banks became solvent again. But it also marks a new version of "too big to fail." After all, when Socialist Trump takes a stake in a corporation, he certainly can’t allow that corporation to fail and wipe out all that equity.

This transaction has sent alarm bells ringing in the executive suites of hundreds of corporations on the government dole. As one corporate lawyer put it, “Virtually every company I’ve talked to which is a regular recipient of subsidies or grants from the government is concerned right now.”

What are they so worried about? They are concerned that they will have to give something back to the taxpayer in exchange for our largess. But the frank admission of their fears also tells us quite a bit about how the corporate economy is actually structured. What Trump is laying bare are decades of corporate socialism—the use of taxpayer money to support and enrich private corporations and their stockholders (including the elected officials who continue to trade shares and profit while making laws and regulations that impact the companies in which they hold shares).

This is the real swamp that is siphoning wealth and stable jobs away from working people. This is the swamp that has caused so many voters to give up on government. This is the swamp full of quicksand, sucking politicians into the suffocating cycle of endless corporate donations. Draining the swamp means ending corporate socialism, dismantling the apparatus that rewards big corporate contributions and empowers lobbyists arguing for big business over the interests of working people, and neither of our two political parties is willing to do that.

By accident, Trump’s overt support for Intel creates an opportunity for the Democrats to help working people secure their jobs from corporate greed. If the Democrats had any guts—granted that’s a big “if”—they would offer legislation prohibiting any corporation receiving taxpayer funding or subsidies from implementing compulsory layoffs. Instead, all........

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