This week, the state of Tennessee responded to claims that its police had violated workers’ rights to peaceful demonstration by claiming that McDonald’s had given them authorization to do so. Yes, you read that right. The state police are arguing that, because they were given permission to violate rights by a multinational corporation, they are free from wrongdoing.

The suit, which claims damages for more than two years of police sponsored suppression, has been featured as a headline story in major publications this week, including The Guardian, and The New York Daily News. To these outlets, police basing their legitimacy in massive corporations is just another outrage-of-the-week — another example of corporate overreach, and perhaps, of police corruption in the United States.

However, as I consider the implications of the Memphis police unapologetically basing its authority in the words of a private company, I find myself facing a much more sinister conclusion. The continued rise of corporate power, and its seepage into daily life, is more than a trend to be condemned; it is an abject threat to modern democracy and human rights. A threat which extends far beyond this one example, and affects millions around the globe.

In John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, he argues that governments have no obligation to tolerate Catholics, for fear of their allegiance to the Pope. His concern with this is that no democratic society is obligated to tolerate loyalty to “foreign princes,” for fear that this loyalty would drive citizens to act against the common good. While Locke may well have simply been taking an opportunity to criticize Catholicism, his reasoning strikes me as valid. Democratic governments face the risk of losing power, or of being corrupted, if their citizens swear fealty to any extra-national association. Strange as it may seem, modern mega corporations constitute exactly such a threat.

Beyond the egregious actions of Tennessee’s police, the undue influence of corporations on modern democracies is hard to miss. Walmart has been abusing and manipulating governments into preventing unionization for decades, for example. In April of 2015, Walmart abused statutes surrounding plumbing codes as an excuse to close five locations in which unions had begun to form. To this day, Walmart employees are fed propaganda which more or less explicitly threatens their jobs, and their livelihoods therefore, should they even consider unionization. While certainly immoral in their own right, the larger scale effects of these subversions are particularly disturbing.

Coal towns in West Virginia overwhelmingly voted from Trump this election cycle, as he promised to protect jobs which are literally killing them. The miners in these communities owe their subsistence entirely to coal, and as such are desperately loyal to the interests of the coal lobby. Locke’s fear of foreign loyalties is more supported by this example than perhaps any other. These workers are not only voting against the common good of all mankind, but against their own personal well being, in order to protect their exploiters. In just over a century, coal workers have gone from facing down the United States military over their right to unionize, to voting for lower wages, poorer health, and fewer protections. These workers have become so desperately dependent on the coal industry that they are literally voting their lives away to protect it.

The list of blatant corporate attacks on democracy far exceeds those enumerated here. From cigarette companies winning suits against nations who tried to impose health standards, to agricultural giants buying seats on the U.S. Supreme Court, such influences are alarmingly common. However, the root of the problem isn’t found in immoral CEO’s, or corrupt politicians. It lies in the subversion of loyalties inherent to any corporation. So long as companies employ workers, they will manage to manipulate laborers into voting against the common good. Until corporations are neutered, the working class is doomed to be yet another weapon in the armoury of today’s foreign prince.