Domestically, the United States of America cannot rest easy. The events surrounding the presidential election held in the fall continue to echo throughout the country. For most of the country’s citizens, the most pressing issue seems to be restoring something like electoral integrity at home. Georgia is one of the first states in the country to enact election reform legislation, which seems to be particularly unpalatable to corporate America. Why?
America just can’t seem to settle down domestically. It is not only new and massive riots and violence that can currently be observed in the city of Portland and in the state of Minnesota (where there is currently also massive looting of stores), but also the presidential elections held in the USA last fall that are constantly providing new fuel for the fire.
Now that the political leadership in the state of Georgia has decided to reform local election laws (including the requirement to present an identification document for certain voting processes), a response to this development was not long in coming.
America’s Major League Baseball (MBL) is meddling in domestic politics – as the MBA did previously – to make a statement against Voter ID legislation by simply moving this year’s All-Star Game from Atlanta, Georgia to Denver, Colorado with no fuss.
More and more fans and sports followers don’t seem to like this interference by sports associations and major league management in the domestic issues of the country at all.
After all, people want to attend and enjoy sporting events in order to escape from everyday political life, at least for a short period of time, without being constantly encouraged to bend their own knee or make other gestures of subservience and humility.
It is hardly surprising in the face of a rampant “cancel culture,” the ever-preached “wokeism,” and a stringent identity politics that many sports followers and fans are now voting with their feet, as can be seen especially in the ratings of the major networks, whose viewership of sports broadcasts has been in free fall for some time now (sources HERE and HERE and HERE).
However, these things do not change the fact that, in addition to the major sports leagues, more and more large corporations and companies, among others, are getting involved in political debates in order to break with an age-old custom, which was to stay out of such debates and remain neutral, taking into account their own business, and simply do what an economically well-positioned company does best: Namely, make money!
From today’s point of view, it is difficult to understand what could have driven those responsible – as in the case of H&M and other fashion companies – to be critical of the Chinese leadership in Beijing, to read the riot act to third parties with a steeply raised finger, to morally pillory them for their supposed lapsi calami and to act as if they were the most virginal creature walking the earth, unable to harm a fly.
What is wrong with these people? Those who are constantly looking for moral missteps in the lives of others should perhaps at some point ask themselves what might be wrong with themselves, and whether they are not projecting themselves onto others to a greater extent.
Who wants to throw the first stone when he is sitting in a glass house with everyone else, right? The end of the story is that H&M & Co. see themselves partially shut down by the Chinese Internet, and massive boycott calls have been launched by users and local authorities in the People’s Republic of China on platforms like Weibo. So was it worth it?
I certainly don’t want to be a defender of human rights abuses here, but if such things are going to be criticized, it would have to be around the world – and thus in a balanced way.
The U.S. itself would have to be included in this kind of criticism, because no other country has been waging seemingly endless wars in the name of a war on terror for twenty years now, destabilizing nations around the world and thereby sharing responsibility for a global refugee crisis that is unparalleled.
Meanwhile, an entire industry has formed around wokeism, cancel culture, and identity politics. The demands made by the pioneers of this development can often no longer be understood by ordinary people – perhaps the pioneers of this “culture” no longer understand themselves.
Be that as it may, American media report that one hundred CEOs of domestic companies joined forces over the weekend to fight “restrictive” election and voter ID laws (based on the current model of the state of Georgia) and to take active action against such developments.
Don’t those concerned actually have anything better to do? If so, why don’t they just get themselves on the ballot to run for Congress?! It doesn’t seem to make sense to the ladies and gentlemen that such an unambiguous positioning could also alienate a whole lot of customers who are politically in a different camp.
And let’s be honest, didn’t last year’s presidential election make it crystal clear that unambiguous identification of voters by means of a presentation of ID or driver’s license documents would not be absolutely desirable? What is a social security number for in America?
For every knick-knack, an ID must now be presented, except when citizens want to exercise their right to vote to determine congressmen and their government. This seems strange.
At a virtual Zoom conference, participating corporate executives now threatened to not only withhold political campaign contributions in the future, but also to punish all those states back home that, like Georgia, are “guilty” of reforming their election laws.
To achieve this goal, investments in factories, infrastructure and other projects in the states affected by this would be put on hold or cancelled altogether. When I read this, I really couldn’t believe it at first.
Among the corporate leaders with whom the horse now seems to be running wild are high-ranking board members of Delta Airways, United Airlines and American Airlines, as if their companies would even take off without perpetuating state bailouts.
According to Axios, James Murdoch, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffmann, Chip Bergh, the CEO of Levi Strauss, and Arthur Blank, owner of the Atlanta Falcons, among others, also would have attended the virtually held conference.
A supplementary report by the Wall Street Journal on the subject said that Kenneth Chenault, ex-CEO of American Express, and Kenneth Frazier, the CEO of Merck & Co., had also asked the other participants to support stronger voter registration in the future, including simplified access to elections to be held.
So does the United States now face the threat of “Zuckerberg boxes” across the country, into which anyone can drop their absentee ballots as they see fit, without relying on unique voter identifiers?
How many reports were there in the course of the last elections, according to which political activists went through old people’s homes in order to “harvest” masses of absentee ballots among the residents there and to hand them in?!
Who simply looks away, if voters registered in a federal state vote perhaps also a second time in another federal state in the course of the same election, in which they lived before perhaps once, or even deceased ones in presidential and congressional elections to participate lets, stands from domestic political view with those expirations, which are well-known from relevant banana republics, on a level.
It would be no problem at all to be ideologically pro suffrage, but to introduce a voter ID requirement for accurate voter identification. Why should this exclude members of poor social classes from the electoral process, since even poor people have a driver’s license – or at least an identification document!
What do these things have to do with “discrimination”? So, in order to forestall what has been described as a “restriction of voters’ rights,” the corporate and business leaders who attended the Zoom meeting are now joining forces to block and/or cancel investments in affected states, if necessary.
To put it succinctly, it can be said that major corporations in the U.S. are issuing unequivocal threats of an economic nature against state political leaders who are introducing election reform legislation designed to ensure the integrity of elections. Wow, that is really eerily “democratic”! Forgive me for a bit of sarcasm at this point.
Perhaps no one has told the corporate rulers yet, but this is precisely the idea that has suffered massively with regard to the most recently held presidential elections in the United States. If many citizens – in this case tens of millions – no longer believe in the integrity of elections, the remnants of a “democratic” republic may as well be buried along with it, to describe the really existing system, in the words of Jimmy Carter, as the rule of plutocrats and/or oligarchs in the guise of a democratic system.
Sharp criticism of domestic corporations had been voiced by, among others, U.S. Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in early April. According to McConnell, there will be far-reaching consequences if corporations abuse their economic power to push through “radical left-wing demands” in society.
From environmental legislation to voting reforms to radical left social agendas and a targeted elimination of the Second Amendment, parts of private business in the U.S. are already acting like a kind of parallel government, McConnell noted.
Corporations and businesses are virtually inviting serious consequences when their managements make themselves an instrument of a strongly left-leaning cultural ideology to “hijack” their own country outside of constitutional rights.
To take a stand on this view of McConnell himself, it should be said that this is not unique to the United States. Even abroad, above all in the People’s Republic of China, it is becoming clear that companies like H&M are shooting themselves in the foot by their actions, and are not making any friends among consumers in the largest market in the world by their wokeism and constant moral criticism.
According to McConnell, it is downright hanebrained to put the current election law reforms in Georgia in a direct comparison to “Jim Crow” and the voting restrictions among African-Americans in the South that existed at one time.
According to the report, Democrat-ruled states such as New York were looking at a smaller number of days before actually holding elections on which early votes could be received in each precinct than the state of Georgia.
Incidentally, citing recent polls on the subject, a clear majority of the U.S. population would favor the introduction of Voter ID legislation at the state level. This alone shows how much the country’s citizens seem to care about this issue after the recent events.
McConnell strongly criticized the Democratic Party leadership because the voting reforms currently underway in Georgia were not even remotely comparable to any related racial segregation or similar issues.
After the occupation of the Washington Capitol on January 6, corporations in the U.S. announced that they would put their own fundraising activities on hold in favor of 147 Republican lawmakers or even stop them completely. This does not seem to have hurt those affected.
As James Oliphant, among others, wrote with reference to a Reuters report at the beginning of March, the Republican Party’s financing apparatus really got going after this announcement. As a result, major donors to the party were outspent by a massive surge in small donors and financial contributions from grassroots political movements.
This, he said, shows that the political influence of corporations and businesses on the Washington two-party landscape continues to shrink. Perhaps this may be why corporate leaders are now making a clumsy attempt to make policy themselves based on threats that are economic in nature – without sitting in the House or in any government office.
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It turns out that ex-president Jimmy Carter would be right when he declared that in the case of the United States of America it was not (anymore) a democratic system, but a country ruled by special and special interests – means corrupt plutocrats and oligarchs. Or how did the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky once describe the functioning of a democratic system? According to Berezovsky, it is nothing other than the power of money. Please make up your own mind about this.
