Who Rules in America? Not You

 The challenge CEOs are issuing to Americans is that they are too big to take on and too big to fail.

By Pedro Gonzalez April 13, 2021 

Ralph Nader made the chief executive officers of America’s largest corporations a proposition in 1996. Considering they had built their fortunes on generous tax benefits and subsidies—valued at an estimated $65 billion a year back then and footed by everyday Americans—would they consider opening their annual stockholder meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance? America had “bred them, built them, subsidized them, and defended them,” as Nader wrote, and as Obama would later more directly say: “You didn’t build that.” 

Federated Department Stores, now Macy’s, was the only corporation that responded positively. Half of them never replied to Nader, while others reacted so indignantly that the late political scientist Samuel P. Huntington registered their responses as evidence of corporate America’s post-national identity.

“As a multinational . . . Ford in its largest sense is an Australian country [sic] in Australia, a British company in the United Kingdom, a German company in Germany.” Aetna’s CEO denounced the idea of pledging allegiance to America as “contrary to the principles on which our democracy was founded.” Motorola condemned the proposal’s “political and nationalistic overtones.” Costco’s CEO responded: “What do you propose next—personal loyalty oaths?” Kimberly-Clark’s executive fumed that it was “a grim reminder of the loyalty oaths of the 1950s.”..........

Conservatives, Republicans, and others who, in response to these woke corporatists, attempt to disprove that a specific law is racist miss the point. There is no good faith argument to be had, no common ground to seek. For too long the right has deluded itself with the belief that the better argument will prevail on the merits. 

But these people don’t care about rational debate, and as long as that is the situation, neither should you. In the current reality, only power checks power and what the Right lacks is not a better argument, but a willingness to exercise power where and how it can.  ..............To Read More....