“More than 150 companies including Apple Inc (AAPL.O), Best Buy Co Inc (BBY.N) and PepsiCo (PEP.O) urged U.S. lawmakers to introduce and pass a voting reform act in a letter signed on Wednesday, as other efforts have stalled in Congress.
The companies called on lawmakers to reintroduce the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, an amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 named after late U.S. Representative John Lewis, who died nearly a year ago. The act would help prevent voting discrimination and set up an improved system for states to report changes in election law.
“We have a duty to work until every American can participate in our democracy, but that won’t happen until every eligible voter in this country has fair, equitable and safe access to voting,” said Chip Bergh, CEO of Levi Strauss & Co (LEVI.N), a signatory to the letter, in a prepared statement.
The companies are part of a group of corporate executives called Business for Voting Rights.” reuters
Comment: The Bolsheviks destroyed capitalist institutions and started over in a heavy handed and inept way that always blundered lumpingly along. The NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) allied itself with industry and big money who objected in no way to the monstrous behavior of the Nazis.
“The month after being appointed Chancellor, Hitler made a personal appeal to German business leaders to help fund the Nazi Party for the crucial months that were to follow. He argued that they should support him in establishing a dictatorship because “private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy” and because democracy would allegedly lead to communism.[55] In the following weeks, the Nazi Party received contributions from seventeen different business groups, with the largest coming from IG Farben and Deutsche Bank.[56] Many of these businesses continued to support Hitler even during the war and even profited from persecution of the Jews. The most infamous being firms like Krupp, IG Farben, and some large automobile manufacturers.[57] Historian Adam Tooze writes that the leaders of German business were therefore “willing partners in the destruction of political pluralism in Germany.”[58] In exchange, owners and managers of German businesses were granted unprecedented powers to control their workforce, collective bargaining was abolished and wages were frozen at a relatively low level.[59] Business profits also rose very rapidly, as did corporate investment.[60]” Wiki on the Economy of Nazi Germany.
Shocking no one that after months of being told this was the ‘most safe and secure election’ ever held in America, where more Americans than ever before elected the man who led a basement based campaign, we are now told our elections – future ones only of course – are un-secure and need federal oversight. Helped along by the multinational company CEO’s, like this product of a “structurally racist system”, Chip Bergh, CEO of Levi Straus. He says so himself: “The ongoing violence caused by structural racism is unacceptable and must end” his LinkedIn comment which directs you to this message, which says something slightly different (surprise!):
https://www.levistrauss.com/2021/04/21/our-commitment-to-racial-equity-justice/
Let me say now: Chip Bergh needs to resign, for equity!
They are getting more desperate by the day. Thanks Chip Bergh, thanks for letting me know which companies I don’t need to spend any of my, or my employer’s, money on.
Those company make more money or have their products made in China.
Corporate America execs are mostly PC/MC twats and if they didn’t employ thousands of normal people, I would hope their businesses would crash.
Le Comte,
Not all; not by any measure. Being amongst that crowd, I’d say they/we are risk adverse. They/we have to protect the company above all else, while maintaining profit targets. That’s in old established blue chips. I really don’t know what happens in the new techie biz. Some of my experience and personal contacts tell me that sector is run by profit seekers who are also utopianists. They want to transform the world in big ways while making money. Now that I think of it, they would be the fascists because a close government alliance is needed to achieve their dual objectives. The government needs them to win elections and keep the people brainwashed and spied upon. Maybe the Nikes of the biz world perceived themselves caught in the middle and have decided the techies are going to prevail and have thus sided with them.
I understand one has to “protect the company above all else” as you say. However, if a company refuses to join the PC party and refrains from making any statements supporting all that BS, then there is no evidence that they either support or do not support that BS. In other words: keep your mouth shut. Any lawyer will tell you that. But they pussy out and feel intimidated into supporting said BS whether they actually do or not.
One way to see it: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/profits-without-honor-milton-friedman-right-wasnt-lawyer-john-minehan/ one guy’s political position may be another guy’s marketing campaign or competitive advantage. So long as it makes money for the owners, who cares? “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it is a good cat.” Hua Xiaoping, 1979 (popularized an old saying).
Agreed. It may turn out to be a profitable business decision to pander to the wokester market.
I don’t see the woke market drinking coke or pepsi and wearing levi Strauss jeans. I see the un-woke crowd purchasing those items. And maybe they are trying to draw the woke aholes in. However, NO more coke or pepsi or levi’s or mlb or nfl for most of my crowd.
I don’t get what the big corporations think they are going get out of aligning with the far left.
The big corp I work for has been increasingly buying into woke-ism; lots of awareness groups being formed (though not mandatory participation so far), statements from the CEO, etc. – mostly lip service at this point. I happen to know that a lot of that is a risk management approach; i.e. build a woke profile to avoid or diminish risk of discrimination lawsuits and other attacks from wokies – a bad short term solution, because the wokies cannot be satisfied short of destruction of everything that has been built, IMO, but rational to some degree.
Other than attempting to appease terrorists, I don’t get it. How would destruction of capitalism be beneficial to profit driven business? What is the end game? Fool wokies into thinking they will get socialism and then use the movement to actually install fascism. When has fascism ever worked out long term for capital? Is it just a failure to know and understand history? I know that big companies have long-term strategies to maintain and then increase their profitability; everything from product developing to marketing strategies, to market share gains, to pricing. How does fascism figure in? Never heard it discussed, personally, in my industry sector. Color me confused.
Eric,
The guy quoted is a San Francisco resident and the company is headquarted there. I submit he’s been a Democratic party supporter for years as have most of their executives. Read the list of signatories. “166 companies 4 million employees” as the website says. Do you think they took a vote of employees to see if they agreed to this political decision? Because, as they say, “the freedom to vote is everyone’s business.” Deciding what you can vote on, well, they are in charge, not the employees. They are replacable, just like Brendan Eich.
“Color me confused.” They’ll be presuring you in a lot more ways shortly.
The big corp I work for has been increasingly buying into woke-ism; lots of awareness groups being formed (though not mandatory participation so far), statements from the CEO, etc. – mostly lip service at this point. I happen to know that a lot of that is a risk management approach; i.e. build a woke profile to avoid or diminish risk of discrimination lawsuits and other attacks from wokies
A pseudonymous writer called “Banned Hipster” has argued that wokeism is driven by the concentrated wealth of oligarchs. I quote his argument:
Here’s a theory:
The USA is an oligarchy like never before. Wealth inequality is at historic levels.
What did the CIA do in the 60’s? The “liberal CIA” invented a non-communist form of “leftism” that more or less ignored economic issues and instead promoted a cultural liberalism.
Is not “woke” the exact same thing? A tiny sliver of privileged Blacks are given media time to slander working class White people, even middle class White people. To an absurd degree, as Steve Sailer loves to point out, they even tell these ridiculous stories about how White people all want to touch their hair.
“Transgenderism” itself … it’s a huge media issue, it’s pushed from the highest levels, it’s almost tailor-made to scandalize women and especially lesbians. Yet these people are a tiny fringe minority. The USA is putting up LGBT flags in Muslims countries as a calculated insult.
Well – this is the modern version of the “liberal CIA.” Jackson Pollack paintings are old hat and the US very much wants authoritarianism and a police state like China’s.
The last thing they want is any sort of movement, racial, ethnic or otherwise, that targets the weathy class – the bankers, the financiers, the Silicon Valley oligarchs.
We know that Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, knew that diversity hurts union organizing. So does multi-culturalism – read, multi-racialism – in general.
A homogenous White country would easily organize to take down the wealthiest oligarchs. A “diverse” society set on itself obviously can never do that.
CIA does this all the time – pit various ethnic groups against each other. That was a lot of their interest in anthropology. The sexual thing, LGBT, is yet another psychological operation, as was feminism before it. As is the free pornography and free abortions, just like the free condoms they handed out in school in my era, to prevent virginal teenagers from getting … AIDS.
As the kids say, don’t “Finkelthink” this. Just because this is against us doesn’t mean we have to be “socialists” or anything.
But we live in an age of abundance, thanks to technology. We could be working 20 hours a week. With a declining population, things like houses would be in the reach of newlyweds. In the era of the Internet, home “schooling” and “stay at home moms” are possible like never before.
But they cannot let us have any of these things, because it is precisely when people get a taste of upward mobility they start getting militant.
https://bannedhipster.home.blog/
These sites are popping up like champagne corks, and I expect the school kids will be reading the two minute articles. Good.
“I don’t get what the big corporations think they are going get out of aligning with the far left.”
Eric, “capitalism” as you perceive/describe it, and many if not all of the corporations on the list, rely on government policies that are [hopefully] favorable to them, no? Couldn’t these corporations simply be attempting to curry favor with the political party currently in control?
Patience, it may well be the other way around – the far left is engaged in constant warfare with all the other kinds of Left and will accept whatever (washed) help, be it organisational or financial, they can get from corporates that simultaneously make the correct ideological sounds when gently prodded.
The corporates of course then own them.
Globalisation doesn’t happen by itself.
Longarch,
The left keeps their fellow blacks in line first and foremost. What clown wrote that silliness? It reads like collegiate coffee shop bull session speak. “The CIA does it!” By “banned hipster”please give us all a break from this kind of alleged influence.
Business for Voting Rights are not a “group of corporate executives”, they are a nonprofit lobbyist org whose sole purpose seems to be to push the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. businessforvotingrights.com
The site has no info on who is behind this noble initiative, so I did some digging. Thankfully the earliest archived version of the site tells us it is “..organized by Business for America (BFA) in partnership with the [ACLU] and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights” This provenance info has been removed at some point.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210228035035/https://www.businessforvotingrights.com/
BFA was started in 2018 by Sarah Bonk – @bonk on Twitter. Sarah is also director of BFA’s partner org; https://takeback.org/
The businessforvotingrights.com domain was registered on 21/1/13.
https://www.businessforvotingrights.com/for-businesses says:
“Businesses are committed to a more just society where everyone has a voice”
“more just” says it all.
Thanks for the digging. Another lefty front group.
Ah Thanks. That helps reconcile my experience versus this crap. More mendacious lefties running an IO.
Col. Lang
You’ve hit the nail on the head!
Fascism in its classical definition has been growing in the United States for well over 50+ years supported by both political parties. The revolutionary party in my opinion is the Party of Davos.
We have already seen significant consolidation in practically all market segments. Below is an article published today on the food industry:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/jul/14/food-monopoly-meals-profits-data-investigation
Jonathan Tepper & Matt Stoller have chronicled this concentration in their recent books.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-Stoller/9781501182891
https://www.mythofcapitalism.com
These transnational companies owe no allegiance to the United States or to American citizens. They want monopoly power with cartel pricing.
Couple that with the national security apparatus. The Church committee published what was at that time shocking. Has their power diminished since then? No. It has only increased under the guise of national security threats. The cold war morphed into the War on Terror and now into Domestic Terrorism. Mass surveillance, National Security Letters and even the use of FISA with false affidavits to spy and smear a duly elected President. If they can do that with impunity what can they not do? The antidote to the Church committee report was the creation of intelligence agencies oversight by Congress with the formation of the Senate & House Intelligence Committees. As we saw with Russia Collusion they have now merged into the apparatus.
There’s no daylight anymore as Congress itself by virtue of both political parties merging into the Party of Davos.
With Iraq WMD and Condi Rice’s mushroom clouds all organs of the fascist “national security state” where in unison. Anyone who dissented was labeled anti-American and non-patriotic. Your brilliant Drinking the Koolaid said it best about how the groupthink was manufactured.
The pandemic with a likely engineered virus leaked either intentionally or accidentally took it altogether to a new level. Public health authorities and not legislatures or Congress exercised draconian powers over individuals and favored Big Oligopolies over small business. Once again we saw all organs of the state including the corporate media generate fear & hysteria, similar to what we saw with 9/11 and caused the majority of the citizenry to clamor for safety. We are now getting to where people are being forced to inject into their bodies vaccines with a brand new technology that has never been deployed other than in a lab. It is going in the direction where people have no bodily autonomy. There is no discussion of Operation Mkultra or the Swine flu mass vaccination debacle on the other hand to provide a semblance of caution. Vaccine passports to separate the compliant from the dissenters. And even suggestions in the UK to make these “passports” into national IDs . Where does it go next?
The judiciary have provided no breaks. They are not the firewall as designed. The judges too are susceptible to the prevailing groupthink and don’t want to be mercilessly attacked by the media mob.
I have long argued that the “left” and “right” frame is not the correct lens and is designed by our ruling class to divide & distract. As they say if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. This duck is classical fascism. The people of the United States have been under a fascist regime for decades. Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum are two sides of the same fascist coin.
Rev. 13:16-18 is where it goes next.
“The drive for a digital ID risks in the end to fundamentally reshape our place in society, with a human race that is more or less forced or coerced to migrate from the physical to the digital realm. If you as an individual don’t accept the ID, you risk being denied access to basic services and a decent life.”
‘Vaccine passports’ are just the start.
https://www.technocracy.news/global-digital-id-fur-alle-seen-as-key-to-sustainable-development-goals/
Barbara Ann
Yes! This is definitely in our immediate future. Macron has already fired the first shot. Europe is definitely on the path.
All we need is a breakthrough mutant which is being incubated among the hundreds of millions vaccinated. Then the hysteria will be amped up to blame the unvaccinated and mandates will be imposed that everyone including babies get on Big Pharma’s subscription model. Maybe they’ll be successful in forcing monthly jabs. Operation Mkultra will come full circle with who knows what else will be in the jab.
What is striking is how little resistance there is to these digital vaccine passports. Yes, there are reports of protests in France and Greece but it is like they have collective amnesia of their not too distant history. As you noted in an earlier thread many won’t do anything until they’re herded on cattle cars when of course it is too late!
Macron has already fired the first shot. Europe is definitely on the path.
All we need is a breakthrough mutant which is being incubated among the hundreds of millions vaccinated. Then the hysteria will be amped up to blame the unvaccinated and mandates will be imposed that everyone including babies get on Big Pharma’s subscription model.
I don’t think Macron is capable of keeping himself in power. The French are often underestimated.
French citizens rioted in response to plans by President Macron to mandate vaccine passports to enter venues like shopping malls, restaurants bars, hospitals, bars, cafés and access public transport.
https://summit.news/2021/07/14/french-citizens-riot-in-response-to-plan-to-mandate-vaccine-passports/
Fred wrote:
What clown wrote that silliness? It reads like collegiate coffee shop bull session speak. “The CIA does it!” By “banned hipster”please give us all a break from this kind of alleged influence.
I don’t actually know who “Banned Hipster” is, but I suspect he is the same fellow who used to write as “Hipster Racist” some ten years ago. I have disagreed with him many times, but he is charismatic and persuasive and capable of gathering large audiences. His intellectual level might be undergraduate, but his propaganda skills are better than mine.
PRC90 wrote:
These sites are popping up like champagne corks, and I expect the school kids will be reading the two minute articles. Good.
I have often argued against Banned Hipster, but I don’t think I have ever persuaded him to change his opinions.
I don’t know what Banned Hipster portends for the future, but he is certainly capable of logical thinking, which is more than I can say for many of the anons who rant on 8kun nowadays. “To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”
I am in favor of committees of correspondence, but I would prefer to see radical Jeffersonians and Ron-Paul-style libertarians capturing the imagination of youth. Regardless, whatever the facts are, it is my duty to ascertain the facts. “For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it might cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and the provide for it.”
https://twitter.com/robert_spalding/status/1415849397880033282?s=21
You’re in good company BP.
From personal and bitter experience as an employee, there is nothing corporate management likes better than a “cordial” relationship with government and the employers union branches.
To me what these corporate folks are buying by being woke are:
1. Less probability of anti trust or pro competition regulation by a “woke” Government. More probability of “business friendly” regulation.
2. “Protection”, exactly like Mafia protection, from BLM, Antifa and/or University activists.
3. Insurance that any internal corporate whistle blowers will be betrayed to them by government, as well as ignored.
4. Freedom from workplace industrial action because the union will do nothing that might hurt its “friend”.
In other words, as an employee, you have no one to turn to. It stinks.
An argument can be made that the Nazis were the first and, to date, only government that successfully, though only temporarily, neutralized and cut out the central bank; a central bank that at the time was in the hands of the Warburg dynasty both in New York and in Germany. The architect of this impressive feat was Hjalmar Shacht who introduced MEFO Bills.
A curious aspect of that period of time is how quickly and extensively Germany recovered economically, technologically and materially. By the late 30s, Germany was at the forefront of technological development globally. As but one example, Germany had already developed a radio guided bomb steered by a joystick mounted in the cockpit of the airplane carrying the ordnance.
In the sheer mountain of literature and research available on this period of history, there is remarkably little on the economic and financial angle.
The economic channels are absolutely being engineered to flow in the same direction. From a distance, looks mighty impressive. Start zooming in however and cracks in the levees are everywhere. Granted, the rate of flow of the cracks are weak but boy, there sure are lots of them and new ones spring daily. Pan in a little more it starts becoming obvious; get to the high ground. Won’t get as high as the engineers but one can still stay relatively dry with some effort.
The final slide into a full-blown fascist/authoritarian/totalitarian society is the ultimate enforcement mechanism of centralized control. Various components have been being introduced over a course of years, but the pace has quickened of late.
The march through the institutions has delivered many elements; educational, legal, an enhanced degree of surveillance (often in disregard for Constitutional liberties), the media, and in particular the “social” media where active suppression of non-conforming views has come to the fore. I left a link late in the “Stasi Stuff” post’s comments concerning the desire by the Biden regime to enter into partnership with common carriers to permit them through proxy “fact checkers” to monitor and intercede in SMS communications.
All of these trends are individually bad, but arguably the One Ring To Rule Them All would be the emplacement of Central Bank Digital Currency, likely to include the phase out of physical cash. Here is a link to a post from an Australian economist on this trend. It starts out with definitions, arguments for and against, and possible forms that it could take. It’s a bit dry in this section, but read on and learn the ways in which in its most extreme form it concentrates unbelievably powerful methods of social control into the hands of central bankers from which there seem to be little chance of escape.
https://www.adamseconomics.com/post/the-potential-orwellian-horror-of-central-bank-digital-currencies
And you thought that the Creature from Jekyll Island – the Federal Reserve a/k/a the central bank – couldn’t get worse? Why did Rep. Paul’s proposal to audit the Federal Reserve get so soundly rejected? Because an audit might disrupt the creep toward enforceable autocracy by all of the enhanced capabilities in CBDC, perhaps?
Read and reflect on how and why it was crucial to massively disrupt the economies of the West through the autocratic measures of the Covid panic, and then how this might be related to this project, a project which bids fair to draw together all the threads pointing toward the final installation of fascism/autocracy/totalitarianism.
https://twitter.com/dailycaller/status/1415727354463281159?s=21
Merger of state and Big Business.
https://twitter.com/electionwiz/status/1416806342841487369?s=21
Tyranny growing in the West. Note that none of these “leaders” are calling for a transparent investigation into the origins of the virus to prevent the next one. We know why. The pandemic has given them the excuse to go tyrannical and the fear & hysteria enables a largely compliant population.
Heck, vaccinated BoJo now is quarantined because he may have come into contact with an infected person. The fact that the vaccinated are getting infected and possibly now transmitters doesn’t enter the equation of the vaccine passport promoters.
https://twitter.com/borisjohnson/status/1416764592043315204?s=21
The fascists interests are aligned – quarterly earnings for Big Pharma and compliant populations willing to give up even bodily autonomy.
Will this matter?
https://twitter.com/deano0901/status/1416829864204722178?s=21
Given the billets-doux Macron has been receiving from both retired and serving military recently, the new regulations are a bold move.
Unrelated fact; Napoleon had the good sense to ban <La Marseillaise, he knew what it could do.