Corporate America's great and good are shocked - shocked! - at the spectacle of GOP legislature adopting nakedly discriminatory voter-suppression laws. They have spoken out and even taken some high-profile actions to punish states that are adopting these laws.
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These actions have been greeted with healthy skepticism from people who've observed corporate America's longstanding indifference to - and support of - institutional racism and voter suppression.
How could it be otherwise? The path to maximum corporate profitability runs right through race- and gender-justice, workplace health and safety standards, and environmental protections.
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Companies that can pay Black people and women less make more. Companies that can pollute don't need to treat their waste. Companies that can dodge responsibility for their maimed and murdered workers can save a fortune in safety systems.
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In other words, companies do best when the majority of us do worse.
Of COURSE corporate America has a long, proud history of backing voter suppression. If the majority gets a vote that counts, then policies that benefit the elite at our expense don't stand a chance.
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The proof is in the pudding. HR1 is a sweeping elections bill that Democrats MUST pass ASAP if they have a chance at keeping the House and Senate in 2022; indeed, a failure to pass HR1 might PERMANENTLY exclude Dems from majorities, no matter how much support they garner.
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HR1 doesn't just reverse a decade of gerrymandering and voter suppression - it also heads off the upcoming redistricting fuckery and new forms of voter suppression currently working its way through state legislatures.
If corporate America cares about votes, it should back HR1.
But the very same companies speaking out so performatively about Georgia suppressing Black votes are also running the giant, influential @USChamber, as it leads a vicious anti-HR1 campaign.
The CEOs of @Microsoft, @united, @Deloitte and @ford signed letters in the @washingtonpost and @nytimes declaring "we stand for democracy" - and they all have seats on the Chamber of Commerce's Board, which authorized a "key vote alert" seeking to scuttle HR1.
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Other Chamber of Commerce members whose CEOs signed the "we stand for democracy" letter:
These companies are funding the campaign to kill the For the People Act, the best and most comprehensive voting rights bill since the 1960s. For all the culture-war bullshit garment-rending the right is doing about "woke capitalism," they have nothing to worry about.
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ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Inside: Mass-action lawsuit against Facebook; $100m deli made $35k in 2019/20; "Anti-voter-suppression" companies are lobbying to kill HR1; People's Choice Communications; and more!
The Worst-ISP-in-America competition is such a stiffly contested race that the country's monopolist ISPs have to share the title.
Today is Friday, which means that @GetSpectrum is the Shit-King Pro-Tem of The American Information Superhighway.
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What's so bad about Charter, you ask? Surely a company whose CEO is the fourth-highest-paid exec in America must be a truly wonderful place to work and a fabulous company to do business with!
Tom "$38.8 Million/Year" Rutledge is the guy who decreed at the start of the pandemic that EVEN THOSE EMPLOYEES who could do their jobs from home had to come to work and risk lethal infections:
If there's one thing we've learned during the lockdown, where the stock market soared even as economic activity (making and buying stuff) cratered, it's that the finance economy is totally decoupled from the real economy.
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Seen in that light, the Gamestop and other meme-stock/stonks bull runs were just more of the same: the movements of the market's fickle, questing line are based on random chance and manipulation, like the movement of the ball on a roulette wheel.
Did your data get breached by Facebook in its vast, ghastly, 500,000,000 person valdez? The lovely folks at @digitalrightsie are suing Facebook under the #GDPR for money damages and they'd like to sign you up to be part of the lawsuit.
You're eligible if you live in the EU and your data was leaked. And, thanks to the GDPR, your participation in the legal action could result in Facebook being on the hook for real cash damages.
A successful mass-action against Facebook with monetary damages will be a game-changer. That's because the data that Facebook gathers on us is very nearly worthless, and the company's vast profits depend on even more vast collection and cheap, reckless, sloppy data-handling.
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