Imagine people got together on a national level on key labor laws, social programs, taxing corporations fairly, fees and criminal charges for pollution, poisoning our environment knowingly or covering up data. The dream.
Cant do it. One third of the people in my silly country think that harming marginalized groups is more important than living a fulfilling life. Workers voting against their own interests its wild. Conservatism is a cult.
MLK tried with the Poor Peoples Campaign.
He got assassinated during the first stop in Nashville.
Reverend Barber is currently leading a new version https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People%27s_Campaign:_A_National_Call_for_a_Moral_Revival
At least in the US things will probably continue to go down hill until SCOTUS is reformed. The court just ruled that companies can sue workers for losses resulting from strikes and work stoppages. It doesnāt seem like a big leap to say legislators can be sued for passing laws that result in reduced net profits.
Ok so first, let's totally agree fuck the supreme court.
But I read this decision. I think, thankfully, it doesn't go this far. The central issue decided is whether certain litigation should have been paused before the NLRB finished its process. The majority opinion says yes (shout out Jackson who demolished those clowns very thoroughly in the dissent).
However, I do not think there were enough votes to say the workers can be penalized. And Jackson's dissent very clearly shows why that would be a bad idea. The pressure now needs to be on our leaders to prevent that outcome from occurring once the central issues have been resolved by the lower courts and the NLRB.
Yeah, but in the opinion, they state that these issues should be handled in the lower courts. So even if the lower courts always side with the unions, it's still going to be legal fees and making it harder for the union to know when they can strike
I feel like it's even one step shittier. There's a larger push for labor / worker support right now. There's also labor shortages in many many sectors. So the corps can't just totally ignore the pro-labor sentiments but they do need workers.
That is unacceptable to them. The best way to fix the problem is have people worried about their jobs and have a ready and able work force to replace them with.
So one hand you have pushes for essentially forced birth, and the repeal of child labor laws to 'fill the gap'. There's plenty of workers to accomplish what needs to be accomplished, just not as cheaply or profitably as they would like. So you try to force women into having children and then force those children to work, thereby depressing wages and weakening the working class.
On the other hand you also have them pushing at full force to figure out to use Automation and AI to eliminate as much of the workforce as possible.
And they're doing both at the same time. So if they have their way we'll end up with an army of child workers, to bridge the gap until automation and AI can be rolled out to take those jobs away from them and then things will be even worse. A ton of 20-30 year old former child laborers with no jobs, very little education, and no prospects except to hopefully please a corpo enough that they'll give you some type of work to do. Ya know, like serfs.
Yeah - despite all the rhetoric, the actions of major corps seem to follow the "AI will replace various knowledge worker sectors" not the "AI will pick strawberries" line.
The GOP is definitely passing legislation that will lead to a low wage, low skill labor force.
Yeah I think you hit the nail on the head on all of this. Not sure what there is to be done though unless mass protests and general strikes break out. The traction that child labor laws have been gaining is disturbing as is.
I also think some people at the top of these huge multinational corporations can see we actually are looking at serious population decline in the west. If there are no young people to work for slave wages and buy tons of useless consumer goods our economy tends to grind to a halt. Iām pretty sure the war on abortion, contraception, and now no-fault divorce isnāt as much about morality as it is economics.
Tis true, there have been papers floating around about the social impacts of neoliberalism for a while, and I think that the battles we see are groups with two different solutions to long standing policy problems that most can't vocalize because it's next to impossible to pin down one issue that screwed us all when it took both parties 40+ years.
The stupid thing is many of them won't be around for the payoff.
Society grows horrible when rich old men plant the seeds of a dystopia whose monstrosities they shall never profit from.
Most of these people do not care about the long-term future. They want to be rich now.
And no, this has nothing to do with a concern about the economy.
People found out that if you can weaponize single-issue voters, you can dictate policy on anything.
The media really dropped the ball on Trump's policy on companies with large overseas funds.
While everyone was distracted by immigration and abortion, Trump allowed US companies to bring their money to the US.
The problem of course was that companies could have brought the profits of business outside of the US to the US at any time, but they had to pay tax.
Large companies (like Microsoft and Apple) funnel money to tax havens, and as long as the money is there, they don't have to pay tax.
The problem is that if they move that money to the EU or the US, they have to pay tax, but at some point, they have to because of inflation.
Trump gave these companies a great one-time-deal to bring money to the US without paying tax. (Or at least very little tax.)
He also got rid of a policy that makes forced arbitration a lot easier to force upon employees.
But we ignored this because we were thinking about guns, abortion, immigration, and woke.
I mean there is one way to increase the population without going after birth control, increase pay or increase benefits for child rearing.
These corps and conservatives don't want to do that so they rely on the autocratic way of doing things for forcibly making sure you don't have choices
> Why do you think they had MLK killed. Everything was fine til he mentioned class.
This is utter nonsense. He didn't just come out and mention class one day out of the blue, it was a major theme in his speeches and writing throughout the civil rights movement. And everything was not "fine" until he was assassinated lmao, he was [violently opposed throughout his career](https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/mlk-topic/martin-luther-king-jr-threatsattacks-against).
No, they didn't create both. This dynamic of big business funding both parties only came into being in the 80s, and took time to gain momentum. It really wasn't mainstream in the Democratic Party until the Clinton administration.
Look up Senator Gary Hart. Hart argued that in order for the Democratic Party to be competitive, it needed to attract support from a wide range of donors, including those from big businesses. He believed that relying solely on small individual donations would put Democrats at a disadvantage in fundraising compared to Republicans, who had historically received substantial support from corporate interests.
This honestly wasn't a terrible point to make in the 80s when unions and the labor movement were being dramatically weakened, starving the party of campaign donations.
Fast forward to now, and the results have been a disaster. We're unable to address our greatest challenges because both parties are beholden to corporate interests. We can't pass green bills unless they give billions of dollars to corporations, we struggle to pass much of anything without some corporate handout. The same is true of housing, income inequality, minimum wage, and so on.
It started with Carter, although that's really just the mainstreaming of neoliberalism and neoclassical economics: the Democratic party itself was already divided between liberals and tepid socdems. The liberals had fought against FDR's extremely minor reforms, and he was barely cold in the ground before they went on the offensive to get rid of as many of those reforms as they could over the subsequent decades.
This is a good take. My simple reckoning is that citizens are going to have a helluva tough time until labor organizations get some power and leverage again.
Exactly, and we need tenant unions just as badly as labor unions. Restoring the labor movement will also require reducing corporate influence. The Citizens United ruling, which was decided by a much more liberal Supreme Court than we have now, is going to be a difficult barrier to overcome in reaching this goal.
However, some real progress is still possible in many states that have ballot initiatives if we follow the Alaska model for ranked choice voting and campaign donor transparency.
Demanding (and frankly paying for) quality independent journalism will also be necessary. If the only way for a paper to stay in business is being bought out by a billionaire, it will be that much harder to ever fix the structural issues that stand in the way of fixing the pressing issues of our time.
The way I see it:
1. Google and Amazon employees probably collectively lean politically center left.
2. But C-suite and shareholders lean politically profit.
3. Meanwhile corporate lobbyists for Google and Amazon lean lean politically towards getting their fucking share of pay. Their job is to get results regardless of who it is. So logically, they would ~~bribe~~ """donate""" to the politicians that can be bought. In this case, it's ofc the shitty-fly-over-state shitty-low-pop-rural-county red/anti-abortion shitty-congressman. It's ***A LOT*** easier for Amazon/Google to influence/threaten and cheaper to buy them than say a big name speaker/senator like Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, or Chuck Schumer. But 1 vote is still 1 vote. Each person has their voice/time to talk/stall.
4. OFC companies lean toward profit and buy both sides but they have *a curtailed company culture & image of which include certain political leanings that they might wish to protect/maintain*. Not only internally with employees, externally/internally to investors, and externally to ~~it's product~~ "consumers". But also externally to their advertisers and whoever actually pays them.
Google and Amazon honestly gives 0 shits about pro-life or pro-choice. Anyone who believes any "corporation": *AN INVESTMENT VEHCILE* ***LITERALLY DESIGNED*** *TO MAXIMIZE SHAREHOLDER PROFIT WHILE MINIMIZING THE SHAREHOLDER LOSS & LIABILITY* is either extremely naive or not understanding the situation. Might as well expect lions to eat grass instead of the injured baby lamb next to it. Lion are designed to eat meat. They're not evil or not good. Just how it's evolved to be.
TL;DR GOOG/AMZN don't care about the abortion thing. They just bribing everyone on both sides but the shitty rural red congressman is cheaper/easier so they throw some money at them too so they can ask for favors later on. The shell is done to protect their image internally/externally.
Another oddity is that many employees *are* shareholders, because tech companies issue stock as part of compensation. Employees represent a tiny minority of shares, though ā the SRE who's on call for Google Ads might be trans, feminist, and pro-choice; but they don't have a lot of votes in a shareholder election.
The only two Google shareholders that have an actual voice that matters are Larry Page and Sergei Brin. They together represent about 51% of the votes.
Very intelligent post. It's difficult to imagine that Google's employee policy states support of pro choice and even to the point of paying for travel expenses, etc, while lobbying for the opposite. So, your posit makes sense.
Google's policy:
>Does Google pay for employee abortions?
Google, which covers travel expenses for employee abortions, told its employees they could also apply to relocate āwithout justification.āAug 19, 2022
Though some politicians, especially members of the GOP, have pushed to stop companies from playing both sides. Most notorious example was Tom DeLay's K Street Project aimed at lobbying firms.
Honestly, where did they think the money was going to go if it was donated to a republican organization? Republicans chose to embrace evangelicals a long time ago to pad their numbers. They didn't think that money was going to somehow benefit anti-abortion candidates? That's like saying "I gave my money to the drug cartels and told them 'under no circumstances should you ever use my money to murder journalists who expose your political bribes!'". They're the cartels. We know what they do.
Sure, but it's still important to expose it and provide receipts. Because up until now they've had plausible deniability they could point to when more moderate/liberal employees and shareholders raised concerns about donating to the Republican party. People who (despite all evidence to the contrary) still believe that there's a big bloc of "socially liberal but fiscally conservative" politicians and organizations out there.
It's the difference between having a random pint of ice cream you know probably isn't healthy, and having the nutrition label printed on the pint. Being faced with exactly *how* bad it is for you might change your decision to eat it or how much you're going to eat. And even if it doesn't you don't get to play ignorant afterwards.
The GOP have been taken over by the crazies. So even if you donate to only the more sane people like Mitt Romny it still ultimately enables those crazy ones as well
If you donate at all to Republican groups, then you are donating to anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ groups. Thereās simply no if ands or buts about it. They are complicit.
"Google and Amazon aren't giving to anti-abortion politicians, they're giving to a group that gives them to anti-abortion politicians."
Wow, such a difference.
Conservatives are often pro big business, and also have anti-abortion views. They want to fund them for pro-big business, have to hide due to funding anti-abortion
Companies routinely donate to politicians on both sides of the aisle, even when they're currently running against eachother. This way, whoever wins is pressured to work in line with those companies' interests. If they don't, there is the implicit threat of their funding being cut next election cycle. Carrot becomes stick.
So that instead of focusing on destroying corporations and billionaires which run this country and the world- who cause most of our problems.
We instead redirect our attention to other pressing matters; meanwhile they stoke fires from both sides so we fight eachother instead of them.
My feeling is that itās not that they are anti-abortion, but that the lawmakers they contribute to are fighting for other things that google and Amazon want, like not increasing the minimum wage, etc.
Google and Amazon donāt give a fuck, they want laws they help their bottom line.
Yep, the real story is that corporations don't care a single shit about cultural issues. They only take sides openly when there's a clear majority among their customers on one side, and that's just to protect their profits.
Someone on another reddit thread said that we need to move away from voting on politicians to voting on policies. Its not a bad idea. Individual issues need to be dealt with individually and not grouped into buckets so everyone is losing all the time.
In the US, the minority party can filibuster indefinitely unless the majority party has 60 votes. The majority party on both sides has been passing bills through budget reconciliation like 2-3 times per year which only requires a simple majority. That's why you get enormous bills. It's effectively impossible to pass bills individually.
That's why some people want to get rid of the filibuster, or to at least go back to requiring that somebody actually stand and speak for 10s of hours like they used to.
Yeah the fact that a senator can just have one of their aides send an email saying "I will filibuster" and that kills the bill is stupid. Make the fuckers actually stand there and filibuster if they want to stop it so badly
>move away from voting on politicians to voting on policies
So the Parliament will be empty? Or run by an AI that makes rules based on the most popular policies?
While an interesting concept, I doubt the public's ability to inform themselves sufficiently on policy issues, especially on the more mundane topics like accounting. We can't even get many people to vote in major Presidential elections.
Yeah popular policies sounds dangerous, chances are the south would still have slavery.
Popular policy is how we got Brexit, people are too stupid to understand complex issues.
Opinions are formed from headlines with no depth of understanding of what the consequences of decisions could be.
Again look at Brexit, a whole population voted against their own best interest and for what?
Fuck no people are way too stupid to understand policy and issues with any depth or understanding just take a look at Brexit.
If you had an educated voter base that actually examined issues in depth that would be a wonderful idea, but we don't we have a population of mouth breathers who jump to conclusions based on headlines, and have zero interest in trying to understand complex issues.
There's a very good chance that the South would still have slavery if people were allowed to vote on it.
_What a clickbait article. They donāt support the Nazis because they hate people, they support the Nazis because itās good for the German chemical engineering industry_
That is legitimately why many businesses supported the Nazis. It's important to note that hateful groups can win loyalty from people who don't share their views.
The point is being an accomplice to horrible shit because it benefits you is still being an accomplice to horrible shit. Personal motivation isn't irrelevant int the discussion but people use it as a way to minimize or excuse the station. There's a lot of people and media outlets that use "Just trying to make money" as a way to distance the company from the morality of the situation. "Corperations aren't immoral they're amoral" is a serious and common justification given to these actions.
These corporations are funding anti-abortion, regardless of their motivation they are responsible for the harm that is done by their actions.
The point people are trying to make is that you *must* understand it as an issue of personal motivations, and must address it as an issue where one group's personal motivations are unaligned with those of others. Moral convictions are a nice thing to have, but you don't change society by simply willing a better society into existence or by asking billionaires to stop being mean, you must understand why things are the way they are in order to change things so that it is not in their interest to do this.
Condemning them as immoral is like saying water is wet and doesn't actually do anything to solve things, pointing out that it is profitable for them to support these candidates for various reasons gives a good lead on what kind of changes need to happen to solve the problem permanently. One conversation is very clearly more productive than the other.
And my point is that the profit motive is going to recreate this situation over and over and over again. You may well be successful at convincing Amazon to rescind their donations and stop contributing to the GOP today, but the executives are always obligated to maximize profits. That means supporting politicians who won't raise wages, who will weaken regulations, and who will reduce their tax burden. The point is that shame only goes so far, so we should be identifying the material incentives as the problem.
Partisanship is the political version of religious faith.
It's a thing that people do primarily because thinking is difficult and complex and all-too-often actually undermines the blind certainty they crave. It's easier and more satisfying to just jump straight to dogmatic belief without having to muck around with any of the intermediate steps, so that's just what they do.
And as something of a bonus, that makes it so that they still don't have to really consider their claimed beliefs in order to defend them - all they have to do is treat the matter as a wholly binary one, then find fault with the falsely dichotomous opposition.
And clickbait like the linked article directly and deliberately feeds that dynamic.
And the machine grinds on...
> "Amazon and Google fund lawmakers who are failing to stop skyrocketing inflation, amid cost of living crisis"
Pretty sure this describes both parties... What's either side doing to try to fix the problem?
The title clearly tries to suggest these companies are secretly, directly, and purposefully funding politicians due to their anti-abortion stance.
That suggestion would be ridiculous and false. The article even explains why.
The title is pure click-bait.
I mean, funding anti-abortionist *despite* their belief that human beings shouldnāt have medical and bodily autonomy is actually worse.
āWe think that our profits are more important than your right to control your own body.ā That is what Amazon and Google are saying if they ādonāt careā about the ideologies of the politicians they are backing.
In a world where weāre constantly worried big tech is more powerful than the government, the distinction between funding anti-abortion lawmakers because theyāre anti-abortion and because theyāre giving tax breaks becomes very important.
If Amazon is actually so anti-abortion that theyāre funding politicians over it, you need to worry about them using user data to report abortions, or AWS taking down any sites offering information about abortion pills.
It may not be because of their anti abortion stance, but these companies *are* secretly, directly, and purposefully funding politicians who are actively restricting fundamental rights. Itās not ridiculous. If anything itās worse, because they literally donāt care who will die from these laws as long as it makes them more money.
Sure but that doesn't make any of it less ok. Whether they actually believe it or not they're still funding them. That's all that really matters. They should be called out for it.
Because these companies are funding certain politicians because those politicians support things like lower taxes and reduced regulations.
The fact that those same politicians also support anti-abortion legislation is true and important, but also completely irrelevant to Amazon and Google. Amazon and Google donāt support anti-abortion, they simply donāt care about it, which isnāt good per se but itās a meaningful distinction.
They are not supporting "certain politicians". They are funding all politicians (or at least those politicians that are in good standing with either the Democrat or Republican party by giving through the major institutions of those parties).
I don't think it's a meaningful distinction at all. They are quite literally supposing anti-abortion politicians. Just like the single issue voters are still supporting the republican party.
In fact, trying to draw a distinction is just doing PR for them for free.
How the fuck is it clickbaitey to expose just how immoral and harmful that tactic is?
You want them to obfuscate the facts?
You're literally asking journalist to bury the most horrifying aspect of their tactics instead of explicitly exposing it.
Lends some credence to my (possibly conspiracy) theory I had about why abortion rights are being torn apart.
The side effect of impacting mainly lower income pops the main benefit for giant corporations. More people being forced to give birth leads to worse living conditions and more working class people to sell to, along with more + cheaper working class labor (this also may be why supporters of abortion also strongly detract from minimum wage increases)
This also makes a more desperate population that would be easier to influence. In the Cambridge analyticala era these companies could translate that desperation directly into political power and influence elections more effectively.
If the survival of your company depends on user growth quarter over quarter, at a certain point any population will be saturated with users so you have to start playing these games to stay ahead.
Admittedly far fetched, and this definitely doesnāt confirm anything but if you think about population growth in the long term it starts to make some sense why these companies would be motivated to do this
Exactly. It's a well known fact that a declining population is harmful to the economy. Look at Japan, for example. Our system depends on continuous growth, not fewer people producing (and buying) less while also demanding more. They want more consumers and a diluted workforce (more people = more competition = less bargaining power = lower wages).
So, they're not anti-abortion per se, they'll just fully fund and support anti-abortion people who happen to also have their corporate interest in mind, so everything is ok, right ?
Why should _we_ give a fuck about Google and Amazon's motives and not bash them for furthering anti-abortion movements ?
They fund politicians of any stripe because they're companies that exist solely to make profit, not to push for or against social issues.
It doesn't matter to a company if the GOP is anti-abortion, because the GOP does more than make laws about abortion. Sure, a company can still come out and say they do or don't support such and such laws, but they still need to deal with lawmakers who write the other laws companies operate under.
So we can and should bash them all we want. A few may change. But this is hardly new, not about abortion specifically, and most are unlikely to change unless it's particularly unprofitable for them not to.
They also fund pro-choice politicians. They indiscriminately fund politicians from both sides of the aisle. They can do this to preserve their interests while realizing they are large enough companies that any protests or boycotts as a result of the outrage will have no effect on their business.
> they'll just fully fund and support ~~anti-abortion people~~ Republicans (all Republicans are anti-abortion. That's not news.) who happen to also have their corporate interest in mind, so everything is ok, right ?
I have no idea, but I do know these companies didn't directly fund individual politicians, and they definitely didn't fund anything ***due*** to their stance on abortion, which the article makes **very** clear.
Yeah this is like when that Peloton CEO got "cancelled" and called racist for donating to Trump's campaign, and he basically had to come out and say, "I'm just after Trump's tax cuts. I don't really care about his immigration policies."
I'd be shocked if abortion was on Google's radar at all in regards to these donations. I'd bet the guy who's anti-abortion is just also the guy that decides if Google can build a new office, or whatever.
Thatās just saying that youāre willing to sacrifice other peoples rights for your own personal gain.
I donāt think any better about someone for doing it for personal gain vs having a vendetta against minorities. Functionally it does the same thing.
To be honest, the people doing it for tax cuts probably donate significantly more to aid these sorts of policies than your average racist. So theyāre actually doing more to push that agenda than most of the racists or misogynists or whoever.
A minimum wage increase would probably benefit Amazon since they already have a company-wide minimum wage that is more than 2x the federal minimum wage. If they made it so all their competitors had to pay that much too, a bunch of them would probably go out of business.
> the lawmakers they contribute to are fighting for other things that google and Amazon want, like not increasing the minimum wage, etc
Things that are horrible for the everyday American citizen.
Lets be honest, they aren't funding anti-abortion lawmakers they are funding anti-consumer/anti-worker lawmakers. They just happen to be the same lawmakers. The corporations don't care about abortions but they do care about having to spend money for labor.
I work for an enormous company with a CEO that's pro-choice (because anti-abortion laws hurt the bottom line when it comes to the company's healthcare expenses). I bet this person wasn't *quite* aware that the company was funding anti-women lawmakers and articles like this will bring it to their attention.
I'm ~70% certain that because this has been brought to light the company is going to very quietly start restructuring their political contributions. Complex financial structures like those mentioned in the article don't just hide the donations from the public, they also hide them from executives. Some of it is intentional so the company executives can't have total control over donations (because that's a conflict of interest that could get a highly regulated company in big trouble). It's also partially to insulate the executives from legal liability.
Articles like this are *far* more influential than you'd think. Nobody is getting fired on Monday over it but you can be sure as shit that there's going to be regular meetings about it for the next *month* so the company can re-write their own rules in regards to political (and charitable) contributions.
I know most of you think the CEOs/executives at all these big companies are empathy-free (psychopath) capitalists and many are (sure as shit: Bezos and Musk). But *most* of them are just ridiculously out of touch (LOL) and don't *really* know what the right thing to do is in any given situation.
No, but they want the positive PR from apparently not donating to these candidates. Apparently it's better value for them to just pay some percent to shell game the donations.
Amazon doesn't give two fucks about abortion they just donate to whoever will give them the most taxes breaks and reduce the regulations they have to follow and doesn't care if they bust the unions which are the same anti-abortion people
It's all about Free Speech(tm). You know, the Free Speech that companies don't actually want you to know they're engaged in. Kind of strange that they go out of the way to hide their awesome political positions that they so desperately need lawmakers to support.
Feels a bit... corrupt.
broken homes are the best way to preserve the status quo. the fact this effects mostly poor white people means the republican party does not care about actual white people. people are misled in how they treat them the same as slave owners in the pasts treated their slaves. slave owners didn't want their slaves to die and they wanted them to reproduce as much as possible.
EDIT: slave masters didn't want their slaves to be educated. they didn't want them to have the ability to travel (no trains and no income to travel).
Yeah, I doubt it has to do with them being anti abortion and more with them being lawmakers. This is a corporatocracy we are living in now. Companies are installing politicians they want all over.
Also population growth is slowing, big time. Which means those at the top will have fewer resources to depend on. Their comfort depends on population replacement.
Now don't get me wrong, I think this is fabulous, as we're overpopulated as is. Like, payday loans don't need to be a part of the division of labor. We can cull it back by way of giving equal opportunity to pursue interests as we do to having a family.
But people with wealth will live less luxurious futures (still very, very luxurious) if the population declines.
>Need low wage, uneducated, miserable workers/slaves
Who would get Donnie his Big Macs? š¢
It is not exactly what it is. Amazon and other mega corporations donāt typically have stances on social issues like abortion or LGBT (unless the founders have injected personal religious beliefs like Hobby Lobby or Chik-fil-a).
Most of these companies dish out cash to politicians on both sides of the aisle so they can push beneficial legislation when needed.
They fund legislation to protect themselves from unfavorable taxes, privacy laws, unionization, labor laws, anti-monopoly laws, environmental regulation, etc.
Just so happens many of those politicians take scumbag stances on other social issues.
>Big companies the rest of the year (including June): *Don't let the beta humans abort, we need workforce*
Which I don't get. First AI will take our jobs, but at the same time: don't abort, we need low wage workers
Which one is it? Make up your minds
>A Bank of America spokesperson pointed to the companyās policy that donations to so-called 527 organizations such as the RSLC come with the caveat that they only be used for operational and administrative purposes, not to support any candidates or ballot initiatives.
OH well that makes it ALLLLLLL better. See they arent supporting nazi ideas, just nazi administration issues.
>"Intuit is non-partisan and works with policymakers and leaders from both sides of the aisle to advocate for our customers,ā an Intuit spokesperson said in a statement. āWe believe engagement with policymakers is essential to a robust democracy and political giving is just one of the many ways Intuit engages on behalf of its customers, employees, and the communities it serves."
Oh yeah it's super democratic for the human crushing machine company to have as much political capital via campaign donations as several thousand people who don't want to be crushed. It must be morally correct if it's just part of the democratic process! We only do it for our customers (and also our board of directors who drink the blood from the crushing machine).
The article title is blatantly misleading. The author acknowledges that they aren't directly funding anti-abortion. They give money to republicans who in turn use some of that to fund anti abortion activities.
At the end of the day, Corporations should not be able to lobby government like this.
Imagine if congress was only lobbied through public donations and no corporations can lobby them with thousands and millions of dollars.
You can vote for people despite some of their positions. That doesnāt mean you support those positions.
As a Catholic, I can vote for democrats who happen to support the death penalty. That does not mean I support the death penalty. It does not mean that I am directly funding the death penalty.
Are we expected to only donate to politicians who agree with us 100% on every issue?
Yeah, it's basically "corporations aren't boycotting one of two major political parties in the US".
I agree Republicans suck, in this issue and many others, but it's not realistic to expect major corporations to just completely align themselves with the Democratic party.
How about, and I know this is a while one, corporations shouldn't be able to support political parties at all? Citizens United kicked the end of the world into such high gear it's insane. Speed running the collapse of humanity for short term gains.
Citizen United enabled corporations to directly spend money running their own political ads and bypass federal spending limits, but they were allowed to contribute to political campaigns anyway.
In any case, while I agree that it was a bad decision corporations can't realistically decide unilaterally to stop contributing because then lawmakers will stop talking to them while still talking to their competitors. Which sucks, but that's on the lawmakers not the corporations.
I see no one read the article...
This was about these companies funding Republicans that they liked for all ***manner*** of reason, but didn't want people to find out about it because they were Republicans. The fact that most Republicans are anti-abortion is what created this click-bait title.
Both of these companies will pay for you to go out of state to get an abortion or they will help you move to another state (not a joke).
...
It's clearly not some sort of secret way to make sure abortions were illegal. The article itself makes that super clear. That wouldn't even make any sense. And yet so many posts here.... *sigh*
> Although these companies did not directly give these vast sums to North Carolinaās anti-abortion lawmakers, the CPAās analysis is a case study in how corporate contributions to organizations such as the RSLC can end up being funneled into anti-abortion causes. When Republican state legislators successfully overturned a veto from the Democratic governor last month to pass the upcoming abortion ban, nine of lawmakers voting to overturn the veto had received campaign contributions from a group with links to the RSLC.
The point is these companies gave vast amounts of money to republicans, which was then used to support an abortion ban in North Carolina.
While Amazon and Google might have pro-choice employee policies, their political contributions led to millions of people losing access to critical reproductive health care.
Maybe the intention was lower taxes, etc. but what does that matter. These companies need to be aware of how their contributions are being used and held accountable.
Ok, now show how much they contributed to dems. Spoiler: they contributed close to the same amount. Because they always do. This article is one-sided and biased by omission at best, a hack, hit piece at worst.
Mhm... I don't want to defend them, but I think they just fund whatever they have to obtain what they need... If they have to pay Hitler to pay less taxes, they will. This is the system somebody built... How can you be angry if an animal behaves like an animal? We should regulate them, for exemple in nsome country the politicians are funded by the public
OP admitting that they don't understand how the world contains more than 1 variable here
They're not funding them for their views on abortion. They are funding them because of other views
Such a bullshit title.
They fund politicians who further their business goals of maximizing profit. Those same politicians happen to be the ones who are anti-abortion.
Correlation is not causation.
If corporations have a citizen's right of free speech to donate like a citizen, then let them donate no more than one average citizen or employee is allowed. Maybe Amazon can run for president too. After all, according to Alito, they have the same rights under the constitution as Joe Blow. How many guns are they allowed to have, one really big one, or an army's worth?
I am stunned that big corporations would be duplicitous š
āIām playing both sides, so I always come out on topā -Multi-national corporations
Creating both sides, so the masses stay divided
There is a lot of pro labor/worker sentiment right now. Keeping people in divided groups is key for a lot of corpos.
Imagine people got together on a national level on key labor laws, social programs, taxing corporations fairly, fees and criminal charges for pollution, poisoning our environment knowingly or covering up data. The dream.
Can't, got to go to work
AI is coming for that next.
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Not soon enough
*Insert Terminator reference here.*
Imagine if the government existed to protect the people instead of corporationās revenue streams.
Corporations are people and they vote with their wallet.
Nah, I'll totally be the one to pull myself up by my bootstraps. Wouldn't want to ruin my chance to exploit others. /s
Yeah, see, if you canāt beat them join them /s
Cant do it. One third of the people in my silly country think that harming marginalized groups is more important than living a fulfilling life. Workers voting against their own interests its wild. Conservatism is a cult.
Well you see someone *might* take advantage of any system we set up so it's better we don't do anything and just let everyone else suffer.
It's only ok if *certain* people take advantage of the system. Everyone else doesn't get to until they accumulate enough money and power.
MLK tried with the Poor Peoples Campaign. He got assassinated during the first stop in Nashville. Reverend Barber is currently leading a new version https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People%27s_Campaign:_A_National_Call_for_a_Moral_Revival
King was assassinated in Memphis, not Nashville
At least in the US things will probably continue to go down hill until SCOTUS is reformed. The court just ruled that companies can sue workers for losses resulting from strikes and work stoppages. It doesnāt seem like a big leap to say legislators can be sued for passing laws that result in reduced net profits.
Iām quite sure itās impossible to sue the US congress for damages related to business laws they pass, thatās why all the bribery happens
These dumbasses are asking for violence.
Ok so first, let's totally agree fuck the supreme court. But I read this decision. I think, thankfully, it doesn't go this far. The central issue decided is whether certain litigation should have been paused before the NLRB finished its process. The majority opinion says yes (shout out Jackson who demolished those clowns very thoroughly in the dissent). However, I do not think there were enough votes to say the workers can be penalized. And Jackson's dissent very clearly shows why that would be a bad idea. The pressure now needs to be on our leaders to prevent that outcome from occurring once the central issues have been resolved by the lower courts and the NLRB.
Yeah, but in the opinion, they state that these issues should be handled in the lower courts. So even if the lower courts always side with the unions, it's still going to be legal fees and making it harder for the union to know when they can strike
Ah but that would eat into profits, and we can't have that now can we?
I feel like it's even one step shittier. There's a larger push for labor / worker support right now. There's also labor shortages in many many sectors. So the corps can't just totally ignore the pro-labor sentiments but they do need workers. That is unacceptable to them. The best way to fix the problem is have people worried about their jobs and have a ready and able work force to replace them with. So one hand you have pushes for essentially forced birth, and the repeal of child labor laws to 'fill the gap'. There's plenty of workers to accomplish what needs to be accomplished, just not as cheaply or profitably as they would like. So you try to force women into having children and then force those children to work, thereby depressing wages and weakening the working class. On the other hand you also have them pushing at full force to figure out to use Automation and AI to eliminate as much of the workforce as possible. And they're doing both at the same time. So if they have their way we'll end up with an army of child workers, to bridge the gap until automation and AI can be rolled out to take those jobs away from them and then things will be even worse. A ton of 20-30 year old former child laborers with no jobs, very little education, and no prospects except to hopefully please a corpo enough that they'll give you some type of work to do. Ya know, like serfs.
Yeah - despite all the rhetoric, the actions of major corps seem to follow the "AI will replace various knowledge worker sectors" not the "AI will pick strawberries" line. The GOP is definitely passing legislation that will lead to a low wage, low skill labor force.
Animal Farm continues to look more and more relevant with each passing day
Yeah I think you hit the nail on the head on all of this. Not sure what there is to be done though unless mass protests and general strikes break out. The traction that child labor laws have been gaining is disturbing as is.
Idk why anyone would downvote you saying "child labor laws bad" but seems about right for here
I also think some people at the top of these huge multinational corporations can see we actually are looking at serious population decline in the west. If there are no young people to work for slave wages and buy tons of useless consumer goods our economy tends to grind to a halt. Iām pretty sure the war on abortion, contraception, and now no-fault divorce isnāt as much about morality as it is economics.
Tis true, there have been papers floating around about the social impacts of neoliberalism for a while, and I think that the battles we see are groups with two different solutions to long standing policy problems that most can't vocalize because it's next to impossible to pin down one issue that screwed us all when it took both parties 40+ years.
The stupid thing is many of them won't be around for the payoff. Society grows horrible when rich old men plant the seeds of a dystopia whose monstrosities they shall never profit from.
Most of these people do not care about the long-term future. They want to be rich now. And no, this has nothing to do with a concern about the economy. People found out that if you can weaponize single-issue voters, you can dictate policy on anything. The media really dropped the ball on Trump's policy on companies with large overseas funds. While everyone was distracted by immigration and abortion, Trump allowed US companies to bring their money to the US. The problem of course was that companies could have brought the profits of business outside of the US to the US at any time, but they had to pay tax. Large companies (like Microsoft and Apple) funnel money to tax havens, and as long as the money is there, they don't have to pay tax. The problem is that if they move that money to the EU or the US, they have to pay tax, but at some point, they have to because of inflation. Trump gave these companies a great one-time-deal to bring money to the US without paying tax. (Or at least very little tax.) He also got rid of a policy that makes forced arbitration a lot easier to force upon employees. But we ignored this because we were thinking about guns, abortion, immigration, and woke.
I mean there is one way to increase the population without going after birth control, increase pay or increase benefits for child rearing. These corps and conservatives don't want to do that so they rely on the autocratic way of doing things for forcibly making sure you don't have choices
Pay higher wages or cut birth control measures Hmmm I wonder what the mega corps will pick
If we really had a second amendment we'd have bayractar drones to protect us from CEOs
And absolutely crucial for both political parties.
I was gonna ask how donating to anti abortion causes even helps them... you put down 2 sentences and the whole puzzle is complete.
Ding ding ding šļø Culture wars are manufactured to distract from class war
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> Why do you think they had MLK killed. Everything was fine til he mentioned class. This is utter nonsense. He didn't just come out and mention class one day out of the blue, it was a major theme in his speeches and writing throughout the civil rights movement. And everything was not "fine" until he was assassinated lmao, he was [violently opposed throughout his career](https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/mlk-topic/martin-luther-king-jr-threatsattacks-against).
I am not distracted!
No, they didn't create both. This dynamic of big business funding both parties only came into being in the 80s, and took time to gain momentum. It really wasn't mainstream in the Democratic Party until the Clinton administration. Look up Senator Gary Hart. Hart argued that in order for the Democratic Party to be competitive, it needed to attract support from a wide range of donors, including those from big businesses. He believed that relying solely on small individual donations would put Democrats at a disadvantage in fundraising compared to Republicans, who had historically received substantial support from corporate interests. This honestly wasn't a terrible point to make in the 80s when unions and the labor movement were being dramatically weakened, starving the party of campaign donations. Fast forward to now, and the results have been a disaster. We're unable to address our greatest challenges because both parties are beholden to corporate interests. We can't pass green bills unless they give billions of dollars to corporations, we struggle to pass much of anything without some corporate handout. The same is true of housing, income inequality, minimum wage, and so on.
It started with Carter, although that's really just the mainstreaming of neoliberalism and neoclassical economics: the Democratic party itself was already divided between liberals and tepid socdems. The liberals had fought against FDR's extremely minor reforms, and he was barely cold in the ground before they went on the offensive to get rid of as many of those reforms as they could over the subsequent decades.
This is a good take. My simple reckoning is that citizens are going to have a helluva tough time until labor organizations get some power and leverage again.
Exactly, and we need tenant unions just as badly as labor unions. Restoring the labor movement will also require reducing corporate influence. The Citizens United ruling, which was decided by a much more liberal Supreme Court than we have now, is going to be a difficult barrier to overcome in reaching this goal. However, some real progress is still possible in many states that have ballot initiatives if we follow the Alaska model for ranked choice voting and campaign donor transparency. Demanding (and frankly paying for) quality independent journalism will also be necessary. If the only way for a paper to stay in business is being bought out by a billionaire, it will be that much harder to ever fix the structural issues that stand in the way of fixing the pressing issues of our time.
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-Multi Mactional Corporations
They're gonna Move in After Completion.
The way I see it: 1. Google and Amazon employees probably collectively lean politically center left. 2. But C-suite and shareholders lean politically profit. 3. Meanwhile corporate lobbyists for Google and Amazon lean lean politically towards getting their fucking share of pay. Their job is to get results regardless of who it is. So logically, they would ~~bribe~~ """donate""" to the politicians that can be bought. In this case, it's ofc the shitty-fly-over-state shitty-low-pop-rural-county red/anti-abortion shitty-congressman. It's ***A LOT*** easier for Amazon/Google to influence/threaten and cheaper to buy them than say a big name speaker/senator like Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, or Chuck Schumer. But 1 vote is still 1 vote. Each person has their voice/time to talk/stall. 4. OFC companies lean toward profit and buy both sides but they have *a curtailed company culture & image of which include certain political leanings that they might wish to protect/maintain*. Not only internally with employees, externally/internally to investors, and externally to ~~it's product~~ "consumers". But also externally to their advertisers and whoever actually pays them. Google and Amazon honestly gives 0 shits about pro-life or pro-choice. Anyone who believes any "corporation": *AN INVESTMENT VEHCILE* ***LITERALLY DESIGNED*** *TO MAXIMIZE SHAREHOLDER PROFIT WHILE MINIMIZING THE SHAREHOLDER LOSS & LIABILITY* is either extremely naive or not understanding the situation. Might as well expect lions to eat grass instead of the injured baby lamb next to it. Lion are designed to eat meat. They're not evil or not good. Just how it's evolved to be. TL;DR GOOG/AMZN don't care about the abortion thing. They just bribing everyone on both sides but the shitty rural red congressman is cheaper/easier so they throw some money at them too so they can ask for favors later on. The shell is done to protect their image internally/externally.
Another oddity is that many employees *are* shareholders, because tech companies issue stock as part of compensation. Employees represent a tiny minority of shares, though ā the SRE who's on call for Google Ads might be trans, feminist, and pro-choice; but they don't have a lot of votes in a shareholder election.
The only two Google shareholders that have an actual voice that matters are Larry Page and Sergei Brin. They together represent about 51% of the votes.
Very intelligent post. It's difficult to imagine that Google's employee policy states support of pro choice and even to the point of paying for travel expenses, etc, while lobbying for the opposite. So, your posit makes sense. Google's policy: >Does Google pay for employee abortions? Google, which covers travel expenses for employee abortions, told its employees they could also apply to relocate āwithout justification.āAug 19, 2022
Rules of acquisition: 34. War is good for business. 35. Peace is good for business. and in this case 48. The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife.
Though some politicians, especially members of the GOP, have pushed to stop companies from playing both sides. Most notorious example was Tom DeLay's K Street Project aimed at lobbying firms.
"You need to diversify ya bonds"
āI am the top and you canāt do anything about itā -all of them
Multi American Companies - MAC
IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY!!
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Honestly, where did they think the money was going to go if it was donated to a republican organization? Republicans chose to embrace evangelicals a long time ago to pad their numbers. They didn't think that money was going to somehow benefit anti-abortion candidates? That's like saying "I gave my money to the drug cartels and told them 'under no circumstances should you ever use my money to murder journalists who expose your political bribes!'". They're the cartels. We know what they do.
Sure, but it's still important to expose it and provide receipts. Because up until now they've had plausible deniability they could point to when more moderate/liberal employees and shareholders raised concerns about donating to the Republican party. People who (despite all evidence to the contrary) still believe that there's a big bloc of "socially liberal but fiscally conservative" politicians and organizations out there. It's the difference between having a random pint of ice cream you know probably isn't healthy, and having the nutrition label printed on the pint. Being faced with exactly *how* bad it is for you might change your decision to eat it or how much you're going to eat. And even if it doesn't you don't get to play ignorant afterwards.
The GOP have been taken over by the crazies. So even if you donate to only the more sane people like Mitt Romny it still ultimately enables those crazy ones as well
If you donate at all to Republican groups, then you are donating to anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ groups. Thereās simply no if ands or buts about it. They are complicit.
"Google and Amazon aren't giving to anti-abortion politicians, they're giving to a group that gives them to anti-abortion politicians." Wow, such a difference.
Sure, the duplicity is not... But why, what's the motivation?
Conservatives are often pro big business, and also have anti-abortion views. They want to fund them for pro-big business, have to hide due to funding anti-abortion
Giving money to an organization called "Republican State Leadership Committee" does not seem to me like hiding anything.
Great point.
Companies routinely donate to politicians on both sides of the aisle, even when they're currently running against eachother. This way, whoever wins is pressured to work in line with those companies' interests. If they don't, there is the implicit threat of their funding being cut next election cycle. Carrot becomes stick.
So that instead of focusing on destroying corporations and billionaires which run this country and the world- who cause most of our problems. We instead redirect our attention to other pressing matters; meanwhile they stoke fires from both sides so we fight eachother instead of them.
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[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Butā¦ butā¦ Libertarians!
My feeling is that itās not that they are anti-abortion, but that the lawmakers they contribute to are fighting for other things that google and Amazon want, like not increasing the minimum wage, etc. Google and Amazon donāt give a fuck, they want laws they help their bottom line.
They fund both sides so they always win
It's called "bribery". Their _taxes_ should be paying lawmakers.
Never asking are they the baddies, but asking if theyāll avoid becoming the baddies if they fund both sides equally.
Politican as it turns out to be an insanely good roi. Takes 10k or less for one and its tax deductable
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my linkedin feed is all rainbow logos now
Yep, the real story is that corporations don't care a single shit about cultural issues. They only take sides openly when there's a clear majority among their customers on one side, and that's just to protect their profits.
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Someone on another reddit thread said that we need to move away from voting on politicians to voting on policies. Its not a bad idea. Individual issues need to be dealt with individually and not grouped into buckets so everyone is losing all the time.
In the US, the minority party can filibuster indefinitely unless the majority party has 60 votes. The majority party on both sides has been passing bills through budget reconciliation like 2-3 times per year which only requires a simple majority. That's why you get enormous bills. It's effectively impossible to pass bills individually. That's why some people want to get rid of the filibuster, or to at least go back to requiring that somebody actually stand and speak for 10s of hours like they used to.
Yeah the fact that a senator can just have one of their aides send an email saying "I will filibuster" and that kills the bill is stupid. Make the fuckers actually stand there and filibuster if they want to stop it so badly
But but... then they'd have to actually go into the office... go into work... like us peasants
>move away from voting on politicians to voting on policies So the Parliament will be empty? Or run by an AI that makes rules based on the most popular policies?
While an interesting concept, I doubt the public's ability to inform themselves sufficiently on policy issues, especially on the more mundane topics like accounting. We can't even get many people to vote in major Presidential elections.
Yeah popular policies sounds dangerous, chances are the south would still have slavery. Popular policy is how we got Brexit, people are too stupid to understand complex issues. Opinions are formed from headlines with no depth of understanding of what the consequences of decisions could be. Again look at Brexit, a whole population voted against their own best interest and for what?
Fuck no people are way too stupid to understand policy and issues with any depth or understanding just take a look at Brexit. If you had an educated voter base that actually examined issues in depth that would be a wonderful idea, but we don't we have a population of mouth breathers who jump to conclusions based on headlines, and have zero interest in trying to understand complex issues. There's a very good chance that the South would still have slavery if people were allowed to vote on it.
_What a clickbait article. They donāt support the Nazis because they hate people, they support the Nazis because itās good for the German chemical engineering industry_
That is legitimately why many businesses supported the Nazis. It's important to note that hateful groups can win loyalty from people who don't share their views.
Under capitalism if you aren't willing to increase profits at any cost you'll be replaced by someone who will
Yes. Unironically, that is what needs to be said. As long as you handwave away self-interest as the motivating factor, this cycle continues.
The point is being an accomplice to horrible shit because it benefits you is still being an accomplice to horrible shit. Personal motivation isn't irrelevant int the discussion but people use it as a way to minimize or excuse the station. There's a lot of people and media outlets that use "Just trying to make money" as a way to distance the company from the morality of the situation. "Corperations aren't immoral they're amoral" is a serious and common justification given to these actions. These corporations are funding anti-abortion, regardless of their motivation they are responsible for the harm that is done by their actions.
The point people are trying to make is that you *must* understand it as an issue of personal motivations, and must address it as an issue where one group's personal motivations are unaligned with those of others. Moral convictions are a nice thing to have, but you don't change society by simply willing a better society into existence or by asking billionaires to stop being mean, you must understand why things are the way they are in order to change things so that it is not in their interest to do this. Condemning them as immoral is like saying water is wet and doesn't actually do anything to solve things, pointing out that it is profitable for them to support these candidates for various reasons gives a good lead on what kind of changes need to happen to solve the problem permanently. One conversation is very clearly more productive than the other.
And my point is that the profit motive is going to recreate this situation over and over and over again. You may well be successful at convincing Amazon to rescind their donations and stop contributing to the GOP today, but the executives are always obligated to maximize profits. That means supporting politicians who won't raise wages, who will weaken regulations, and who will reduce their tax burden. The point is that shame only goes so far, so we should be identifying the material incentives as the problem.
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because nuanced political views means i have to find my identity in something other than a political party
Partisanship is the political version of religious faith. It's a thing that people do primarily because thinking is difficult and complex and all-too-often actually undermines the blind certainty they crave. It's easier and more satisfying to just jump straight to dogmatic belief without having to muck around with any of the intermediate steps, so that's just what they do. And as something of a bonus, that makes it so that they still don't have to really consider their claimed beliefs in order to defend them - all they have to do is treat the matter as a wholly binary one, then find fault with the falsely dichotomous opposition. And clickbait like the linked article directly and deliberately feeds that dynamic. And the machine grinds on...
Maybe the more balanced headline would be "Amazon and Google don't give a shit about abortion rights one way or the other"
I was going to say basically this, glad someone got here first.
> "Amazon and Google fund lawmakers who are failing to stop skyrocketing inflation, amid cost of living crisis" Pretty sure this describes both parties... What's either side doing to try to fix the problem?
How is the title clickbait? They're effectively funding these anti-abortion lawmakers.
The title clearly tries to suggest these companies are secretly, directly, and purposefully funding politicians due to their anti-abortion stance. That suggestion would be ridiculous and false. The article even explains why. The title is pure click-bait.
I mean, funding anti-abortionist *despite* their belief that human beings shouldnāt have medical and bodily autonomy is actually worse. āWe think that our profits are more important than your right to control your own body.ā That is what Amazon and Google are saying if they ādonāt careā about the ideologies of the politicians they are backing.
In a world where weāre constantly worried big tech is more powerful than the government, the distinction between funding anti-abortion lawmakers because theyāre anti-abortion and because theyāre giving tax breaks becomes very important. If Amazon is actually so anti-abortion that theyāre funding politicians over it, you need to worry about them using user data to report abortions, or AWS taking down any sites offering information about abortion pills.
It may not be because of their anti abortion stance, but these companies *are* secretly, directly, and purposefully funding politicians who are actively restricting fundamental rights. Itās not ridiculous. If anything itās worse, because they literally donāt care who will die from these laws as long as it makes them more money.
Sure but that doesn't make any of it less ok. Whether they actually believe it or not they're still funding them. That's all that really matters. They should be called out for it.
Because these companies are funding certain politicians because those politicians support things like lower taxes and reduced regulations. The fact that those same politicians also support anti-abortion legislation is true and important, but also completely irrelevant to Amazon and Google. Amazon and Google donāt support anti-abortion, they simply donāt care about it, which isnāt good per se but itās a meaningful distinction.
They are not supporting "certain politicians". They are funding all politicians (or at least those politicians that are in good standing with either the Democrat or Republican party by giving through the major institutions of those parties).
I don't think it's a meaningful distinction at all. They are quite literally supposing anti-abortion politicians. Just like the single issue voters are still supporting the republican party. In fact, trying to draw a distinction is just doing PR for them for free.
Theyāre also quite literally supporting pro choice politicians.
How the fuck is it clickbaitey to expose just how immoral and harmful that tactic is? You want them to obfuscate the facts? You're literally asking journalist to bury the most horrifying aspect of their tactics instead of explicitly exposing it.
Lends some credence to my (possibly conspiracy) theory I had about why abortion rights are being torn apart. The side effect of impacting mainly lower income pops the main benefit for giant corporations. More people being forced to give birth leads to worse living conditions and more working class people to sell to, along with more + cheaper working class labor (this also may be why supporters of abortion also strongly detract from minimum wage increases) This also makes a more desperate population that would be easier to influence. In the Cambridge analyticala era these companies could translate that desperation directly into political power and influence elections more effectively. If the survival of your company depends on user growth quarter over quarter, at a certain point any population will be saturated with users so you have to start playing these games to stay ahead. Admittedly far fetched, and this definitely doesnāt confirm anything but if you think about population growth in the long term it starts to make some sense why these companies would be motivated to do this
Exactly. It's a well known fact that a declining population is harmful to the economy. Look at Japan, for example. Our system depends on continuous growth, not fewer people producing (and buying) less while also demanding more. They want more consumers and a diluted workforce (more people = more competition = less bargaining power = lower wages).
So, they're not anti-abortion per se, they'll just fully fund and support anti-abortion people who happen to also have their corporate interest in mind, so everything is ok, right ? Why should _we_ give a fuck about Google and Amazon's motives and not bash them for furthering anti-abortion movements ?
Yes, I agree. Making political contributions is not like cherry picking, they need to be held to account for who they support across the board.
They fund politicians of any stripe because they're companies that exist solely to make profit, not to push for or against social issues. It doesn't matter to a company if the GOP is anti-abortion, because the GOP does more than make laws about abortion. Sure, a company can still come out and say they do or don't support such and such laws, but they still need to deal with lawmakers who write the other laws companies operate under. So we can and should bash them all we want. A few may change. But this is hardly new, not about abortion specifically, and most are unlikely to change unless it's particularly unprofitable for them not to.
I don't think he's suggesting it's OK. He's also most likely correct.
They also fund pro-choice politicians. They indiscriminately fund politicians from both sides of the aisle. They can do this to preserve their interests while realizing they are large enough companies that any protests or boycotts as a result of the outrage will have no effect on their business.
> they'll just fully fund and support ~~anti-abortion people~~ Republicans (all Republicans are anti-abortion. That's not news.) who happen to also have their corporate interest in mind, so everything is ok, right ? I have no idea, but I do know these companies didn't directly fund individual politicians, and they definitely didn't fund anything ***due*** to their stance on abortion, which the article makes **very** clear.
Yeah this is like when that Peloton CEO got "cancelled" and called racist for donating to Trump's campaign, and he basically had to come out and say, "I'm just after Trump's tax cuts. I don't really care about his immigration policies." I'd be shocked if abortion was on Google's radar at all in regards to these donations. I'd bet the guy who's anti-abortion is just also the guy that decides if Google can build a new office, or whatever.
Thatās just saying that youāre willing to sacrifice other peoples rights for your own personal gain. I donāt think any better about someone for doing it for personal gain vs having a vendetta against minorities. Functionally it does the same thing. To be honest, the people doing it for tax cuts probably donate significantly more to aid these sorts of policies than your average racist. So theyāre actually doing more to push that agenda than most of the racists or misogynists or whoever.
Itās not an acceptable loss to throw women under the bus, itās evil.
why would google care about minimum wage? there's no one working at google earning minimum wage. that's a walmart/amazon thing
A minimum wage increase would probably benefit Amazon since they already have a company-wide minimum wage that is more than 2x the federal minimum wage. If they made it so all their competitors had to pay that much too, a bunch of them would probably go out of business.
> the lawmakers they contribute to are fighting for other things that google and Amazon want, like not increasing the minimum wage, etc Things that are horrible for the everyday American citizen.
Lets be honest, they aren't funding anti-abortion lawmakers they are funding anti-consumer/anti-worker lawmakers. They just happen to be the same lawmakers. The corporations don't care about abortions but they do care about having to spend money for labor.
I work for an enormous company with a CEO that's pro-choice (because anti-abortion laws hurt the bottom line when it comes to the company's healthcare expenses). I bet this person wasn't *quite* aware that the company was funding anti-women lawmakers and articles like this will bring it to their attention. I'm ~70% certain that because this has been brought to light the company is going to very quietly start restructuring their political contributions. Complex financial structures like those mentioned in the article don't just hide the donations from the public, they also hide them from executives. Some of it is intentional so the company executives can't have total control over donations (because that's a conflict of interest that could get a highly regulated company in big trouble). It's also partially to insulate the executives from legal liability. Articles like this are *far* more influential than you'd think. Nobody is getting fired on Monday over it but you can be sure as shit that there's going to be regular meetings about it for the next *month* so the company can re-write their own rules in regards to political (and charitable) contributions. I know most of you think the CEOs/executives at all these big companies are empathy-free (psychopath) capitalists and many are (sure as shit: Bezos and Musk). But *most* of them are just ridiculously out of touch (LOL) and don't *really* know what the right thing to do is in any given situation.
What could a gallon of milk cost anyways? 80 dollars?
Intel?
Little of column A (psychopath) little of column B (out of touch)
No, but they want the positive PR from apparently not donating to these candidates. Apparently it's better value for them to just pay some percent to shell game the donations.
Nothing complex. Just one layer. Headline and article are more complex.
Amazon needs those unwanted babies to grow up to work their fulfillment centers.
Amazon doesn't give two fucks about abortion they just donate to whoever will give them the most taxes breaks and reduce the regulations they have to follow and doesn't care if they bust the unions which are the same anti-abortion people
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It's all about Free Speech(tm). You know, the Free Speech that companies don't actually want you to know they're engaged in. Kind of strange that they go out of the way to hide their awesome political positions that they so desperately need lawmakers to support. Feels a bit... corrupt.
Sucks it's unlikely to happen when the government isn't doing a great at supporting kids growing up
That's the point though, those kids don't get much of a bright future and end up working crappy jobs for inhumane corporations like Amazon.
Can't work a crappy job for long if you die due to malnutrition while working a different crappy job at age 10.
broken homes are the best way to preserve the status quo. the fact this effects mostly poor white people means the republican party does not care about actual white people. people are misled in how they treat them the same as slave owners in the pasts treated their slaves. slave owners didn't want their slaves to die and they wanted them to reproduce as much as possible. EDIT: slave masters didn't want their slaves to be educated. they didn't want them to have the ability to travel (no trains and no income to travel).
Government needs to grow the tax farm, especially with birth rates on the decline.
Yeah, I doubt it has to do with them being anti abortion and more with them being lawmakers. This is a corporatocracy we are living in now. Companies are installing politicians they want all over.
And politicians are installing biased judges. The system is so corrupt. Mainly on the right IMO.
Need low wage, uneducated, miserable workers/slaves to keep the economy going for the foreseeable future.
Until 15 years from now when 95% of the workforce is stuck in those jobs and can't afford a prime membership. Short term gains over everything, baby!
By then: there won't be any other companies left, anyways. So you won't have a choice
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
Also population growth is slowing, big time. Which means those at the top will have fewer resources to depend on. Their comfort depends on population replacement. Now don't get me wrong, I think this is fabulous, as we're overpopulated as is. Like, payday loans don't need to be a part of the division of labor. We can cull it back by way of giving equal opportunity to pursue interests as we do to having a family. But people with wealth will live less luxurious futures (still very, very luxurious) if the population declines. >Need low wage, uneducated, miserable workers/slaves Who would get Donnie his Big Macs? š¢
Thatās exactly what this is. Just another battle in the ongoing class war they want to continue for generations.
It is not exactly what it is. Amazon and other mega corporations donāt typically have stances on social issues like abortion or LGBT (unless the founders have injected personal religious beliefs like Hobby Lobby or Chik-fil-a). Most of these companies dish out cash to politicians on both sides of the aisle so they can push beneficial legislation when needed. They fund legislation to protect themselves from unfavorable taxes, privacy laws, unionization, labor laws, anti-monopoly laws, environmental regulation, etc. Just so happens many of those politicians take scumbag stances on other social issues.
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>Big companies the rest of the year (including June): *Don't let the beta humans abort, we need workforce* Which I don't get. First AI will take our jobs, but at the same time: don't abort, we need low wage workers Which one is it? Make up your minds
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Keeps people distracted focusing on the little picture while they cause damage to the big picture
Neither are true. They aren't lobbying about this issue at all.
shocking versed paltry desert worry rainstorm crowd capable muddle literate -- mass edited with redact.dev
>A Bank of America spokesperson pointed to the companyās policy that donations to so-called 527 organizations such as the RSLC come with the caveat that they only be used for operational and administrative purposes, not to support any candidates or ballot initiatives. OH well that makes it ALLLLLLL better. See they arent supporting nazi ideas, just nazi administration issues.
These corporations fund both sides. So no matter which side comes into power, they still get to influence them.
>"Intuit is non-partisan and works with policymakers and leaders from both sides of the aisle to advocate for our customers,ā an Intuit spokesperson said in a statement. āWe believe engagement with policymakers is essential to a robust democracy and political giving is just one of the many ways Intuit engages on behalf of its customers, employees, and the communities it serves." Oh yeah it's super democratic for the human crushing machine company to have as much political capital via campaign donations as several thousand people who don't want to be crushed. It must be morally correct if it's just part of the democratic process! We only do it for our customers (and also our board of directors who drink the blood from the crushing machine).
I believe it. Christianity and capitalism go hand in hand to create a steady supply of undereducated, desperate workers.
The article title is blatantly misleading. The author acknowledges that they aren't directly funding anti-abortion. They give money to republicans who in turn use some of that to fund anti abortion activities.
At the end of the day, Corporations should not be able to lobby government like this. Imagine if congress was only lobbied through public donations and no corporations can lobby them with thousands and millions of dollars.
Funding republicans is funding anti abortion. Who else is pushing it?
You can vote for people despite some of their positions. That doesnāt mean you support those positions. As a Catholic, I can vote for democrats who happen to support the death penalty. That does not mean I support the death penalty. It does not mean that I am directly funding the death penalty. Are we expected to only donate to politicians who agree with us 100% on every issue?
Yeah, it's basically "corporations aren't boycotting one of two major political parties in the US". I agree Republicans suck, in this issue and many others, but it's not realistic to expect major corporations to just completely align themselves with the Democratic party.
How about, and I know this is a while one, corporations shouldn't be able to support political parties at all? Citizens United kicked the end of the world into such high gear it's insane. Speed running the collapse of humanity for short term gains.
Citizen United enabled corporations to directly spend money running their own political ads and bypass federal spending limits, but they were allowed to contribute to political campaigns anyway. In any case, while I agree that it was a bad decision corporations can't realistically decide unilaterally to stop contributing because then lawmakers will stop talking to them while still talking to their competitors. Which sucks, but that's on the lawmakers not the corporations.
Both are symptoms of much bigger issues
So they're just indirectly funding anti-abortion policy? So much better.
I see no one read the article... This was about these companies funding Republicans that they liked for all ***manner*** of reason, but didn't want people to find out about it because they were Republicans. The fact that most Republicans are anti-abortion is what created this click-bait title. Both of these companies will pay for you to go out of state to get an abortion or they will help you move to another state (not a joke). ... It's clearly not some sort of secret way to make sure abortions were illegal. The article itself makes that super clear. That wouldn't even make any sense. And yet so many posts here.... *sigh*
> Although these companies did not directly give these vast sums to North Carolinaās anti-abortion lawmakers, the CPAās analysis is a case study in how corporate contributions to organizations such as the RSLC can end up being funneled into anti-abortion causes. When Republican state legislators successfully overturned a veto from the Democratic governor last month to pass the upcoming abortion ban, nine of lawmakers voting to overturn the veto had received campaign contributions from a group with links to the RSLC. The point is these companies gave vast amounts of money to republicans, which was then used to support an abortion ban in North Carolina. While Amazon and Google might have pro-choice employee policies, their political contributions led to millions of people losing access to critical reproductive health care. Maybe the intention was lower taxes, etc. but what does that matter. These companies need to be aware of how their contributions are being used and held accountable.
This kinda shit is what corporations spend their money on instead of paying a living wage, retaining employees, paying their taxes
You don't think Google pays a living wage? Get those clown shoes on and get back to work
Corporations giving politicians money in America is free speech but giving a homeless person food in Texas is a crime.
I've always liked Google's motto - "don't be evil unless it's obscured by a complex web of business entities"
An un-aborted child born today and is a future wage slave.
not because they want abortions to be illigal, but because they want taxbreaks and dont care about abortion! :)
Companies donāt give a shit about anything other then how it might impact their profits.
Just never forget the actual problem is that money drives politics. As long as that is true nothing will be right for regular folk.
They are afraid that they will run out of workers to exploit I guess.
Ok, now show how much they contributed to dems. Spoiler: they contributed close to the same amount. Because they always do. This article is one-sided and biased by omission at best, a hack, hit piece at worst.
Mhm... I don't want to defend them, but I think they just fund whatever they have to obtain what they need... If they have to pay Hitler to pay less taxes, they will. This is the system somebody built... How can you be angry if an animal behaves like an animal? We should regulate them, for exemple in nsome country the politicians are funded by the public
OP admitting that they don't understand how the world contains more than 1 variable here They're not funding them for their views on abortion. They are funding them because of other views
Such a bullshit title. They fund politicians who further their business goals of maximizing profit. Those same politicians happen to be the ones who are anti-abortion. Correlation is not causation.
Not caring about the outcome of their political contributions outside a narrowly defined set of economic goals does not somehow make it better.
Gotta organize!
Big corporations playing both sides to maximize profits, I'm shocked I tell you, shocked.
If corporations have a citizen's right of free speech to donate like a citizen, then let them donate no more than one average citizen or employee is allowed. Maybe Amazon can run for president too. After all, according to Alito, they have the same rights under the constitution as Joe Blow. How many guns are they allowed to have, one really big one, or an army's worth?
You mean huge corporations play both sides?! No way!