Progressives will continue cramming their grim vision down our throats, and the neo-Trumpists will be utterly ill-equipped to stop them

 Here's what's going to happen, as far as I can tell: "Progressives" are going to complete the dismantling of Western civilization, the neo-Trumpist Right is going to persist in thinking that progressives can be stomped into the dust and that "conservative" values will then prevail, and actual conservatives - sheesh, isn' there a better term for what I mean at this late date? - will have to keeps their heads down and their mouths shut in order to survive.

Progs experienced some setbacks lately, such as Bud Light sales going into and remaining in a slump, and Target making some tweaks to the displays of its sexual-freak merchandise. But they're not down for the count:

Rose Montoya, a transgender content creator who has worked with marketers including Savage X Fenty, said fewer brands are reaching out for Pride partnerships this year. Montoya attributed that drop to fear sparked by the furor surrounding Bud Light and Target, in addition to other factors including greater saturation of the influencer market.

“For us, it’s important for our customers to not only see themselves in our products, but also know that we see and welcome them—many of whom aren’t represented or often overlooked by other brands across a wide range of industries,” said Emma Tully, chief brand officer at Savage X Fenty.

The fashion brand, which recently introduced a new Pride collection, uses its marketing to support the LGBT community, as well as related groups such as the Black Trans Femme Arts Collective, throughout the year, Tully said.

“All of this will hopefully blow over,” Montoya said. “The queer community has huge spending power. Brands can’t afford to not work with us forever.”

Companies at the same time can no longer row back to an era when they were neutral on social and political issues, said Adamson, the Metaforce co-founder. Doing so may run the risk of creating forgettable brands that don’t resonate with anyone, he said.

“No matter what, they have to assume there will be a minority who will strongly object, and they have to be prepared to live with that decision,” Adamson said. “And part of that is moving from marketing to the basics of crisis management.”

A couple of marketing consultants speak plainly about where we are:

“Previously you could send a homogeneous message to the country, but there’s so much divisiveness and polarization on so many issues that that’s become almost impossible,” said Allen Adamson, co-founder of brand and marketing consulting firm Metaforce. 

And

“The marketplace has become saturated with hostility that seems to break out in any number of places at any time,” said Scott Broetzmann, president and chief executive of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting, which conducts the study with the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.

Well, isn't combativeness of the type displayed by the neo-Trumpists  just what's needed to champion what's been traditionally considered normal, objectively true and worthy of upholding?

Um, no. For one thing, the movement's namesake has the depth and the understanding of history of a paramecium. The only reason he rants about "leftist radicals" is because someone told him that such a stance would ensure that his drool-besotted leg humpers would glorify him. And he's not going away. Even as the GOP slate of presidential candidates continues to grow, he blows the doors off all of them, and they're too cowardly to do what they'd need to do to rectify that. And the next-most-viable candidate campaigned for Kari Lake last year, characterized Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a territorial dispute, and said he'd consider pardons for some January 6 convicts. And all other neo-Trumpists are performative, cartoonish yay-hoos. 

And the closest thing to an institutional effort to assert the presence of the remaining non-neo-Trumpist right has shifted from seeking to ground itself in the principles developed by Montesquieu, Locke, Adam Smith, Burke et al to a position that Democrats may have some good points. The Bulwark and Principles First have narrowed, for the purpose of trying to project a modicum of conservatism, their defenses of anything traditional to a kind of shallow Disney's-just-trying-to-operate-within-the-free-market libertarianism.

So we get Pride garbage crammed down our throats, and the Progs also continue apace in their crusade to abolish material forms of human advancement such as gas water heaters and any kind of dishwashers. 

Quite honestly, I don't see any alternative to the scenario I lay out in the first paragraph. As I said over at Precipice the other day, we're knuckleheads who have squandered our birthright.

 

 

 

I'd love to see Jennifer Rumsey and Steven Koonin sit down for a conversation about net zero

 Cummins, Inc. which characterizes itself as a "leader in global power technology," had been teasing the public for weeks, in the form of Facebook posts and highway billboards, with a major development the company intended to unveil on March 8.

This being the 9th, we now know what the development was. We now know that it is 

the launch of Accelera by Cummins, a new brand for its New Power business unit. Accelera provides a diverse portfolio of zero-emissions solutions for many of the world’s most vital industries empowering customers to accelerate their transition to a sustainable future. 

The launch of Accelera is a significant step forward in Cummins’ efforts to achieve its Destination Zero strategy, focused on evolving Cummins technologies to reach zero emissions across its product portfolio. Cummins’ Destination Zero strategy is rooted in the understanding that multiple solutions are required to achieve industry-wide decarbonization across the diverse applications the company powers. Over the past several years, Cummins has invested more than $1.5 billion in research and technology, capital and acquisitions to build Accelera’s leadership and technological capabilities. Accelera is now a global leader in zero-emissions technologies, providing battery electric and fuel cell electric solutions across commercial and industrial applications with hundreds of electrolyzers generating hydrogen around the world today. 

“Achieving our goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 requires leveraging our entire portfolio of businesses,” said Jennifer Rumsey, Cummins President and Chief Executive Officer. “As we have continued to lead in and advance the engine-based solutions that power our customers’ businesses, we have also built the broadest combination of zero-emissions technologies dedicated to the commercial vehicle industry like battery electric and fuel cell electric powertrain solutions and electrolyzers for green hydrogen production. Establishing Accelera reinforces our commitment to leading in zero-emissions solutions and highlights our unmatched ability to leverage our deep understanding of our customers’ needs and applications, technical expertise and extensive service and support network to walk hand in hand with our customers throughout the energy transition.” 

Accelera is advancing a range of zero-emissions solutions, including hydrogen fuel cells, batteries, e-axles, traction systems and electrolyzers, to sustainably power a variety of industries from commercial transportation to chemical production. Both a components supplier and integrator, Accelera is decarbonizing applications like buses, trucks, trains, construction equipment, stationary power and carbon intense industrial processes. 

Now, Cummins employs some of the best and brightest, and has some notable concrete efforts to show for its net-zero zeal:

Recent zero-emissions highlights that Accelera will continue to build on include:

• Completing the acquisition of Meritor, Inc., and Siemens Commercial Vehicle business to advance electric powertrain solutions 
• Increasing global electrolyzer manufacturing capacity with gigawatt-scalable plants in Fridley, Minnesota – its first in the United States – and in Spain (now under construction)
• Powering the world’s largest proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzer in  operation in the world in Bécancour, Canada
• Powering the world’s first hydrogen refueling station for ships, cars, trucks and industrial customers in Antwerp, Belgium
• Powering the world’s first megawatt-scale demonstration plant for storing wind energy in the natural gas grid in Windgas Falkenhagen, Germany
• Powering the world’s first fleets of hydrogen fuel cell passenger trains in Germany
• Deploying four hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered class 8 heavy-duty trucks with several marquis fleet customers in the United States
• Powering 52 fuel cell city buses in Lingang, Shanghai
• Powering refuse trucks with FAUN across Europe

Impressive stuff. But theoretical physicist and American Enterprise Institute fellow Steven Koonin, in an interview with Genn Loury, casts doubt on whether such measures are going to be adequate to Cummins's vision:

Now, what about the Paris Accords, the possibility of international diplomacy being able to get the Chinese and the Indians and the Europeans and the North Americans all on the same page on this? I mean, particularly in light of what you just observed about the fact that most of humanity has yet to fully empower itself to enjoy the benefits of the modern technological civilization that we take for granted, which depends on fossil fuels.

Ain't gonna happen, all right? We're not gonna reduce, we're not gonna go to zero certainly by 2050. Even John Kerry admits that now. And we're not gonna go to zero globally certainly before the end of this century.

Oh, excuse me. Can you just explain to people what “go to zero” means?

Okay, so the world emits a certain amount of greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide, every year. Most of that emission is due to the burning of fossil fuels. Because the world is developing and the population is increasing, the amount of fossil fuels we burn every year goes up, has been going up at about one-and-a-half percent a year. In order to stabilize—not reduce but just stabilize—human influences on those emissions have to go to zero. If you want to stabilize the climate, allegedly, at one-and-a-half degrees temperature rise, it needs to go to zero by 2050. If you go to zero more slowly, the temperature will be higher, they say. 

So the goal, the political goal, the goal of the Paris Accord is to get to zero some time in the latter half of this century, globally. That means no emissions of fossil fuels used in the conventional way. Also, by the way, you gotta fix agriculture, which accounts for about 25% of emissions. But basically to get to an emissions-free world by 2050 or 2100. So that's kind of the goal. 

But if you look at the drivers, the development, the rate of change of technology, the somewhat modest increase in population expected over the next 80 years, there's just no way that's gonna happen. And you can understand that from the point of view of the Chinese or the Indian. Their overwhelming priority is to get enough energy for their people so that they can improve their lives. But the issue of, well, something might happen to the climate a hundred years from now is just not particularly important relative to that overwhelming need.

A whole lot of effort is being expended to address something that is not a crisis.

And there's a whole lot of the world that would like to enjoy the Western standard of living. Leapfrogging over the employment of the energy forms that made that standard of living possible isn't going to achieve that.

Cheap, dense and ready available energy is still the foremost kind. 

 

 

ESG, like all progressive virtue-signaling, is not achieving its purported aims

 Great piece by John Masko today at UnHerd. In the course of looking at where the ESG movement currently stands, he runs us through a synopsis of its history. It shows that the whole thing was cooked up to try to convince progressives that the corporate world was puking all over itself to get its mind right:

ESG first entered the investment and banking mainstream as a survival strategy. In 2009, BlackRock had acquired Barclay’s Global Investors Ltd, making it the largest investment firm in the world with almost $3 trillionin assets under management (AUM), a sum larger than the total revenue of the US federal treasury. Politically speaking, BlackRock’s emergence as an investment superpower could hardly have come at a worse time. Amid the wreckage of the 2008 Financial Crisis and then the ululations of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, public suspicion of big banks and corporations was at an all-time high. Finance, in particular, became a morality play: financial institutions were the greedy villains, while policymakers played the heroic civic advocates reining them in. For BlackRock, the chances of continuing to grow freely in such a hostile policy climate seemed remote.

But BlackRock’s leaders had an epiphany — one that would repeat itself in the C-suites of several of its competitors in the early 2010s. What if big investment houses could rebrand themselves as so unimpeachably virtuous and civic-minded that their virtue outshone even their regulators themselves? Such a strategy would be game-changing. Not only would it afford investment houses a mile-wide road to limitless growth; it could even, if played judiciously, accord the companies themselves quasi-governmental power.

The ESG principles underpinning that strategy had already been written. The 2004 United Nations report “Who Cares Wins,” which introduced the principles of ESG to a worldwide audience, suggested that investors would make higher long-term profits if they put more emphasis on environmental and social progress. The small print was that the task of defining these impossibly broad categories (“environmental” or “social”) would be left to international institutions. Per those institutions’ priorities, “environmental” would mostly focus on implementing CO2-reduction goals, while “social” would mean anything related to the UN’s stated social goals on issues such as gender parity, racial justice, and poverty reduction. In other words, from the very beginning, the goal of ESG was to harmonise the priorities of political elites with those of business leaders. This approach was nothing new in Europe, where Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum (WEF) had long blurred the lines between business and government. But in the US, where the WEF ethos had failed to take root and the shareholder remained king, it was a radical departure.

But when it did take off here, it really took off:

When the UN invited global financial institutions to sign onto the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) in 2007, the total global assets managed by ESG-minded investing vehicles was around $10 trillion. By 2020, a mere 13 years later, that has grown to more than $30 trillion worldwide and more than $17 trillion in the US. New private equity firms and investment outfits devoted purely to ESG — such as Al Gore’s Generation Investment — were springing up every year, and most large US investment firms began offering ESG-mandated mutual funds, leading Bloomberg in 2021 to project $53 trillion invested in ESG by 2025.

This happened because individual owners of shares in companies had a smaller voice than ever:

As the ESG agenda took hold, the individual investor increasingly found himself shunted aside. Admittedly, the roots of this shift lay in the early Eighties, when federal proxy voting rules were changed to allow fund managers such as BlackRock to vote on behalf of their clients. The idea was a good one at the time, in that it recognised that few individual investors have the time to attend shareholder meetings or the wherewithal to make their views known to company leadership. But it handed vast power to investment companies — admittedly under the understanding that they would vote on behalf of their clients for one purpose only: the maximisation of profits and shareholder returns. It was, however, only a matter of time before this power was exploited.

BlackRock's Larry Fink has demonstrated jaw-dropping hubris for the past eight years:

Fink’s first few letters contained tell-tale signs of the revolution to come, particularly in 2015, when he chastised managers for returning too much money to their investors in dividends and buybacks. Then, in his 2018 letter, he went a step further, advocating that CEOs step away from traditional shareholder capitalism and toward ESG by embracing the idea of “stakeholders”. In his words: “Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate.” “Every company,” he wrote, “must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.” Allow me to translate: On behalf of millions of shareholders I’ve never met, I declare that they no longer truly own the companies they have invested in. Society does.

With a three-fold result: investors not being on board, financial under-performance, and foot-dragging by corporations on compliance with Fink's edicts:

Over the past decade, as investment houses such as BlackRock have exerted ever-greater influence over decision-making at their portfolio companies, investors have in fact been signalling for them to take a step back. We can see this in the growing popularity of passive strategies (in which investment companies take a backseat role) compared with active strategies (in which they more frequently buy and sell stocks and actively intervene in the affairs of portfolio companies to improve performance). In 2011, 21% of US AUM were managed passively, compared with 79% managed actively; by 2018, the split had narrowed to 36% to 64%. Parity is projected for 2025. BlackRock’s own active-to-passive balance has followed a similar trajectory. Their portfolio had been primarily actively managed until 2009. But by 2018, $3.9 trillion of their $6 trillion assets were invested passively. Just as BlackRock’s customers were voting with their dollars for the firm to intervene less in company policy, BlackRock’s leaders were declaring it their sacred duty to intervene more.

Over the years, ESG advocates have parried charges of overreach by responding that investing with ESG criteria is just as lucrative as traditional investing. This has always been a dubious argument: after all, if favouring ESG-friendly companies were a prudent financial strategy, an investor would not need to publicly commit to ESG in order to do it; it would simply be the best financial decision.

The evidence of ESG’s performance has until recently been ambiguous enough to offer ammunition to both sides. But that has begun to change. In 2022, eight of the top ten actively managed US ESG funds (including one of BlackRock’s) performed worse than the S&P 500. This demonstrates two things. First, that ESG funds are not some financial miracle. And second, that the performance of ESG funds is tightly bound to the tech industry, which had a terrible year in 2022. (Unsurprisingly, tech stocks are overrepresented in ESG funds, since it is easier for tech companies to claim low environmental impact than companies that actually make things.)

Not only is ESG failing to make money, but it is not even achieving its non-financial goals. One sizeable Columbia University and London School of Economics study published in 2021 found that US companies in 147 ESG portfolios had worse compliance records for both labour and environmental rules than US companies in 2,428 non-ESG portfolios. They also found that companies added to ESG portfolios did not subsequently improve compliance with labour or environmental regulations. This study added to a growing body of evidence that ESG investing is not only anti-democratic but ineffective.

Maybe the academic world, in which 52 percent of professors say that they're afraid to speak their minds and 11 percent say they've been disciplined for what they've taught in the classroom, could take a cue from the actual owners of American businesses.

There come a point at which the absurdity of the entire progressive project becomes so obvious that something has to move the needle. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the kind of crud we get when "stakeholder capitalism" gains a foothold

 All that Great-Reset/Business-Roundtable-redefinition-of-a-company's-purpose hooey is beginning to play out in concrete and ill-advised ways.

Climate alarmists have been drumming their message into society's collective head so incessantly that it's leading to developments like Ford converting its venerable F-150 pickup truck to being completely electrically powered:

When Ford Motor Co. surveyed American truck owners last year, the automaker received a clear message: “Keep your hands off my truck.” Only 40 percent said they’d be “excited” about an electric pickup.

That truck, like it or not, is here. Now the question is whether consumers — and Congress — will join Ford and other automakers for the ride.

The Ford F-150, an iconic American brand with a seven-decade history, will go electric in 2022. President Joe Biden will tour the vehicle’s Dearborn, Michigan, factory on Tuesday in advance of Ford’s big reveal of the new truck, the Lightning, on Wednesday.

 

The president will make a case for his infrastructure plan, including $174 billion for electric vehicle technology and 500,000 vehicle charging stations. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has called the plan “left-wing social engineering,” but Ford likes the way Biden thinks.

The company is a key player in what has been a rapid political turnabout that has corporate America ahead of the Washington curve on climate policy. While their onetime Republican allies in Congress wield fossil fuels as weapons in a culture war, Ford and other companies are moving ahead without them.

“The politics around climate change haven’t caught up with where the stakeholder community is,” said Sasha Mackler, director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Energy Project. “Big companies are making their own commitments and actually doing things with respect to the energy transition. The Ford F-150 is part of that.”

And it will be a particularly important case to watch. Pickups, especially the F-150, are deeply rooted in the American psyche and the economy. And their sales are heavily concentrated in conservative states where high-speed electric charging stations are few and far between. 

In Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota, more than 40 percent of all vehicles sold are pickups. In South Dakota, Alaska and Idaho, more than a third of all vehicles sold are pickups, according to a Cox Automotive analysis.

Those are also states with the lowest density of high-speed charging stations, according to Department of Energy data, and could be the biggest beneficiaries of Biden’s plan.

This is precisely a case of the pointy-headed administrative overlord class - government, corporations, and activist groups  - coming together to dictate what consumers will be able to buy. So much for millions of decisions being made every day on the micro level that provide signals to the market as to what companies ought to produce. This is the truck that will be available to you, and you will damn well like it.

And you will cough up billions of tax dollars for charging stations. 

Not only is this a real throat-squeeze on economic liberty, it's costly as hell:

The push for lithium stems from the electric vehicle craze that's unfolded in the last year. States such as California and Washington have said they'll phase out gasoline cars. Tesla has become the world's most valuable automaker. Automakers like VW and GM have begun to invest billions to transition to electric cars and trucks. Electric vehicles are a cornerstone of President Biden's infrastructure plan, with a $174 billion investment. 

Electric vehicles can't happen without lithium — and a lot of it. Lithium is a critical mineral in the batteries that power electric vehicles. The world will need to mine 42 times as much lithium as was mined in 2020 if we will meet the climate goals set by the Paris Agreement, according to the International Energy Agency. Existing mines and projects under construction will meet only half the demand for lithium in 2030, the agency said.

The United States has only one active lithium mine today. The country will need 500,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate equivalent by 2030, according to research by RK Equity, a New York firm that advises investors on lithium. The entire global lithium carbonate equivalent market last year was 325,000 metric tons, RK Equity partner Howard Klein told CNN Business. 

What would be involved in talking sense into a critical mass of the public so that it came to see that dense, cheap and readily available energy forms are just fine for humankind to extract and use?

It may be too late, now that corporations are rushing to be told what to do in order to be able to congratulate themselves on their virtue.  

 

Marco Rubio has gone off the rails

 He has an op-ed at the New York Post today that is a complete mess.

It has its valid points.  Corporate woke-ism is a real thing. The nation's largest companies are indeed ate up with preoccupation with "equity," inclusiveness and the global climate. 

Where his piece unravels is when he conflates concern about that with the kind of nostalgic yearning for the thriving factory towns of a bygone era that was a key component of Trumpism, trotting out the protectionist lines about "moving good jobs out of our nation," "prioritizing offshoring" and "with the profits came a corporate duty to care for the strength of the nation and its citizens." Where in the federal code is that found? Those were the whines of the populists well before the woke-ism element became such a problem.

I understand that US companies being so entwined with China is problematic and even has national security implications, but that's a specific situation that ought to be targeted for examination. The idea that it's, generally speaking, somehow "greedy" for corporations to offshore is something that has a more-than-faint leftist odor about it. Government - as in elected lawmakers such as Rubio - ought to be steering policy toward a free-market footing. Whether Republicans have ever been anywhere close to purists about that is debatable, but given that their party is ostensibly the repository for conservative principles on the national landscape, they should be. 

Rubio frames the low-corporate-taxes stance Republicans have taken as part of a transaction:

Cutting corporate taxes, and especially investment taxes, makes sense if US companies are going to invest in American industry. But if they’re instead prioritizing offshoring operations or simply returning windfalls to shareholders, then policymakers are going to start being more careful in how we structure tax cuts. 

Sorry, Senator, the reason for keeping corporate taxes low is the same as it is for any kind of taxes: the money belongs to the person or organization earning it, not the government. 

He winds up his argument with this humdinger. There's no way around it; it sounds downright Mussolini-esque:

America’s laws should keep our nation’s corporations firmly ordered to our national common good. 

Corporations, like mom-and-pop shops or any other form of organization that exists to show its owners a return on their investment, are not obligated to hew to anybody's concept of the "national common good." Who the hell gets to define that?

 Yes, corporations ought to get out of the business of weighing in on transgender bathrooms, election laws and police shootings, but they ought to continue to set up their facilities and supply chains in the most cost-efficient manner possible, free of pressure from government  to do otherwise. 

Senator Rubio, when did you get this idea that tax law is a legitimate instrument of leverage?

Corporate wokeness is real and a problem; one doesn't have to be a populist bonehead to understand that

 I've liked Amanda Carpenter's work at The Bulwark. She's struck me as a dependably conservative voice at a publication that started out with a simple premise - that actual conservatism was different from Trumpism and was not going away - but has exhibited some serious wobbliness as it's grown, most notably in the contributions of Richard North Patterson, who clearly doesn't fit anybody's definition of a conservative. 

But today, she goes after the Republican ire toward corporations engaging in falsehood based indignation over Georgia's election law. She says it's hypocritical, especially on the part of Mitch McConnell:

For decades, McConnell was an outspoken supporter of corporations’ political expression and expenditure. His name is on the Supreme Court case challenging the campaign-finance law that limited certain kinds of corporate speech; he later praised the Citizens United decision that overturned those limitations. But now he wants corporations to shut up and put up. It’s unfair of them, you see, to criticize Republicans for supporting restrictionist laws based on Trump’s Big Lie about the election.

Yes, the Big Lie is real and it was supremely shameful and a serious blow to this country's constitutional stability. But I think she mischaracterizes the Georgia legislature's motives in crafting the election law, or at least cynically omits certain motives. 

The corporations in question were not upset about the law in its developmental stages, and even right after it became law. As Allahpundit points out at Hot Air, they didn't enter the fray until they were squeezed my the cultural left:

Delta actually praised the law in its first statement after Brian Kemp signed it, noting that it “improved considerably during the legislative process, and expands weekend voting, codifies Sunday voting and protects a voter’s ability to cast an absentee ballot without providing a reason. For the first time, drop boxes have also been authorized for all counties statewide and poll workers will be allowed to work across county lines.” Shortly thereafter lefty activists grabbed the company by the lapels and urged it to reconsider its assessment, which Delta duly did.

At least Delta offered input on the law during the drafting stage, though. Georgia legislators who spoke to NRO’s Ryan Mills told him that Major League Baseball didn’t give a rip about the bill while it was being debated. No meetings, no comments, zip. Not until it passed and Joe Biden declared that he’d “strongly support” moving the All-Star Game from Atlanta in protest did the league conclude that the law was an offense to God and man.

If MLB cared about voting rights, why didn’t it intervene when it had a chance to influence the legislation? Answer: Because it didn’t care until the left told it to.

“I do not recall any interaction with Major League Baseball for sure, and I do not recall any interactions with anybody representing the (Atlanta) Braves organization the whole time that we were debating and working through the bill,” said Barry Fleming, the state representative who sponsored the House version of the election bill…

“I talked to the commissioner, offered to explain anything he wanted in the bill, because I heard they were getting pressured. He thanked me for that,” [Brian] Kemp said. “And then I got a call saying they had moved the game. No dialogue whatsoever, which is just disappointing.”…

Between the House and Senate, [Fleming] said, there were about 20 hearings on the proposal when MLB officials also could have weighed in. If MLB was dissatisfied with the legislation, “we certainly could and would have made changes along the way,” Fleming said.

Fleming did meet with other business leaders, just none from MLB because MLB didn’t care. They moved the game from Atlanta due to a progressive pressure campaign, not because they have any sincere objections to the law — not a single provision of which they have yet to identify as especially troubling, by the way. In fact, Mills notes, other states like Ohio and Florida that hosted the All-Star Game recently have voting laws that aren’t dissimilar from Georgia’s and which have been criticized in various respects by liberal activists. MLB didn’t care. Until now.

And if the answer to that is, “It wasn’t until last year that one party tried to disenfranchise millions of voters by overturning the election so go figure that voting rights are now a priority,” it only brings us back to the original question. If MLB’s consciousness about voter access had been raised by the “stop the steal” fiasco, why wasn’t it seeking to influence Georgia’s new law while in development?

My theory all along has been that they probably would have kept the game in Atlanta notwithstanding the pressure from leftists if not for Biden coming out publicly and saying he’d support moving it. They had cover on their left flank from Stacey Abrams and Jon Ossoff to decline a boycott, but once the president raised the stakes it was destined to become an issue that would follow the league and its players for months. 

This is a bit of a sticky area. I even had to take issue with a Principles First ally on Twitter yesterday, who had proclaimed that there is no woke corporate mob.

The issue right now is a Georgia election law, but precedents have been getting set for some time. There was the dustup over Indiana's religious freedom law, the North Carolina bathrooms-for-gender-dysphoria-sufferers, and take-a-knee gestures and social justice slogans on uniforms in several sports leagues. 

One doesn't have to be some kind of populist to find the trend disturbing. It's a disruption to the proper functioning of the free market. Companies exist to deliver particular products to their customers and thereby show their owners a return on investment. They become something other than that when virtue-signaling becomes a prominent part of their mission. That may be find with the Business Roundtable, the Great Reset crowd and stakeholder-theory proponents generally, but not everyone is up for that kind of transformation. 

 

Woke-ism makes it damn hard for free-market champions to defend corporations against regulation and taxation

 I'm not huge on litmus tests, but I do consider it as essential to substantiation of someone's claim to be a conservative that they be on board with free-market economics. That he or she have the principles laid out by Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt and Frederich Hayek ingrained in his or her bones. Economic freedom is essential to the viability of any other kind of freedom.

But it's clear that the Trump phenomenon brought us a "populist" take on economics that depends less on immutable principles than it does on appeals to Little Guys and Average Joes. It's going to be hard to wrest that terrain back from them in the struggle to reclaim the mantle of actual conservatism.

And conservatives are sure not getting any help from post-America's big corporations, That's been true for some time, but the momentum has been increasing in 2021. It's given the populists the perfect excuse to thumb their nose at that whole sector:

Republicans and corporate America are on the outs.

In the past week alone, American Airlines and computer company Dell came out strongly against GOP-led bills that place restrictions on voting in their home base of Texas. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a rising star in Republican Party, continued to take heat for nixing a bill that would have imposed a ban on transgender athletes in sports, citing the potential impact on her state's bottom line. And conservatives spent days bashing "vaccine passports" some businesses think are needed to return to normal.

And then there was Georgia, where the Republican-controlled state House narrowly voted to end a tax break worth millions that Delta enjoys on jet fuel after the airline's CEO — along with the CEO of Coca-Cola, another major Atlanta-based business — condemned new voting restrictions in the state. (The GOP-led state Senate did not take up the measure.) On Friday, Major League Baseball pulled this year's All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest of that same law.

Republicans were outraged.

"Boycott baseball and all of the woke companies that are interfering with Free and Fair Elections," former President Donald Trump said in a statement. "Are you listening Coke, Delta, and all!"

"Why are we still listening to these woke corporate hypocrites on taxes, regulations & anti-trust?" Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., tweeted.

Such public dust-ups between businesses and members of the GOP are becoming more frequent, though the divide — possibly one of the most consequential in U.S. politics and society — is years in the making. The shift is the product of a Republican Party increasingly driven by "culture war" issues that animate a base invigorated by Trump and corporate powerhouses that are under more pressure than ever to align themselves with the left on voting rights, LGBTQ rights and anti-racist efforts.

The result is a fraying in relations between a GOP that has for years advocated for the kinds of libertarian economic policies that have widely benefited these businesses and companies that are using their might to help advance racial and social justice causes.

"We have long thought and still think of the big institutional drivers of this culture war as more in academia, the arts, the media, and corporate America has mostly sat it out until recently," retiring Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., told NBC News in an interview. He added that while he does not think of corporate America "as the biggest player yet," companies coming off the sidelines "can change the dynamic."

It's to the point at which some are ready to quit speaking of people's - and that's what we're talking about, even in the case of big corporations, since they're owned by investors - right to keep government's hands off their money:

"Talking about corporate tax cuts and reducing burdensome regulations doesn't do it for our new voters," this person said. "I guess it's not that exciting. It might be exciting for those country club Republicans we lost, but we're losing them."

What it means for policy is less clear, however, even as some Republicans embrace some leftward policies like an increase in the minimum wage. Under Trump, Republicans implemented a tax cut that saw much of its benefits go toward some of these same corporations conservatives now decry for their social activism. Few Republicans are turning away from the traditional agenda of lower taxes and deregulation — though some prominent Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Rubio have sought to position themselves as corporate antagonists.

Toomey said he's seen the "rise in economic populism among some Republicans," with the possibility of more "anti-corporate momentum" should corporations decide "to become part of the left-wing social movement."

Toomey makes this observation objectively, but it's not his own viewpoint, to be sure:

Toomey, a former president of the Club for Growth, is not on board with such moves.

"I'm still going to fight for the right economic policy, right? I'm not going to say, 'Well, let's punish them for their bad behavior,' because unfortunately punishment is inflicted on the American people and our economy," he said. "So I'm not going to be part of that."

There's plenty of cluelessness here to go around. The populists have lost sight of the principles of freedom  and limited government, and the corporate sector has signed on to all this "stakeholder theory" and social-justice nonsense, probably at the expense of the maximum profitability it owes its actual owners. 

It's so hard for clarity to get an airing in post-America. 

 

 

 

 

The obscene preening over the Georgia election law

 Lots of people and organizations are grandstanding and demagoguing about a piece of legislation in Georgia that is well within the midrange of voting laws to be found around the country, and merely specifies provisions that were considered quite normal less than a decade ago. Their displays of self-congratulation are based on lies and they know it. 

Let's start with President Joe Biden, whose "Jim Crow on steroids" remark and lies about the law's voting-hours provisions garnered four Pinocchios from the Washington Post's fact-checker Glenn Kessler:

First he quotes Biden:

“What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It’s sick. It’s sick … deciding that you’re going to end voting at 5 o’clock when working people are just getting off work.” (March 25)

“Among the outrageous parts of this new state law, it ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over.” (March 26)

“You are going to close a polling place at 5 o’clock when working people just get off. This is all about keeping working folks and ordinary folks that I grew up with from being able to vote.”

Then Kessler responds to the president’s claims:

In reality, Election Day hours were not changed and the opportunities to cast a ballot in early voting were expanded. The law made a modest change, replacing a vague phrase “normal business hours” — presumed to be 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. — to a more specific 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. time period. (Some rural county election offices worked only part time during the week, not a full eight-hour day, so the shift to more specific times makes it clear they must be open every weekday for at least eight hours.) But that’s the minimum.

Under the new law, counties have the option to extend the voting hours so voters can start casting ballots as early as 7 a.m. and as late as 7 p.m. — the same as Election Day in Georgia. Moreover, an additional mandatory day of early voting on Saturday was added and two days of early voting on Sunday were codified as an option for counties.

The White House did not provide an explanation for Biden’s erroneous statement, which has turned up in a news conference, an official statement and an interview. Astonishingly, at an April 1 news briefing, White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the president’s comment, incorrectly arguing “it standardizes the ending of voting every day at 5, right?”

The truth is that the Georgia bill codifies drop boxes for ballots as a permanent feature of the state’s voting system (prior to 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic they had never been used there before), expands early voting, and institutes a voter ID requirement that is broadly supported by Americans of all races. Jim Crow it is not, much less a performance-enhancing drugged-up version of it.

Then there's his disgusting distortion of what the handing-out-food-and-water provision says:

Here’s what Biden had to say:

It’s an atrocity. The idea, you want any indication, it has nothing to do with fairness, nothing to do with decency. They pass a law saying you can’t provide water for people standing in line, while they’re waiting to vote.  You don’t need anything else to know that this is nothing but punitive, designed to keep people from voting. You can’t provide water for people about to vote? Give me a break.

Let’s take a look at what S.B. 202 actually says:

No person shall solicit votes [or] distribute or display any campaign material, nor shall any person give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink, to [a voter] … This Code section shall not be construed to prohibit a poll officer…from making available self-service water from an unattended receptacle to [a voter] waiting in line to vote.

The parts in bold are what S.B. 202 added to the statute. The prohibition applies inside polling places, within 150 feet of a polling place, or “within 25 feet of any voter standing in line to vote at any polling place.”

Now, first of all, notice what is not prohibited here. Voters can still bring bottled water or other food or beverages with them to stand on line to vote, as people often do when waiting at Disney World or to buy concert tickets or in other public places where people stand on long lines. Voters can still also, if they like, order food; the bill doesn’t stop the Domino’s Pizza man or the local hot dog cart or taco truck from doing business. And if you feel impelled to donate food and drink to voters, you can still do that, too; you just have to give it to the poll workers so they can put it out for general use. The president’s claim that “You can’t provide water for people about to vote” is just false. What you cannot do under the new Georgia law is deploy people in National Rifle Association t-shirts and MAGA hats to hand out free Koch-brothers-financed, Federalist Society–branded pizza to voters. 

  

If you read the full Major League Baseball statement, written my commissioner Rob Manfred, also found in the above-linked piece, you'll see he doesn't actually specify any details of the law that the organization finds objectionable. Just a lot of dog waste about Hank Aaron and "fair access to voting."

Delta Airlines peddles falsehoods with a race-card angle in its chime-in on the matter:

Delta’s CEO, Ed Bastian, issued a foolish statement denouncing Georgia’s election reform legislation. Bastien’s statement parroted false left-wing narratives:

Last week, the Georgia legislature passed a sweeping voting reform act that could make it harder for many Georgians, particularly those in our Black and Brown communities, to exercise their right to vote.

This is false. What the law does is make it harder for non-existent people, people who are not qualified voters, and people who have already cast ballots to vote.

I need to make it crystal clear that the final bill is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values.

The right to vote is sacred. It is fundamental to our democracy and those rights not only need to be protected, but easily facilitated in a safe and secure manner.

After having time to now fully understand all that is in the bill, coupled with discussions with leaders and employees in the Black community, it’s evident that the bill includes provisions that will make it harder for many underrepresented voters, particularly Black voters, to exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives. That is wrong.

Again, this is sheer fabrication, and racist fabrication at that. The idea that “Black voters” are somehow unable to participate in an elementary process like voting is insulting to them.

You may remember Gabriel Sterling, the Georgia election official who gave the thunderous speech last December holding Donald Trump responsible for creating a climate in which threats and calls for violence could proliferate, and for costing the GOP the Senate;

My boss, Secretary Raffensperger, his address is out there. They have people doing caravans in front of their house. They’ve had people come on to their property. Tricia, his wife of 40 years, is getting sexualized threats through her cell phone. It has to stop. This is elections. This is the backbone of democracy. And all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this. It’s too much. Yes. Fight for every legal vote. Go through your due process. We encourage you. Use your first amendment. That’s fine. Death threats, physical threats, intimidation, it’s too much. It’s not right. They’ve lost the moral high ground to claim that it is.

I don’t have all the best words to do this because I’m angry. The straw that broke the camel’s back today is again, this 20 year old contractor for a voting system company, just trying to do his job. Just there. In fact, I talked to Dominion today and I said, “He’s one of the better ones they got.” His family is getting harassed now. There’s a noose out there with his name on it. That’s not right. I’ve got police protection outside my house. Fine. I took a higher profile job. I get it. Secretary ran for office. His wife knew that too. This kid took a job. He just took a job. And it’s just wrong. I can’t begin to explain the level of anger I have right now over this. And every American, every Georgian, Republican and Democrat alike should have that same level of anger.

Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia. We’re investigating. There’s always a possibility. I get it, and you have the rights to go through the courts. What you don’t have the ability to do, and you need to step up and say this, is stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed. And it’s not right. It’s not right. And y’all, I don’t have anything scripted. Like I said, I’m going to do my best to keep it together. All of this is wrong.

So he's clearly no fan of the Very Stable Genius. But he also sees that Biden's remarks are every bit as toxic:

Sterling wasn’t pleased. “I think it’s morally reprehensible and disgusting that he’s perpetuating economic blackmail over a lie,” he told The Dispatch. “It’s a lie. This is no different than the lie of Trump saying there was voter fraud in this state. And the people who are going to be most hurt by [a boycott] are the workers in all of these places that are going to be impacted.”

Georgia was by no means purple, even though it wound up sending two Democrats to the Senate in the January runoff.  That was largely due to the boneheaded GOP candidates' behavior and the VSG's antics such as the "find 11,000 votes" call to Brad Raffensperger. My powers of prognostication are decidedly those of an amateur, but I think we can expect 2022 midterm results that show strong backlash to this disgusting bit of strutting by the leftists who have designs on making America unrecognizable. 

UPDATE: A white-hot Governor Brian Kemp lets loose on the MBA and big Georgia-based corporations. 

UPDATE:  Donald Trump needs to shut his stinking rotten mouth and stay the hell out of this situation.