Corporate America and the Left

American Thinker ^ | March 6, 2018 | Paul Gottfried

[all the best]

A distinguished social economist of my acquaintance, Carl Horowitz, produced a penetrating essay, which is available in the latest issue of Social Contract, on "The Alliance of Corporate Capitalism with Political Radicalism." Carl demonstrates that black nationalists, revolutionary socialists, and off-the-wall feminists have loyal benefactors among the corporate boards of high-tech enterprises and in older corporations like Pepsi-Cola and Citibank. Carl's illustrations are vivid and shocking, and his well constructed speech leads me to raise two questions occasioned by his evidence.

One: Carl describes his targets as people who are betraying the free enterprise system that has allowed them to flourish, but it might be asked whether this is really the case. Can't it be argued that someone like Mark Zuckerberg, the socially radical billionaire founder of Facebook, is being economically rational even when he indulges his infantile leftist fantasies and sports a Che Guevara shirt? Many of those who avail themselves of Zuckerberg's invention hold the same political and cultural beliefs. I'm not even sure that the decisions made by Facebook and Google here and in Western Europe to kick political conservatives off their sites is a bad business practice. Perhaps most users of these internet conveniences welcome P.C. intolerance. They may be like those college students who are demanding safe spaces and who cheer anti-fascist demonstrators keeping "intolerant" views from being expressed on their campuses. Political pressures are coming almost entirely from the cultural left, and it might make perfectly good business sense to accommodate these politically engaged customers.

[all the best]

Old day business titans were protestants and adhered to bourgeois values. Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, the Google boys, et al are anything but.

[farming pharmer]

My high school government teacher taught us that big business and big government are a lot alike. Wise man.

[Mmmike]

Materialism makes for strange bedfellows. As Whittaker Chambers taught, the fundamental struggle is a religious one. To me, there's no way the enemy was ever all-in for reasons of abstract economics. That was just his deceptive rallying cry. Now he's more openly nihilistic, which appeals to many of the nouveau riche as well as the old-fashioned untermenschen.

[SoConPubbie]

Too bad he was too cowardly to look into the more insidious infiltration by the gays into senior leadership and boards of corporation.

[Louis Foxwell]

The notion that political pressure is e3xclusive to the left ignores the election of DJT.

[tbw2]

Socialists think that the average person is an idiot who needs to be controlled, while the state should be the source of everything good.
Socialists deciding to simplify the market to only the few big businesses they control, backed by the big businesses who now get a monopoly in exchanged for supporting the state, is not a new concept.

[Pining_4_TX]

It’s like the rich man’s children who turn out to be wastrels. They have no appreciation for hard work nor any understanding of how wealth is created. Most of the large foundations have been taken over by leftists, too. Socialist parasites know how to worm their way into positions of power. Like some other paradites, they will eventually destroy their hosts.

[farming pharmer]

The notion that political pressure is e3xclusive to the left ignores the election of DJT.

I agree. In example, the success of the NRA. The left owns the political freak show, though. Makes for better TV reporting.