Free Republic

Eighty-eight big-business leaders signed a letter Friday endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, underscoring the ongoing political realignment since 2016. Before former President Donald Trump won the presidency, the Republican Party appeared to be the party of big-business and corporate interests. Now the Democrat party is taking up that mantle in the banner of globalism and “democracy,” a reformation of political identities dating back to Franklin D. Roosevelt and beyond.

Like many of you, I both attend and lead many a presentation. Some are sales-focused, some are just project updates; some are intended to be educational. One of the more disturbing things I’ve noticed throughout my career has been how political points creep into such presentations. Sometimes it’s formal – “this is the company-mandated slide on diversity hiring.” Sometimes it’s more subtle – “Here are some interesting statistics about our business: so many sites, so many employees, so many solar panels” – and so forth. I’ll share two recent ones. One of my vendors now includes a slide showing a...

NEW DELHI/HANOI (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden visits Vietnam's capital city Sunday, where the two countries are expected to declare themselves strategic partners, as the United States seeks to push supply chains from China and both countries to try to counter Beijing's military and diplomatic influence in Asia. Biden will arrive at the Presidential Palace Sunday afternoon for a formal welcome from Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, Vietnam's most powerful leader, then journey to the Party headquarters where the two will meet and then give public remarks. The visit comes as trade and investment ties between the...

Several other Republican attorneys general joined Paxton in bashing the Biden administration, largely over previous policy decisions they disagreed with. ... Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton .. attacked the Biden administration in a federal court brief as part of a case involving the seizure of records from former President Donald Trump’s home in Florida. Paxton, a Trump ally who has joined the former president in falsely claiming the 2020 election was marred by widespread voter fraud, filed a friend of the court brief in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He argued the government under Joe Biden cannot be...

The party will be over for big businesses that push “woke” agendas once the Grand Old Party takes over the House next month, insiders told The Post. Long viewed as the party of big business, fed-up Republicans will now lead committees and have subpoena power as they seek to punish investment firms that prioritize the environment over fossil fuels, as well as trying to rein in China’s outsized influence on the US economy, according to several sources interviewed by The Post. “There is frustration with specific issues like woke capitalism but it’s also the case that the GOP sees Wall...

“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, OK?” Golden State Warriors' minority owner and billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya told his co-host, Jason Calacanis, on their Jan. 15 "All-in" podcast. “You bring it up because you really care, and I think it’s nice that you really care. The rest of us don’t care.”The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom stated in its 2021 annual report how the Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic minority group native to the Xinjiang (pronounced shin·jaang) province of western China, have faced increasing persecution from the government along with other religious minorities such as Christians, Tibetan Buddhists...

If you don’t understand the stakes, and how fraught the situation is — that the ruling class seeks total power, is closing in on it, and will stop at nothing to achieve it — you are unfit to lead. The defining political question of our time is this: “Do you know what time it is?”The line, popularized by the Claremont Institute’s David Reaboi, succinctly captures the most essential of points: If you don’t understand the stakes, and how fraught the situation is — that the ruling class seeks total power, is closing in on it, and will stop at nothing...

U.S. industrial giant General Electric will split into three companies following years of seeing its stock underperform, the company announced on Tuesday. The company will be divided into separate units focused on aviation, health care and energy. GE plans to spin off the health-care unit by early 2023 and the energy unit by early 2024, the company said in a news release....

WASHINGTON – Workers at larger businesses will have to get vaccinated for COVID-19 by Jan. 4, 2022, or face regular testing under new federal rules being released Thursday. Workers who choose the testing option may have to bear the cost. They also will be required to wear a face mask on the job, beginning on Dec. 5. The rules fill in the details for the vaccination requirement President Joe Biden announced in September for businesses with 100 or more employees. The Labor Department is taking feedback over the next month on whether smaller workplaces should be included. "COVID-19 continues to...

President Joe Biden’s newly issued mandate that companies with 100 or more employees must require vaccinations or weekly COVID-19 testing among their workforce may be just what the doctor ordered for a number of Chicago-area companies, including WeatherTech, the southwest suburban car floor mat manufacturer. The company, which has 1,700 employees on its sprawling Bolingbrook, Ill., campus making everything from dog bowls to cellphone holders, has no vaccine or testing mandates in place, despite having “several very sick employees” and one death from COVID-19, according to WeatherTech founder and CEO David MacNeil. MacNeil, a strong proponent of COVID-19 vaccinations for...

Politicians say they pass laws to "protect Americans from big business." People like hearing that. Many don't like big business. Unfortunately, most people don't realize that those laws often help big business while hurting consumers. "Big business and big government are not enemies like a lot of people think they are," says American Enterprise Institute fellow Tim Carney in my new video. "When government gets bigger, whether it's through spending or taxes or regulation, the big guys, big business benefits." Consider the $15 minimum wage. People think of that law as pro-worker. But big companies like Walmart, Costco and Amazon...

By resisting censorship from the government, corporations, or cancel mobs, we reaffirm the value of the freedoms won and cherished in centuries past.As I wrote in a preceding essay, the First Amendment was written to limit the government’s power. In the 18th century, only the state was conceived as possibly wielding the power to keep free people from speaking their minds. Thus, if maintaining a free people requires free speech, it followed that the government must be kept from controlling speech. For a long time, no more was necessary, but that would change.As the United States grew in population and...

The definitive list of left-wing companies that you should boycott - Once upon a time, the Cardinal rule of business was to never even discuss politics, yet nowadays, more and more large corporations are brazenly choosing to alienate half of the country by taking sides against Donald Trump, against Republicans, by attacking voting integrity laws, by pushing for censorship of conservative speech, and/or by reinforcing the Democrat's toxic culture war, including pushing the false and racist narrative of systemic racism. These companies are a threat to our country and our freedoms.

The modern democracy desired by Saturday’s participants is one our corporate and ivory tower overlords control, rather than the peons in red states.On Saturday, 100 big business leaders joined a Zoom call to plot a unified response to voting-integrity legislation pending in many states, similar to a law recently passed in Georgia. While billed as “non-partisan” efforts to defend voting rights and democracy, the players involved, their preferred policies, and the undemocratic pressure they seek to exert proves the virtual gathering was nothing of the sort.CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe first confirmed the existence of the call on Saturday, identifying American...

Old habits die hard, and now it’s time for the GOP’s habitual support of big business to die, and to die hard. Look around – the corporations have decided it’s a great time to use their power against us. There used to be a kind of gentleman’s agreement – they stay out of our business and we stay out of theirs. But they broke that agreement. They decided to go all in. And it’s no coincidence that the political positions they have taken conform exactly to those of the Democrat Party. So, the hell with them. This change has been...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Wednesday walked back his call for corporate America to “stay out of politics” after several big businesses publicly voiced opposition to Georgia’s voter integrity law. “I didn’t say that very artfully yesterday,” McConnell replied when asked about his comments. “They’re certainly entitled to be involved in politics. They are.

I am deeply offended that big corporations are trying to bully Georgia into repealing a perfectly reasonable voting integrity law. President Biden lied about the law so egregiously that even the Bezos propaganda outlet, The Washington Post, awarded him 4 Pinocchios. But that didn’t stop some of America’s most prominent corporations from trying to bully Georgia into repealing the law, one which protects legitimate votes from being cancelled out by fraudulent votes.Now, former President Trump is calling for boycotts of the corporations that are acting as political overlords:"For years the Radical Left Democrats have played dirty by boycotting products when...

What’s happening in America right now is absolutely insane. It makes some degree of sense that politicians on the left are going along with the party line as conceived by Antifa and the Black Lives Matter rioters. But, what does not make any sense at all, in my opinion, is the fact that corporations are bowing down to terrorists. Yes, I said that correctly. Corporations are bowing down to terrorists. Nike is supporting Colin Kaepernick’s attempts to turn hating America into a career path. They let him be the arbiter of what is racist and what is not, which is...

Source: Courtesy Photo of U.S. Customs and Border ProtectionIt is rare in this polarized era for legislation of moral and commercial significance to attract substantial support across party lines. A bill to fight slave labor in China is turning out to be a notable exception.The Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act, was introduced in March by Representative Jim McGovern, the Worcester Democrat who chairs the House Rules Committee, and by Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. It would ban the importation of goods made in China's Xinjiang region, where more than 1.5 million Uighur Muslims are imprisoned in a vast gulag...

Some of the largest American companies — including Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola — are actively lobbying the U.S. Congress to weaken legislation that would bar the import of products made with Uighur forced labor in Xinjiang province, China.These corporations are opposing the bipartisan Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which passed the House of Representatives 406-3 in September and is now under consideration in the U.S. Senate. The goal of the bill is to ensure “that goods made with forced labor in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China do not enter the United States market.”Since Beijing...