*Quick fun factoid!* I get a kind of ironic chuckle when I hear all of this nonsense about turning American school teachers into the Wyatt Earp's of the classroom. The NRA are some truly bad mofo's, aren't they? Except for the fact that about 25 years ago, when a couple of NRA staffers at the Washington DC main office were shot in separate incidents in the NRA garage, the NRA didn't provide armed guards as escorts for employees, nor did they hand out Glock's as Christmas bonuses either, they tucked their scaly tail between their legs and moved to a building in a better neighborhood.
There's nothing I love more than a good old fashioned boycott! There's just something so "uprising of the masses" to see all of us miserable peasants, banding together to kick the monolithic, multi-national, too-big-to give-a shit companies where it hurts the most, in their fiscal balls.
So, you can only imagine how I'm enjoying watching company after company run away from the NRA like the kid at school with cooties. These companies are not doing this because the NRA offends their delicate olfactory passages, they're doing it because public backlash against the NRA could slop over on their "good names" if they're associated with them.
But Pee-Pee LePew is right, NRA members are not going to care about corporate discounts when it comes down to their right to possess weapons of mass carnage. And the NRA itself is not going to lose any money either. Companies don't pay the NRA to accept their discounts, they give the NRA the discounts in the expectation that NRA members will choose them over the competition with the incentive of their affiliation with the group. The loss of 10% discounts won't stop Wayne LaPierre and Dana Loesch from being nihilistic assholes.
But remember this. At it's heart, the NRA is not a lobbying group, it is a wholly owned subsidiary of the American armaments industry. You think that the NRA could afford to spend millions every election cycle on candidates from the paltry dues they charge their 5 million members? That's chump change, their power money comes from direct donations and corporate sponsorships from US gun and ammunition manufacturers.
And those guys are in trouble. The number of households that buy and keep guns at home is shrinking, the death merchants are becoming more and more reliant on a small but feral group of gun zealots that won't be happy until their garage looks like the stockroom at Fort Benning.
It was reported today that Black Rock Capital is reconsidering their position in regards to the NRA and related assets. Read that as arms manufacturers. Black Rock is huge. And they don't buy stocks, they buy "indexes." Indexes are like umbrellas. An airline index would be one purchase, which would contain stocks in American, United, Delta, JAL, that kind of thing. If the report was correct, Black Rock is the second largest single holder in US armament stocks.
This could be a fiscal armageddon for the US arms companies. I've seen this in action before. I quit smoking 2.5 years ago, and my support group was the DKos GUS (Gave Up Smoking) community. While a member of that community, I wrote a long article about the incredibly powerful effect a move like this could have on an industry.
In brief, it began with an Australian oncologist at a large medical center. In a seminar with the groups retirement and 401k investment firm, she discovered that the retirement and 401k funds had a large position in tobacco stocks and related products. This struck her as insane, she was trying to save the lives of people who had gotten cancer from tobacco products. The good doctor went on a crusade, and within 2 years, the investment firm overseeing the medical groups pension and 401k accounts announced that they would be completely divesting from tobacco related stocks in the next 12 months. When other socially responsible companies saw what the medical group was doing, they began pressuring their own investment banks to divest from tobacco stocks as well.
It was a bloodbath. Investment firms simply sat back and waited for the divestment. They knew they could put in low ball bids on the stocks that the selling company was offering because the firm was motivated by divestment, not profit. Tobacco related stocks went down the flusher in the deluge of their stocks being sold at fire sale prices. And even at bargain basement prices, there was a saturation point in the market for tobacco stocks, and the selloff reached it.
If Black Rock follows through with divestment, it would be a major blow to the US armament industry's bottom line. And if the #1, or even #3 and#4 index fund traders follow suit, it could literally cripple the armaments industry for many years. And if the armaments industry takes it in the shorts in the value of their stock, guess who will see their private donations and corporate sponsorships start to dry up? None other than the Godfather of Gore, the NRA.
And if in fact this happens, it will occur for one reason. It will happen because a bunch of traumatized teenagers in Florida, most of whom can't even vote or buy a gun, stood up and said "never again." Then candidate Barack Obama put it perfectly on May 5th, 2008 when he said in a speech, "We are the change that we seek." It almost gives you hope for the future, doesn't it?
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Cross posted on The Trump Impeachment.