At The Atlantic, Derek Thompson writes—Why Are Corporations Finally Turning Against the NRA?
Pressured by Parkland high-school students and others to boycott the NRA, more than 20 companies have cut ties with the pro-gun group.
The NRA exodus includes major airlines like United, six rental-car firms including Hertz and Avis Budget Group, and MetLife, the insurance giant. These companies are not rescinding NRA donations, nor are they refusing service to NRA members. Rather, they’re ending discount programs, which companies routinely offer to groups and companies, like the NRA or the AARP. [...]
Why have the Parkland shootings forced corporate action in a way that previous school shootings could not? To put it another way: United and Delta both serve more than 100 million domestic passengers each year, while the NRA only has a few million members. So, why has it taken so long for these companies to distance themselves from one of America’s most controversial associations, despite 30,000 annual firearms deaths and so many mass shootings?
One important question raised by all this is if there is a deeper force at work. Have America’s corporations shifted to the left, even as national government has moved toward the Republican Party? Or are companies just more sensitive to protests than a divided government is?
In many cases, America’s corporate community has become a quiet defender of socially liberal causes. Nearly 400 companies filed an amicus brief in 2015 urging the Supreme Court to legalize same-sex marriage, including Amazon, Aetna, Apple, American Airlines, American Express, and AT&T (and those are just the ones starting with the first letter of the alphabet). Hundreds of executives, many from tech companies, signed a 2017 letter urging the president to protect immigrants brought to the U.S. as children by saving the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. When North Carolina passed a law against transgender-friendly bathrooms, the NCAA announced in 2016 that it would pull its college-basketball tournament from the state (and other companies withdrewtheir business, too).
It would be strange to call these corporations “liberal.” By and large, they support the GOP’s economic policies, which in just the last year have eased regulations and slashed corporate taxes by several trillion dollars. But on social issues, national and multinational companies have moved left of the GOP, even as many Republican figures (particularly the president) have found it useful, or at least tantalizing, to play up cultural flash points, like trans rights and undocumented labor.
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“For in the sciences the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man. Besides, the modern observations deprive all former writers of any authority, since if they had seen what we see, they would have judged as we judge.”
~Galileo Galilei, Frammenti e lettere, 1564-1642
TWEET OF THE DAY
On this date at Daily Kos in 2013—The sequester is stupid and contractionary, but Republicans can't stop themselves:
I'm not sure that there's much nuance to be parsed out about the sequester and why we seem to be headed for it despite it being plainly and obviously the worst possible thing to do. The problem is that the one actually sensible solution—to just dump the whole idea, as Congress can do at any point during this entire ridiculous, posturing debacle—isn't politically palatable to any of the involved groups. Sure, the sequester will foul up the economy, hurt a hell of a lot of people and botch up important government functions all around the nation, but as of right now both parties see "screw up the entire American economy, again" as being preferable to any of the achievable political alternatives.
The Republicans know the partial shutdown of services is going to hurt—a lot. They also know they're going to be blamed for it, no matter what little Twitter hashtags they deploy to the contrary, and that once people with government jobs or government contracts actually start getting furloughed, costing them a hefty chunk of their paychecks, people are quickly going to become irate. Every small town in America is going to be awash with the news of what's been cut, and how many local residents are being furloughed, and how that's going to affect the rest of the local economy, and they'll all be duly noting that there was abso-effing-lutely no reason for it other than this stupid "cut everything because governmenting is hard and stuff" plan.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: The Trumps are still Trumping; Republicans everywhere strive to ignore it. Utah GOP hates on Romney. Texas church shooting thwarted, but the cops shoot the thwarter. Steve Sittig reads us a Marjory Stoneman Douglas bio. An Aussie on Oz's gun laws.
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