Nina-Bytes: Corporate USA Collaborates for Cash

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Money Is Its Own Ideology

To some degree, the story of the first two months of the second Trump presidency has been one of cowardice, capitulation, and collaboration with fascism. Top DC law firms, powerful educational institutes, and even the opposition party in the US government have all failed to meet the moment and resist the imposition of Trump’s fascist order on an America that did not, factually speaking, provide the Klepto Kaiser with a mandate to end American democracy and install a dictatorship. As regular readers of my Fediverse blog will know, this is happening so often that I’ve been compiling a thread featuring the numerous collaborations, capitulations and craven surrenders of the American establishment in the opening weeks of the Trump 2.0 era.

While a lot of the stories in that thread focus on the cowardice of institutional actors in either submitting to, or even assisting the fascist Trump regime in installing a Christian Nationalist dictatorship, when the history of this political moment is written in the fullness of time it will be noted that it was actually big companies in the US private sector that embraced the regime’s white nationalist policy platforms first; and in doing so, helped legitimate Trump’s quest to rule as King of America. Unlike administrators in higher education, lawyers targeted for revenge by Der Führer, or bodies controlled by the openly fascist US government through funding, large corporations in the private sector required little if any incentive to adopt Trump’s authoritarian “anti-DEI” policies; indeed, companies like Walmart, Paramount, and even Victoria’s Secret practically fell all over themselves to align with the regime’s agenda, essentially obeying in advance, before the administration had to apply any pressure at all.

Why would they do that? As this short essay by Adam Harris writing in The Guardian lays bare, the truth is that corporate power never really wanted to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion even before the rise of Trump; which is why the programs executives installed after the twin motivating factors of the George Floyd protests against police violence, and the COVID pandemic, were never really designed to achieve those objectives in the first place.

American corporations didn’t want to diversify, anyway

“Within days of taking office, Donald Trump signed an executive order that would eliminate Johnson’s civil rights order. The order directed the office of federal contract compliance to stop “promoting diversity” and holding contractors responsible for “affirmative action”. To Smith, the administration’s early actions amount to “a blatant effort in order to not only uphold the white power structure, but to remove any government responsibility to uphold the rights of individuals of color, specifically Black people”. It is the fruit of a conservative movement that has been trying to reverse course ever since the government began taking seriously efforts to protect the rights of Americans regardless of race, sex, religion or national origin.

In 2020, hundreds of private companies pledged to change their culture – to use their power and influence and, most importantly, money, to re-shape American society toward more just ends. Now, the three largest employers in the nation – Walmart, Amazon, and the federal government – have all rolled those policies back. Dozens of other corporations have turned back the clock on even pretending to care about equality in the workplace as well.

To businesses’ credit, they had a difficult task ahead of them in 2020. “They’re faced with putting a policy in place quickly that’s responsive and doesn’t sound like lip service to frustrated people,” Dawkins said. But in doing so, they made an admission: they had not been taking diversity seriously before – and the capitulation to the administration’s demands since has betrayed that truth. And they made clear their efforts were always lip service.”

Frankly I don’t think it’s really news that much of the American private sector’s DEI initiatives were motivated more by appearing to oppose white supremacy and enforced social hierarchies in an increasingly Christian Nationalist political environment, than actually opposing those problems. This was pointed out long before Trump’s second term, and obviously their actions since the regime was installed have demonstrated that critics were right to question the commitment of American corporations that directly profit from a white supremacist order that marks out certain groups of people for brutal exploitation. In that context then, it’s important to understand that we are in fact not “all in this together” and a corporate sector that gladly donated to Trump’s election campaigns must be understood as active partners in the installation of a Christian Nationalist dictatorship in America. The fact that they did so because they think it’ll improve their bottom line is largely irrelevant; fascist collaboration is still fascist collaboration, regardless of the motives that inspire it.

Folks, I don’t know who needs to hear this but the brands, and the rest of the ruling class establishment are not going to save us from fascism. We, the people, are the cavalry and if we don’t start organizing to stop the installation of a fascist dictatorship then Trump is simply not going to be stopped. I don’t know what complete victory for the Pork Reich looks like, but if the first two months of the second Trump presidency is any indication, nobody with an ounce of human decency is going to like it. It’s time to put up, or shut up; either we band together and stop fascism now, or we will surely fall to these politically-empowered nazis one by one.

 

 

– Nina Illingworth

 

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.

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