You are either for more people voting or you want to suppress the vote.
It appears, big business is “beginning” to take exception to what Republicans are doing at the local level to suppress the right to vote by the poor, the minorities, etc. It is about time for those who can exert such pressure on state legislatures to do so in support of the right to vote.
It would be cool if the Coca Cola defied the Georgia government and handed out Dasani (water) to voters before they entered a voting line and if Pepsi did the same with their brand Aquafina.
Usually, the law restricting actives near a polling place is a a defined distance of approximately a hundred feet or so.
Heather Cox- Richardson from “Letters from an American:”
Yesterday, more than 70 Black executives wrote a letter urging companies to fight the voter suppression measures under consideration in 43 states.
Ken Chenault, the former head of American Express:
“There is no middle ground here. You either are for more people voting, or you want to suppress the vote.”
After complaints that companies had been quiet about the Georgia voter suppression bill, the chief executive officer of Delta Airlines, Ed Bastian, issued a statement calling the new law “unacceptable” and noting that”
“[t]he entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 elections. This is simply not true. Unfortunately, that excuse is being used in states across the nation that are attempting to pass similar legislation to restrict voting rights.”
Bastian condemned the:
“sweeping voting reform act that could make it harder for many Georgians, particularly those in our Black and Brown communities, to exercise their right to vote.” He pledged “to protect and facilitate your precious right to vote.”
Shortly afterward, the leader of Coca-Cola, James Quincey, followed suit with an interview on CNBC that called the law “unacceptable.”
After Bastian spoke, Georgia Republicans said they were caught off guard by his opposition. In the Georgia House, Republicans voted to get rid of a tax break on jet fuel that benefits Delta.
David Ralston, the leader of the Republican Party in the House said:
“They like our public policy when we’re doing things that benefit them,” then added: “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand. You got to keep that in mind sometimes.”
That is, Republican lawmakers made it clear they are not legislating in the interest of the public good, but are instead using the law to retaliate against Delta after its chief executive officer criticized their voter suppression law. (The Georgia Senate did not take up the bill before the legislature adjourned.)
Similarly, Ralston told reporters he was now a Pepsi drinker, seemingly retaliating against Coca-Cola for its own opposition to the law.
A similar scene played out in Texas, where legislators are considering an even more restrictive bill that tries to end drive-through voting and 24-hour polling places, as well as giving partisan poll watchers more leeway to harass voters, including by recording them on video.
Today, American Airlines announced it was:
“strongly opposed to this bill and others like it.”
American Airlines affirmed its support for democracy and called for making it easier, not harder, to vote.
“Voting is the hallmark of our democracy, and is the foundation of our great country. We value the democratic process and believe every eligible American should be allowed to exercise their right to vote, no matter which political party or candidate they support.”
Tonight, the chair of the Dallas County Republican Party, Rodney Anderson, retweeted a statement cheering on the Georgia House for trying to strip Delta of the multimillion dollar tax break for criticizing the state’s voting bill. Then he suggested retaliating against companies that oppose Texas’s proposed voting restrictions by increasing their tax burdens. Within an hour, he had deleted the tweet.
In the late nineteenth century, southern lawmakers’ calculation that business would support voter suppression efforts would have been accurate. Indeed, southern lawmakers could suppress Black voting in part because business leaders across the country were happy to see poor voters cut out of political power, especially after the alliance movement suggested that farmers and workers might make common cause across race lines to change laws that privileged industry over ordinary Americans. When fourteen southern lawmakers defended their region’s suppression of Black voting in an 1890 book, they dedicated the work to “the businessmen of the North.”
The reaction of today’s business leaders to new voter suppression measures suggests that the old equation in which businessmen want to get rid of Black and poor voters is no longer so clear. While businesses undoubtedly like preferential treatment, they now answer to a broader constituency than they did a century or more ago, and that constituency does not necessarily support voter suppression. Today, Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, which is developing a hub in Atlanta, took a stand against the new Georgia election law.
He wrote:
“We hope that companies will come together and make clear that a healthy business requires a healthy community. And a healthy community requires that everyone have the right to vote conveniently, safely, and securely.”
In 1890, southern white leaders promised the North that voter suppression would make the South bloom. They were wrong: by concentrating wealth and power among a few white leaders, it kept the South mired in poverty for at least two generations. Rejecting voter suppression this time around could write an entirely different story.
“…Rejecting voter suppression this time around could write an entirely different story…”
[I have lived in the South all my life. Ending voter suppression will not solve all our problems, but it will damned sure help solve one big problem that we have had from the beginning of the nation and longer. Class bias is deeper than race, but racial bias plays strongly in averting attention from class bias. We have far more broken pieces to society, but we need to start here with ending racial discrimination and all discrimination in suffrage. This would just be a beginning rather than an end.]
Hey Ron:
That business is coming out to object to it is a big deal. It is just not one company, it is multiples. More will follow. I would like to see one of them move out of Georgia if they penalize them for fighting suppression.
Class bias is deeper than race, but racial bias plays strongly”~~A. K. A.~Second the motion, AKA! Coca Cola and voting looks delicious, but so much of class bias stems from housing status.U. S. Land Reformdid George Bernard Shaw once quip, “there is nothing wrong with Social Security except that no one ever tried it.”?imprecisely yet he did give us a gentle hint about what is wrong with Social Security. you see what is happening? Social Security covers some of the expenses of Old Folks if and only if they own their own home, but if they have to pay rent, that Social Security doesn’t go very far. what we need in addition to Social Security is land-reform, but how to effectively Dole out land reform in a free market economy? by creating a gigantically expensive land reform bureaucracy? no! it’s all very simple. we simply levy an annual real property tax for example 9%. We tax the price of all real property according to the county assessor’s previous year’s value. Seeing the looming tax on the horizon, taxable entities who own real estate will quickly sell their land to avoid the tax, Massive land auctions will drop land prices enough to allow peasants to buy land for construction. peasant can then get her/his teenage children to help build a house from commercially available kits. you can now see how simple that is. No bureaucratic overhead no coca cola.the extra Revenue coming in from the real property tax will reduce our public debt enough to give investors from around the world a glimpse of how solid our currency is. Dollar denominated equities thus strengthen thereby spurring industry to expand with a rehiring multiplier effect. this debt reduction will thus prevent a stock market crash which is otherwise scheduled for about 2 weeks from now, 2 weeks or less. Congressional Critters,takeheed!
Lends new meaning to retail politics :<)
Kind of. Instead of railing against government regs, they are siding with the gov.
@Run,
I see it more as supply siding with demand. Long gun makers and retailers may still have strong market interest in poorly educated white men, but most of the market is moving on to greener pastures. Nixon played the Southern Strategy, but Trump overplayed the Southern Strategy.
Conservatives will need to find a new whipping boy now with minorities constituting a majority market for corporate profits. Of course, this may just be the right time for Blue Dogs to completely take over the Democratic Party and lay the Republican Party problem to rest.
Let’s see what the Koch brothers next move will be. They nixed Trump towards his terminus.
Realistically though, I do not expect traditional conservatives to abandon the Republican Party, but rather to relegate the MAGA Nazis to a persistent bloody splinter of the likes akin to John Birch.
You are dreaming if you think class bias is more prevalent that race bias.
Check the voting habits of White Union workers.
voting habits of White Union workers.
”
union members are frequently prejudiced against anybody who “knows everything ’bout my job”
the difference between non-union members vs union members is that the union members own their jobs. they have a vested interest in their job. you can’t get rid of them when they don’t know Everything about their joB
EMike,
You are correct in what you meant, but that is not what if meant by “Class bias is deeper than race.” We are all at least partially aware of our own racial bias. For most, but not all, their racial bias is in favor of their own race above all others. Class bias does not work that way at all. We are trained to turn against our own wage class and be obedient to elites, the upper class. Then racial bias is manipulated by elites to keep us even further divided against ourselves.
So, class bias is mostly subliminal and deferential to our betters. This has been an extraordinarily easy play for the so-called law and order conservative crowd due to the intensely hateful, deeply racist segment in our society. So, there is the deeper for you in racism. It is a segment of society that is allowed to intimidate the more docile majority. It is also part of why I would never be a pacifist. Class bias is inverted and mostly subconscious. Racial bias is widespread, direct, and mostly subtle except for narrow segments where extreme animus has been allowed to populate a bizarre social contradiction, one’s political rights to oppose another’s civil rights. It took a lot of political manure to create a social ground this fertile for hate.
A couple of years back I was talking to an older (than me even) black lady in line at the bank. She told me that what bothered her most was all the hate in the world, but she kept house for a wealthy family and they were very nice to her. She did not mind rich people at all, just the haters. She had no idea who controlled the media and the political establishment in the US. Her world view was based entirely upon her direct contacts with the world.
“We are trained to turn against our own wage class and be obedient to elites, the upper class.”
Ron
I disagree totally. Racism makes people act against their own self interest. The “elites” just take advantage of the racism.
Scapegoats of the world unite :<)
The most useful, durable scapegoats are never quite as innocent as they are convenient. Reality is nonlinear in action and reaction, in cause and effect, despite the generally linear nature of time.
For example, who on Earth would blame the US bankers that pressured Wilson to demand repayment of British and French war debt, for which Wilson in turn agreed with Britain and France regarding German reparations, that those US bankers were the cause of the genocide of European Jews merely a score of years later? OK, who besides John Maynard Keynes, predictively in his The Economic Consequences of the Peace first published in 1920 and observationally over the ensuing years leading to the next war until he was branded anti-Semitic?
EM
racism is endemic. so is class hate. as for the chicken and the egg: pernicious racism will emerge with any conflict between two tribes. but the “rich” foment racism for their own ends: either conflict against another tribe, or to distract the poor from their hatred for the rich. meanwhile the rich hate the poor because they treat them badly.
Ron, yes, I have seen that deference to the rich by the poor. seems to me to be a survival strategy, but sincere nevertheless. i never suffered from it. I think i can tell you the boss will hate you more if you don’t doff your cap, than if you make mistakes that cost him a million dollars.
i don’t trust the corps alla sudden worrying about voter suppression. the voters need to keep the boycot weapon in mind, and look for ways to cooperate among themselves to defeat the suppression strategies. organized “place-holding” in long lines at the polls, for example. car pools to distant polling places. very serious effort to get the voters the propler i.d. and keep up with address changes and stuff like that.
my personal preference would be to have a small group of boyos on hand to intimidate the intimidaters, but that could lead to very bad consequences (unless done with almost superhuman skill and “tact.”)
Hat tip to Coberly.