A growing list of major corporations including Georgia-based Delta and Coca Cola have spoken out against the state GOP's voter suppression law and Major League Baseball (MLB) has pulled the next All-Star game from Atlanta in protest.
Republicans are protesting this manifestation of "cancel culture" just like they always do in the face of even mild criticism, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is warning corporations that there will be legislative "consequences" for their actions.
There will be "serious consequences" if corporate America continues acting like "a woke parallel government."
The broadside from the Senate minority leader, who has aligned himself with the business community for decades, is just the latest sign of a fraying alliance between big companies and the Republican Party. In the wake of the cancellation of the Major League Baseball All-Star Game in Georgia over new election laws there, McConnell (R-Ky.) flashed frustration that companies appear to be taking direction from Democratic complaints about the law. [...]
“Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex. Americans do not need or want big business to amplify disinformation or react to every manufactured controversy with frantic left-wing signaling," McConnell said in a lengthy statement on Monday. "Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order."
The Outrage-Industrial Complex; as if that isn't what Fox News has been for the last two decades.
There is virtually no reason for any business or corporation to take McConnell's threats seriously and not just because Republicans do not control the government.
If not as if Republicans would raise corporate taxes and impose new regulations in some punitive manner even if they took control of the government tomorrow. Moreover, Democrats are currently planning to raise corporate taxes to partially pay for President Biden's infrastructure proposal and that doesn't appear to have stopped businesses who are supposedly 'taking direction from Democrats.'
The business community isn't taking direction from anything except the free market of public opinion and consumer sentiment. Corporations are people, my friend, right? No? Corporations are entitled to free speech, aren't they?
I don't believe in corporate personhood, but you get the point. Republicans have only ever favored free market absolutism when it favored them in return.
Maybe Republicans shouldn't have spent the last twenty years ensuring that the next two generations of voters and consumers -- Millenials and Gen Z -- would become Democrats and "woke" consumers out of necessity just to survive the hellscape that Republicans created. Activist consumer behavior is obviously not exclusive to younger people, but "woke" activism was wired into our electoral brains by the Blowjob Impeachment, the Iraq war, the Great Recession, and Donald Trump.