In May 2019, Gov. Brian Kemp, R-Ga., signed into law a bill limiting abortions to the first six weeks of a pregnancy; down from 20 weeks.
Ignoring the fact that the law was enacted by duly elected officials, Hollywood corporate moguls and actors, led by Disney, issued statements threatening to boycott the state of Georgia.
While the issue became moot after a federal court ruled the law unconstitutional in July 2020, the boycott, if implemented, would have had a devastating economic impact on the City of Atlanta because it is the film capital for making movies and television shows.
Georgia was hit again with boycotts after the governor approved a law aimed at preventing voter fraud. Believing the preposterous lies spread by leftists that the revisions were equivalent to the Jim Crow laws of yesteryear, scores of corporations denounced the law.
The biggest blow was Major League Baseball’s decision to move the All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver. That change of venue will cost Atlanta over $100 million in revenues and will hurt working-class folks, most of whom are people of color.
This kind of corporate activism is relatively new to the American political landscape. And why and how this happened is the subject of an interesting book by Stephen R. Soukup, "The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business."
In the post-World War II era, leftist activists worked 24/7 to impose their cultural values on every aspect of American life. To achieve that end, they wormed their way into the Democratic Party, academia, federal, state and local governments, and big business.
The intellectual roots of this politicization, Soukup points out, goes back 100 years.
The founding father was the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937).
Gramsci rejected Karl Marx’s view that man’s history is the story of economic class conflict. "The real class conflicts," Gramsci argued, "are cultural … and only after the existing culture has been thoroughly destroyed can the new culture — and the new economics — be established."
Gramsci’s prime enemy was Christianity because it was "the creator and enabler of the bourgeois culture that kept the classes relatively peaceful and harmoniously with one another."
Thus, anti-Christian Marxists had to embark on "the long march through the institutions" to overthrow cultural standards before there could be a proletariat revolution.
Gramsci begat the Hungarian Marxist György Lukács (1885-1971), who turned Marxism "into a philosophical endeavor, replete with explicit normative value judgments."
Gramsci and Lukács influenced a group of professors that became known as the Frankfurt School.
Frankfurt intellectuals "integrated Freud’s source psychology with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s state of nature fetishization, Gramsci’s aggressive anti-Christianity, and Lukács detestation of social and sexual mores to fashion 'Cultural Marxism' that would become the dominant ideology of the New Left in America and, by extension, of the entire American system of higher education."
After leftists conquered schools of liberal arts and sciences, they turned their sights on schools of business.
They introduced courses that indoctrinated students with "stakeholder" planning that rejected the longstanding belief that "managers of corporations should do what is in the best interests of the corporation and its shareholders."
Business decisions they taught should be based on various social justice theories, economic redistribution, feminism, race, critical theory, diversity, etc.
The useful idiots that graduated from Ivy League schools of business have since advanced to key corporate positions, particularly in firms that manage trillions of dollars invested in the stock market. Many asset managers have been using their proxy voting power to pressure companies to promote leftist political agendas.
"Socially responsible" investors have pressured corporations to comply with the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), which defines what constitutes "sustainable" business practices based on left-wing priorities.
And scores of corporations, like Disney and Apple have fallen into line.
Yet, while many of these corporate giants have condemned the actions of elected officials in Georgia, Soukup describes how they kowtow to one of the most repressive regimes in the history of humankind — China.
That the Communist Chinese are responsible for the deaths of over 60 million innocent people since they took power in 1949, and continue to suppress human rights, doesn’t seem to matter.
When dealing with China "corporate social responsibility" is placed on a back burner.
Why? Because they are hypocrites.
Disney and Apple want and need China’s markets. In the case of Apple, "not only is it China’s largest manufacturer, but it is also Apple’s second-largest market."
To maintain its relationship with the Chinese Communists, Apple removed The New York Times and Skype apps from the App Store.
Apple also removed the "Quartz news app that was covering the Hong Kong protests and blocked an app used by those protesters to organize."
In "Dictatorship of Woke Capital," Soukup proves that ideas do indeed have consequences.
Soukup warns that if conservatives from all walks of life do not unite to oppose the leftist idea of placing our capitalistic system under the umbrella of the total state, we will find ourselves subservient to a "more economically powerful version of the woke college campuses."
George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is the author of "The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact," and "Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy." He is chairman of Aid to the Church in Need-USA. Mr. Marlin also writes for TheCatholicThing.org and the Long Island Business News. Read George J. Marlin's Reports — More Here.
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