Big Corporations Now Deploying Woke Ideology the Way Intelligence Agencies
Do: As a Disguise
By draping itself in the finery of political activism, the corporatist class
consolidates political power, corrupts democracy and distracts from its real
functions.
Glenn Greenwald
Apr 13
Customers wait in line in an attempt to purchase limited-edition Air Jordan
1 'Light Smoke Grey' outside a Nike store on July 25, 2019, in Yichang,
Hubei Province of China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
The British spy agency GCHQ is so aggressive, extreme and unconstrained by
law or ethics that the NSA - not exactly world renowned for its restraint -
often farms out spying activities too scandalous or illegal for the NSA to
their eager British counterparts. There is, as the Snowden reporting
demonstrated, virtually nothing too deceitful or invasive for the GCHQ. They
spy on entire populations, deliberately disseminate fake news, exploit
psychological research to control behavior and manipulate public perception,
and destroy the reputations, including through the use of sex traps, of
anyone deemed adversarial to the British government.
But they want you to know that they absolutely adore gay people. In fact,
they love the cause of LGBT equality so very much that, beginning on May 17,
2015 - International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia - they
started draping their creepy, UFO-style headquarters in the colors of the
rainbow flag. The prior year, in 2014, they had merely raised the rainbow
flag in front of their headquarters, but in 2015, they announced, "we wanted
to make a bold statement to show the nation we serve how strongly we believe
in this."
Official publication of the British surveillance agency GCHQ, May 17, 2015
Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble
gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ
really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men,
lesbians, bisexuals and trans people? Sure, maybe they go a little overboard
with the spying sometimes, and maybe some of their surveillance and
disinformation programs are a bit questionable, and they do not necessarily
have the highest regard for law, privacy and truth. But we know that, deep
down, these are fundamentally good people working within a fundamentally
benign institution. Just look at their flamboyant support for this virtuous
cause of social justice.
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Similar agencies of deceit, militarism and imperialism now robustly use this
same branding tactic. The CIA - in between military coups, domestic
disinformation campaigns, planting false stories with their
journalist-partners, and drone-assassinating U.S. citizens without due
process - joyously celebrates Women's Day, promotes what it calls The Agency
Network of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Officers (ANGLE) and
hosts activities for Pride Month, and organizes events to commemorate Black
History Month. The FBI does the same.
CIA @CIA
Throughout the month of June, CIA hosted a series of events, panels, &
activities celebrating the progress toward equality for members of the
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender community. #PrideMonth
bit.ly/2MY0LqZ
June 26th 2018
115 Retweets402 Likes
It's so sweet that one is tempted to forget about, or at least be more
understanding of, all the bombing campaigns and all the dictatorships they
install and prop up that repress and kill the very people that they purport
to honor and cherish. Like the GCHQ, how menacing can an intelligence agency
be when it is so deeply and sincerely supportive of the rights of the people
they routinely spy on, repress and kill?
Again, this does not make the CIA perfect - sure, they make some mistakes
and engage in some actions that are worthy of criticism - but to combat real
evil, you do not go protest at Langley. They are engaged in important work
combating homophobia, racism and misogyny. Thus, real warriors against evil
look not to them but instead go searching online for the Boogaloo Boys and
boomers on Facebook who post Q-Anon and other problematic memes. That is
where your focus should remain if you want to root out the real threats.
Large corporations have obviously witnessed the success of this tactic - to
prettify the face of militarism and imperialism with the costumes of social
justice - and are now weaponizing it for themselves. As a result, they are
becoming increasingly aggressive in their involvement in partisan and highly
politicized debates, always on the side of the same causes of social justice
which entities of imperialism and militarism have so effectively co-opted.
Corporations have always sought to control the legislative process and
executive branch, usually with much success. They purchase politicians and
their power aides by hiring them as lobbyists and consultants when they
leave government, and those bought-and-paid-for influence-peddlers then
proceed to exploit their connections in Washington or state capitals to
ensure that laws are written and regulations enforced (or not enforced) to
benefit the corporations' profit interests. These large corporations achieve
the same goal by filling the campaign coffers of politicians from both
parties. This is standard, age-old K Street sleaze that allows large
corporations to control American democracy at the expense of those who
cannot afford to buy this influence.
But they are now going far beyond clandestine corporatist control of the
government for their own interests. They are now becoming increasingly
powerful participants in highly polarizing and democratic debates. In the
wake of the George Floyd killing last summer, it became virtually obligatory
for every large corporation to proclaim support for the #BlackLivesMatter
agenda even though many, if not most, had never previously evinced the
slightest interest in questions of racial justice or policing.
One of the very few companies that refused to do so was the Silicon
Valley-based cryptocurrency exchange platform called Coinbase - which
announced that it would remain apolitical and not involve itself in partisan
debates or causes of social justice unrelated to its core business mission.
When announcing that policy of political neutrality, the company's
co-founder Brian Armstrong explained that "the reason is that while I think
these efforts are well intentioned, they have the potential to destroy a lot
of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating
internal division." That once-anodyne announcement - to stay out of politics
as a corporate entity - produced instant backlash. And exactly two months
after, the notoriously censorious and politicized "tech reporters" of The
New York Times punished the company for its heresy of neutrality with a
lengthy article depicting Coinbase as a bastion of racism and toxic bigotry
(the company was also savaged by journalists because of its audacity to
reveal and respond to the NYT's allegations in advance of the paper's
decision to publish).
Post from Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong, Sept. 27, 2020; New York
Times article on Coinbase, Nov. 27, 2020
Ever since, large corporations are diving into numerous other political
debates with great vigor and force - provided that their views are in
alignment with affluent liberal culture and prevailing social justice
pieties (though, like NBA officials and stars, they confine themselves to
easy domestic causes and scripted liberal platitudes while they steadfastly
avoid commenting on any injustices that may implicate their business
interests, such as debates over repression in China or Amazon's abuse of its
workers). The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported that "dozens of chief
executives and other senior leaders gathered on Zoom this weekend to plot
what several said big businesses should do next about new voting laws under
way in Texas and other states." The campaign against these laws includes not
just corporate giants but also the nation's largest and richest corporate
law firms.
Part of the motive may be self-serving strategy. With Democrats controlling
both houses of Congress as well as the Executive Branch - all of the
instruments that can legislate and regulate their businesses - they may be
calculating that using their massive weight to serve the Democratic Party's
political agenda is wise. Doing so could curry favor with powerful lawmakers
and regulators and result in rewards or, conversely, allow them to avoid
punishment and recrimination for the crime of refusing to engage in
activism. That motive at least partially explains why they have been so
generous with their donations to Democratic candidates. "Wall Street is
putting its money behind Democrat Barack Obama for president," reported
Reuters in 2008, while they did the same overwhelmingly in 2020 to support
Biden over Trump (just as Democrats have increasingly become the party of
affluent suburbanites, they are also increasingly supported by the
wealthiest corporate and tech power centers).
The farcical nature of all of this is obvious. Just as it is laughable that
the CIA and GCHQ care about social justice, feminism, and racial diversity
as they bomb and subvert the rest of the world in ways that contradict all
of those professed values, the idea that corporate giants who use
sweatshops, slave labor, mass layoffs and abuse of their workforce care
about any of these causes would make any rational person suffocate on the
stench of their insincerity.
New York Times, Nov. 20, 2020
But whatever the motives, the dangers of growing corporate involvement in
U.S. political debates are manifest. In its healthiest form, the way
democracy would function is that citizens vote for the representatives they
believe will best serve their interests, and those representatives then
enact laws they believe their constituents favor. But when giant
corporations use their unparalleled economic power to override that process
- by forcing state and local governments to rescind or reject laws they
would otherwise support due to fear of corporate punishment - then the
system, by definition, far more resembles an oligarchy than a democracy. Rod
Dreher, writing on Monday in The American Conservative, advanced arguments
and concerns that were once the province of the left:
This is progressive oligarchy. Woke Capitalism is a threat to democracy. As
I write about in Live Not By Lies, these same people are eventually going to
eagerly collaborate with government to create the Social Credit System
necessary to make this country controllable.
When is it going to occur to people on the Left that Big Business is doing
all this because it knows that if it makes the right moves on cultural
issues that matter to the Woke, it will be able to do whatever it wants to
workers? It has never had to worry about Republicans. That may be changing
soon, if we elect a crop of populists who know how to do more than tweet and
make belligerent but empty speeches. I'd like to see Republicans like this
get elected, and get active to remind Big Business of its proper place. . .
.
Big Business is already quite powerful in our society. Do we really want a
society in which Big Business reserves to itself the right to tell polities
what their laws and policies are going to be, at the risk of punishing that
polity economically if it resists? Does this sound like the kind of country
you want to live in? If you are pro-choice, imagine that Big Business
decided to threaten your state's legislature with economic consequences if
it doesn't pass pro-life legislation. One expects the business lobby to
engage itself on legislative questions pertaining to its own sphere, but
beyond it? Big Business already has a lot of power over our lives - and now
it wants more. The only force powerful enough to reign it in is the State.
Whatever else you might say about the State, at least it is democratically
accountable - unlike Big Business.
Residing beyond the dangers of even greater corporatist control over our
lives and politics is the deceitful branding and distractions that this
exploitation of social causes, by design, engender. If large corporations
are crusading for voting rights, why would anyone regard them as a menace?
The contrary is true: we should be grateful for their noble activism.
When it comes time to identify the root causes of social pathologies, we
will look elsewhere. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of
the corporate class and the ways they abuse and eliminate labor, control
government, and destroy the working and middle classes will be impossible to
see, as we are all blinded by the glare of their virtuous Instagram posts
about racial justice and their unified campaigns against voter suppression.
In an instant of swooning over their benevolent devotion to social justice,
we will forget what they actually exist to do. When we work to harness their
power to support our own political causes, we forget about how out of
control and menacing that power is, and what it is most often used for. And
that is exactly the way they want it.
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