Don’t Wait around Expecting AT&T to Save Women’s Reproductive Rights
Corporations have always played a role in politics. Their role has mostly been to exert influence over politics by buying politicians. This exercise of public corruption, always present in US politics but more blatant or perhaps just made more apparent to the general public, is rightly decried across the political spectrum. It is at least by most of us schlubs among the general public, anyway. With a minority of exceptions, politicians on the Right and “Left” are both languoring deep in corporate coffers, and offer only empty rhetoric when it comes to getting corporate money out of politics. Democrats, as with everything, feign moral superiority, though in truth most of them are as indebted to corporate “donors” as the Republicans. The Republicans are simply more upfront about their corruption. The last Republican I can recall trying to limit “campaign donations,” not end but limit, was John McCain, and he lost that fight to Mitch McConnell, who succeeded with the aid of the even-then dangerously corrupt and right-wing Supreme Court in making unlimited and unrestricted bribery the norm in US politics.
Considering how completely McConnell took his party into the realm of total corporate ownership, where everything of consequence they do is at the behest or with the approval of their largest donors, all on the ethically, logically, and linguistically perverse notion that money equates to speech, it’s pretty rich how the Republicans lash out when corporations speak out in ways that they don’t like.
It’s become fashionable for corporations to issue press releases and make business decisions based on public sentiment, in response to an event or sometimes to a piece of legislation, and to call it activism. Corporate activism is at best pretty cynical and at worst revolting, like when Kendall Jenner left a photoshoot to join a generic protest of ethnically diverse fashion models demonstrating for a nonspecific cause and started a racism-abolishing party by handing a can of Pepsi to a friendly non-riot-gear-garbed and apparently unarmed cop. Most of the time, all of the time, it’s a business decision. The fetid undulating masses of human matter that comprise the decision-making centers of corporations make all their decisions based on profit incentives. They don’t give a fuck about people or the state of the world except to the extent that it affects their profits. They do not have morals. They are not people, despite what the Supreme Court says.
In response to the mass international protests that followed the public murder of George Floyd, many corporations took a side, claiming allyship with the protestors and marginalized communities most victimized by state violence. They didn’t do a lot, most didn’t do anything, to actually help the protestors and those communities. Most just expressed solidarity, hollow words. In response to recent actions and attempts by Republican legislators in some states to pass voter suppression laws and further diminish our already pathetic pretension of a democracy, some corporations went further than words and pulled their operations from those states. The MLB moving the All Star game out of Georgia was a bold move, though of course pulling events and services from a state or boycotting a state can hurt the working people of that state as much or more than the politicians running their state into the ground. It was a similar case in 2017 when the NCAA pulled their tournaments out of North Carolina because of the state’s anti-trans law banning people from using a bathroom in a government building if it doesn’t correspond to the sex on their birth certificate. Other corporations scrapped projects planned for the state because of the bill.
Naturally, the Republicans who champion the deranged notion of corporate personhood protest whenever a corporation pulls its operations and its money from a state in response to discriminatory legislation that Republicans have passed. Few things embody Republicans so well as hypocrisy, along with bigotry and corruption. And naturally, the Democrats and their supporters celebrate the corporations who make such “principled” decisions, decisions based on the principle that the corporations have to choose a side and it’s more financially beneficial to them to side with the majority opinion than the minority.
Since Texas passed its abortion bounty law, there’s been discussion in the media about the relative silence from corporations in response. A few made statements, a couple dating app companies based in Texas said they’d start “relief funds,” and Uber and Lyft claimed they’ll cover their drivers’ expenses if they’re sued for “aiding and abetting an abortion,” which is a big step up from not giving them insurance, considering them employees, or treating them like humans. The largest corporations based in Texas, however, have stayed quiet, despite public urging. It’s not that the corporations have fervently held anti-choice beliefs, or that they aren’t moved by the plight of women and girls in Texas, it’s that corporations don’t have any beliefs and aren’t moved by anything. They’re weighing the decision of speaking out or staying silent, the latter which is as good as being in favor of the draconian law, but whatever decision they do reach will be a purely financial one. They’ve so far decided that it’s not worth it to them to be on the side of justice. Unless half of AT&T’s national customer base boycotts the company, which besides their shitty cell service and the Yellow Pages means giving up HBO and maybe a third of the media landscape, there’s no reason for them to even consider doing the right thing.
On its face, it’s a good thing when corporations take the right side, use their influence to attempt to reverse the fascistic actions of politicians. But it’s a shortsighted view, and a dangerous one, the idea that we should rely on corporations to make moral decisions, that corporations can exercise greater power than politicians. The people cannot rely on corporations as defenders of morality and human rights. Ideally, politicians are meant to represent us. In our country’s flawed and undemocratic system of “representative democracy,” politicians should act as extensions of the people they represent. So when a corporation exerts power over a politician, it is a further extension of them exercising power over us. As a people and a country we are beholden to the whims of corporations. The extent to which the people have any power over corporations is limited to our spending: If enough of us choose to withhold funds from corporations in service of a cause, they may in turn exert influence over politicians. This is what happens when a society values capital over everything and accepts corruption as its fuel. In a functioning democracy, the people exert power over their elected officials, those officials then act in service of the people, passing laws based on popular support which empower the people and restrict the powers of big business. Because ultimately and rationally, it is big business, the corporations, that we should fear. To the extent that they should exist at all, it should be to serve us, to provide for the betterment of society, not act as its masters.