Why are so
many corporations, especially those that provide information technology,
promoting political radicalism? A growing number of people, at least on the
Right, must be wondering about all this, especially as the business community
continues to line up in solidarity against President Donald Trump. For it
hardly can be denied that the corporation, partly out of self-interest and
partly out of conviction, is becoming an adjunct of the hard Left. And equally
to the point, the hard Left is becoming an adjunct of corporations. This
alliance is anything but benign. In the long run, it even may jeopardize the
existence of the United States.
A Not-So-Strange Alliance
In this context, radicalism does not refer to businessmen using the State to achieve and maintain market advantage over competitors. That practice has been going on in this country for well over a century. Nor does radicalism here refer to the much more recent tendency of corporations to pay black, Hispanic and other racial-ethnic shakedown artists a “diversity tax” in hopes of shooing them away. That’s capitulation, not commitment. No, the radicalism of which I speak is the arms-length agreement between corporations and far-Left activists on the need to subvert deeply ingrained human loyalties, most of all those related to national identity. It is a partnership that rests on the principle that America is a post-national rather than national polity.
The motives of each faction differ. Businessmen act out of material self-interest. They want to hire people from abroad at much lower wages and benefits than those that the native-born will accept. And they want to sell in untapped markets. Radicals, by contrast, act out of emotional self-interest. They crave total multiculturalism in one nation, of that magic and apparently achievable moment over the horizon when our nation sings “We Are the World” in unison. Where these camps converge is the conviction that national sovereignty is an outdated idea and should give way to a new system of global coordination. America and other Western nations, in this view, have no moral right to define themselves in terms of race, language, or collective memory. We have an obligation to accommodate the crush of people from abroad wanting to come here, regardless of their likely impact on national well-being. Nor can we discriminate between one sending nation and another. As one country is as good as another, we do not have the right to question an individual or family’s motives for migrating here. America, in other words, ought to function as a global sanctuary, a coast-to-coast UN General Assembly. Corporate chieftains now get very snippy, in fact, with any person or group calling for restricting immigration. At information technology companies, where this mindset has advanced furthest in the business world, the profit motive and mass immigration walk hand in hand. “Moderate” corporate officials go along with the new regime, however reluctantly, lest they risk losing public face and eventually their jobs.
The quest for post-national racial “diversity”—which assuredly does not allow for a diversity of opinion—is now the coin of the realm. Corporate executives are leading the quest, all the while hitting the right buzz words. Examples:
• A number of years ago then-PepsiCo CEO Steven Reinemund remarked: “It’s easier to recruit diverse talent than it is to create an inclusive culture. The challenge comes with creating an environment in which every associate—regardless of ethnicity, gender orientation, gender, or physical ability—feels valued and wants to be part of our growth.” His hand-picked successor, Indra Nooyi, enforces the same party line.
• Comcast greeted attendees at an annual convention of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network several years ago this way: “We live and breathe innovation every day. By embracing diversity of thought, philosophy, and experience, we have become the nation’s leading provider of entertainment, information, and communication products and services. By embracing diversity of communities, we have become an employer and a provider of choice. Our diversity is our strength…Comcast proudly supports the National Action Network.”
• The website of eBay declares: “Diversity and inclusion at eBay goes well beyond a moral necessity—it’s the foundation of our business model and absolutely critical to our ability to thrive in an increasingly competitive global landscape.”
Similar statements can be extracted from mission statements and brochures of literally thousands of companies. In today’s environment, corporate executives must establish and enforce a policy that tries to squeeze every last vestige of racial and ethnic homogeneity out of their respective companies.
One corporation, Airbnb, the worldwide online lodging service, is going that extra mile. Immediately after President Trump’s January 27 executive order barring entry into the U.S. from seven terrorist-occupied or terrorist-sponsoring nations for up to 90 days pending executive review (i.e., the “Muslim ban”), company co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky announced that his company would provide free shelter to anyone adversely affected by the order.1 Apparently, Chesky wasn’t adversely affected by Title 8, Section 1324 of the U.S. Code, which states that facilitating illegal immigration is punishable by up to five years in prison. Airbnb’s resistance to “intolerance” wasn’t limited to presidential executive orders. Only days after his announcement, the company on short notice produced and aired a 30-second Super Bowl TV spot depicting a diverse group of people with the accompanying text: “We believe no matter who you are, where you’re from, who you love or who you worship, we all belong. The world is more beautiful the more you accept.” The company also has committed itself to donating $4 million over four years to the International Rescue Committee, a New York City-based refugee relief fund headed by prominent British Labour politician David Miliband.
The goal is monopoly. But more than simply a monopoly over a particular product or service market, it is a monopoly over public opinion. And right now, the opinion that matters most is that President Donald Trump, and the “hatemongers” who support him, don’t fit into America’s future. Corporate executives, even if supportive of his economic initiatives, share this conviction. In August 2017, for example, Visa, MasterCard, and Discover Financial Services each ended merchant agreements with targeted “hate” groups and/or websites based on lists provided by “concerned organizations.”2 During this time, Campbell Soup CEO Denise Morrison, who had sat on President Donald Trump’s manufacturing jobs council, denounced his statement criticizing both the Right and Left for the recent street violence in Charlottesville, Virginia; she insisted that only street activists of the Right had done wrong.3 “Racism and murder,” she declared, “are unequivocally reprehensible and are not morally equivalent to anything else that happened in Charlottesville.” Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, two days after President Trump’s “Muslim ban,” issued this companywide memo: “(W)e will neither stand by, nor stand silent, as the uncertainty around the new administration’s actions grow with each passing day. There are more than 65 million citizens of the world recognized as refugees by the United Nations, and we are developing plans to hire 10,000 of them over five years in the 75 countries around the world where Starbucks does business.”4 And Facebook chairman-CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a vocal supporter of providing sanctuary for illegal immigrants, in February 2017 unveiled a manifesto outlining plans to retool his company as a global issues advocate. He asked: “Are we building the world we all want?”5
So why are some of the largest and best-managed
American enterprises trying to dissolve the country’s historical identity and
(by implication) force employees to go along? Aren’t they acting against their
own interests? Actually, from the standpoint of short-run profit maximization,
they are rational actors. It is here where one’s attention shifts to a familiar
body of thought originating more than a century and a half ago.
Marxism: Old and New
Critics of the radicalization of the corporation may be prone to view this process as an example of an idea very much now in vogue on the Right: “cultural Marxism.” This term is something of a misnomer. Karl Marx himself wrote very little about culture beyond his pre- Communist Manifesto, “Young Hegelian” phase. And to the extent he did, he saw culture as subordinate to a larger class struggle. The use of the term cultural Marxism here is thus one of convenience, not conviction.
Marxism is based on a core assumption: the irreconcilability of labor and capital. Everything flows from that. As Marx saw it, the central fact of modern history is the evolution of two rival social classes: those who sell labor (workers, or the “proletariat”) and those who buy labor (industrial capitalists, or the “bourgeoisie”). Large landowners, as remnants of feudalism, are not a major factor. The capitalist-worker relationship, by nature, is exploitative. Industrial capitalists, in their pursuit of profit, pay their workers poverty-level wages for long hours, viewing them as nothing more than means to an end. As a consequence, workers become alienated from work, family, and society. At first, they can’t explain their situation. But with proper proselytizing, they awaken to their plight and acquire a class consciousness. And they rebel in ways legal and illegal. Capitalists, with the State supplying muscle, respond with repression. But with the cat now out of the bag, the conflict replicates itself worldwide and becomes more volatile. This is capitalism in its roiling, “late” stage. Eventually, the system collapses under its weight of contradictions and revolution arrives. And the outcome is historically preordained: Labor wins, capital loses. Private property is overthrown and a better world is born.
Such is Marxism in a nutshell. In hindsight, even to orthodox Marxists, things obviously have not gone according to plan. Regimes that call themselves Communist, such as the People’s Republic of China, never mind the United States, know better than to abolish private property. For all practical intents and purposes, classical Marxism is extinct. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be adapted to circumstances.
In three key ways, Marxists have gone off the original script. First, they regularly use law, policy, and the courts as a means of building socialism. They are willing to pursue “bourgeois parliamentary reforms” of the sort Marx disdained, especially in such areas of material well-being as pensions, health care, and housing. Second, they recognize that capitalists, at least with a certain amount of coaxing and threatening, can evolve into natural allies. In other words, capitalists may wind up absorbing the lessons of their critics to the point where they are not so much capitalists as financial agents of revolution. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Marxists have shifted their primary focus from class to race and sex. This is not to say that they have given up on class struggle. But their most passionate identifications for the last several decades have been with “people of color,” women, and gender-bender sexual minorities. These are, in a sense, the New Proletariat. Especially useful in winning adherents are hybrid categories such as “women of color,” “workplace gender oppression,” and “Latino workers.”
Race, most of all, is central to this transformation. Beginning in the 1960s, white people, here and in Europe, began to reject their identity in favor of an emotionally driven intergroup racial altruism. This was especially significant because the main disseminator of this view, higher education, was experiencing dramatic increases in enrollment. The idea that whites owe a gargantuan debt to blacks and other “people of color” became absorbed into our frame of reference. So did the idea that nonwhites, in their primal and often violent behavior, somehow are more “expressive” and “authentic” than whites. Riots, in this view, are righteous protests that happen because those in power are deaf to the desperate pleas of the rioters—self-fulfilling prophecy! This view got its unofficial launch, at least among white audiences, in 1957 with the publication of Norman Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,”6 which argued that to be white and possessed of a conscience required an existential emulation of blacks.
While the influence of the Frankfurt School of Marxism here should not be ignored, I believe it to be vastly overstated. The most crucial game-changers have been black writers. Ur texts include Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Malcolm X’s Autobiography, and Richard Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power. Over the next several years, as the Black Panthers turned up the heat, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, and Huey Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide became must-reads. Much more recent have been Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and Cornel West’s Race Matters. The latest addition to this roster of literary pugilists is Ta-Nehisi Coates,7 winner in 2015 of a five-year, $625,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” His father, William Paul Coates, is a former Black Panther who founded a Baltimore publishing house, Black Classic Press. Truly, Ta-Nehisi was “to the manor born.”
The rise of such authors could not have happened without the support of pliant and guilt-ridden white benefactors. The best explanation for this prostration before one’s natural enemies remains Pascal Bruckner’s Eighties classic, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt.8 Observing his fellow Frenchmen, the author concluded that white swooning over Third World cultures, at bottom, is groveling, reflexive self-abasement. Since that time, white masochism has evolved from trend to default setting. More than ever, the violence, poverty, and illiteracy endemic to the Third World, including home-grown American blacks, are off-limits to discussion, save for calling attention to “root causes” (i.e., white neglect and oppression). And as class struggle and racial struggle are of a piece—activists for Black Lives Matter, for example, often stridently make this point9—eliminating inequality in developing nations requires overthrowing both capitalism and whiteness.
Liberal guilt is key to understanding the
psychology of surrender to shakedowns. It explains why the “color-blind” Civil
Rights Act of 1964 so quickly morphed into racial quotas, goals, and timetables
despite passionate assurances from its backers that the new law would never do
such a thing. The year 1964, by no coincidence, also witnessed the first of
several riotous “long hot summers” in our cities. Lawmakers, policymakers,
academics, journalists, and civil rights leaders desperately searched for ways
to head off more destruction. Corporate officials in short order joined the
ranks of the Concerned.
Global Salvation Inc.
Understand this about corporations: They are neither inherently Leftist nor inherently Rightist. They are inherently profit-seeking. They will undertake a strategy or project if they believe they can generate a return. Conversely, they will avoid a course of action if they anticipate that it will lose them money. Starting in earnest during the Seventies, and accelerating since, companies have redefined their mission to have it both ways: mollify inquisitors and please shareholders. CEOs and other corporate officials now see racially based redistribution of wealth and power as not just sound philanthropy, but sound business strategy as well.
In this mission, profit is intertwined with two principles: 1. Corporate Social Responsibility; and, 2. globalism. Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR, is the doctrine that a corporation is answerable not just to people formally connected to the company, but to the broader society—i.e., stakeholders—affected in some way by company decisions. CSR advocates argues that corporations have an obligation to place stakeholder concerns on par with concern of their own people. A corporation isn’t just about delivering value to employees, shareholders, and customers. It also is about promoting the general welfare, here and abroad. Toward that end, corporations should establish partnerships with sovereign governments, supranational governments (e.g., the European Union, the United Nations), and nongovernmental organizations.10
Globalism, a closely related principle, rests on the assumption that nation-states hinder the functioning of multinational corporations and indeed of whole economies. To maximize competitiveness, we must recognize the interconnectedness of people the world over, and abandon protectionism and other obstacles to market efficiency. This principle flowered in the Nineties, thanks in large measure to a number of influential books. Walter Wriston’s The Twilight of Sovereignty,11 was one such work. The author, chairman emeritus of Citibank, called for transforming corporations into semi-autonomous global entities. The old managerial class, he argued, is a dinosaur and should give way to a “global conversation.” Likewise, Kenichi Ohmae, a senior partner with McKinsey & Co., argued in The Borderless World12 and The End of the Nation State13 that sovereign governments, unable to control events (including those that affect the value of their currencies), are on their way out. As economies are global, governance must go global as well. Nations should cede most of their sovereignty to pro-market supranational entities. Ohmae argued in The Borderless World that the main goal of the U.S./Europe/Japan sovereign triad should be “ensuring the free flow of information, money, goods, and services as well as the free migration of people and corporations. Traditional governments will have to establish a new single framework of global governance.”
Strictly speaking, none of this has anything to do with Marxism. Yet indirectly, it has facilitated its advance. Since nations apparently no longer matter, it follows that neither do their borders. And as unrestricted cross-national movement of labor is crucial for industry competitiveness, support for the free market goes hand in hand with elimination of immigration restrictions. This is a major reason why corporations are working furiously with social justice nonprofit groups to root out anti-immigration “hate”; their leaders view large-scale immigration, especially from low-wage countries, as essential to profit. Toward this end, a number of major companies are getting out their checkbooks. In the summer of 2017, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, a company with a market cap in the $800 billion-to-$900 billion range, informed employees that Apple would be donating $1 million to those masters of moral panic, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), providing a 2-to-1 match for employee contributions. Similarly, JPMorgan Chase announced plans to donate $500,000 to the SPLC to promote its “tracking, exposing, and fighting hate groups and other extremist organizations.”
Corporations also have discovered the joys of mutual cooperation, at least when the mission is derailing the presidency of Donald Trump. In February 2017, after a Seattle federal judge had invalidated Trump’s “Muslim ban,” top officials from Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Reddit, Twitter, Uber, and dozens of other information technology firms, to an extent pressured by their own employees, submitted an amicus brief to an appeals court in support of the lower court ruling.14 Even before that ruling, our friend Tim Cook had stated: “Apple would not exist without immigration, let alone thrive and innovate the way we do.”15 And at the start of that September, executives of well over 300 companies—including Amazon, Apple, Crate & Barrel, Facebook, General Motors, Marriott, Microsoft, and Starbucks—announced their signed opposition to President Trump overturning President Obama’s 2012 order creating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.16 The petition, circulated by FWD.us, a lobbying group co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg, claimed our economy would severely suffer if DACA’s roughly 800,000 beneficiaries were forced to return home.
The outsized role of Google in the Obama administration should dispel any illusions about corporate radicalism being possessed of libertarian instincts. By October 2015, Google representatives, including lobbyists, already had visited the White House a combined 427 times, with the company’s director of public policy, Johanna Shelton, alone accounting for 128 of those occasions.17 More than 250 persons either left Google for a position with the federal government or vice versa; fully 53 of those transitions were White House-related. In addition, Google used the White House Office of Science and Technology as if it were a company back office—and in ways that skirted federal employee ethics rules. In the end, the Google-Obama pipeline may have warded off a Federal Trade Commission antitrust suit; the company already had been the target of at least three FTC complaints related to deceptive billings of consumers for charges incurred by minor children downloading apps from the Google Play Store for use on Android mobile devices.18
Eric Schmidt, who until this past December had
served as chairman of Google’s holding company, Alphabet Inc.,19 travels in lofty political circles. On
Election Night 2016 he was an honored guest at Hillary Clinton headquarters in
Manhattan. Significantly, Schmidt, whose
Forbes
magazine-listed personal net worth has been hovering as of late between $12
billion and $14 billion,20 initiated a
policy of allowing Google to combine user browsing data from third-party
websites with individual Google search and email data. Hacked emails by top
Clinton campaign adviser John Podesta virtually confirm Schmidt’s motivations.
One email from Schmidt to Clinton aide Cheryl Mills read: “Key is development
of a single record for a voter that aggregates all that is known about them.”21 That sounds like someone wants to spy on
behalf of the government. The recent movie,
The Circle, was not
far off the mark.
Capitalism Alongside National Identity: The Prospec
Difficult as it is to resist the temptation, it is important not to panic or get cynical. Business still does many terrific things that we take for granted, certainly a lot more often than socialism. And not every businessman has joined the multicultural ride. That said, capitalism may be planting the seeds of its own demise, putting national identity in harm’s way. This is not a new observation. Seventy-five years ago, Austrian-born Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter, in his classic book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy,22 argued that capitalism is ultimately unsustainable. Unlike Marx, he did not welcome this outcome. But he feared that it would come to pass anyway. In brief, Schumpeter argued that the monopoly-seeking tendencies inherent in capitalism would alienate the general population, but that rather than resort to revolution, voters would elect anti-capitalists to office who in turn would transform their economies into social democracies.
Recent events are justifying such fears. While one should not underestimate the ability of a society to resolve its problems through the market, a parallel reality is that corporations are altering their mission in ways that make reversal of present trends all the more difficult. To preserve the viability of capitalism, corporate officials must focus far more on what enabled them to grow: creating profits and raising living standards. It is not their job to serve as paymasters and pitchmen for global salvation. Let nonprofit groups, whether religious or secular, worry about that.
But how can corporations be persuaded to do this? One approach is to buy voting shares of stock and introduce proxy resolutions at annual shareholder meetings. Most resolutions do not pass. But over the long run, they can initiate change. Talking about a taboo subject in front of a couple thousand shareholders really can get a debate going. Another approach is to sue companies that inhibit freedom of speech. Example: The alternative social media network, Gab, this past September filed an antitrust suit against Google for banning Gab from the Google Store.23 Gab apparently committed the sin of promoting free speech by allowing “hate” groups to use its platform. Google saw this gesture as injurious to the nation. Google had allowed Gab in its app stores until August, days after Google fired one of its engineers, James Damore, who had the temerity to circulate a memo criticizing company “diversity” programs.24 Apple already had banned Gab in 2016.
Some readers might be asking at this point: What about boycotts? Why not starve errant corporations out of revenue until they change their behavior? If only it were that easy. As a practical rule, boycotts should be used sparingly at best. For one thing, they rarely succeed. Second, and even more to the point, they shouldn’t succeed. They thrive on factual misrepresentation, panic-peddling, character assassination, and guilt by association. Even with good intentions, they can quickly take unexpected wrong turns. “The Left does it too” is not an argument for their use.25
Making the corporate-Left partnership even more problematic is that resentment against capitalism is enjoying a renewed surge the world over. Anti-business authors such as Naomi Klein, Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman, and Alfie Kohn are virtual superstars on the Left, while anti-business politicians such as Bernie Sanders (U.S.), Jeremy Corbyn (U.K.), and Jean-Luc Melenchon (France) have large and growing audiences. Most of all, young adults are driving this trend. A Harvard poll in 2016 revealed that millennial adults supported capitalism over socialism by a mere 42 percent to 33 percent.26 A 2015 Gallup poll indicated that 69 percent of millennials would consider voting for a socialist presidential candidate.27 And a survey released in October 2016 by the Victims of Communism Memorial found that only 55 percent of millennial respondents (born 1982-2002) believed that Communism is, or ever was, a problem; 80 percent of the baby boomers and 91 percent of the elderly felt this way.28 Ironic, isn’t it? Corporations are going all out to impress or even join the Left, and this is the thanks they get.
Corporations are not parties, philanthropies, or think tanks. By taking on such roles, they are working against not only their own interests, but also the interests of their nations. Even more frightening is the prospect of corporations drawing closer with “deep state” operatives, street radicals, and organized gangsters to form an informal global ruling coalition. It sounds like dystopian fiction. And it could become dystopian fact.
This is hardly to say that free enterprise does not matter. Of course, it matters. But to function over the long run, it must operate in the context of preservation of national identity and sovereignty. “Be assured my young friend, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” wrote Adam Smith to an acquaintance following the British defeat at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. By this, Smith, a man who understood the nature of capitalism better than most, meant that misguided political or military calculation very easily can undermine one’s country. In a modern context, that dictum ought to include corporate radicalism. With great determination, corporate enterprises are joining forces with anti-American political activists, in and out of government, to dissolve our nation. The need for civilized popular resistance is paramount. ■
Endnotes
1. For a lengthy analysis of this sequence of events, see Carl Horowitz, “Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky Enables Illegal Immigration; Shuns Fiduciary Duties,” Falls Church, Va.: National Legal and Policy Center, March 30, 2017.
2. Discover headquarters, for example, explained its decision this way: “In light of recent events (in Charlottesville, Va.), we are terminating merchant agreements with hate groups, given the violence incited by their extremist views. The intolerant and racist views of hate groups are inconsistent with our beliefs and practices.” See “Visa, Discover, MasterCard Cut Ties with Extremist Groups After Rally,” www.paymentssource.com, August 16, 2017.
3. See Barbara Boyer, “Campbell Soup CEO Resigns from Trump Council Just before He Disbands It,” www.philly.com, August 16, 2017. Actually, not only did the Right and the Left deserve criticism for the Charlottesville debacle, but in truth, the Left deserved much more criticism. Indeed, many “anti-racist” activists behaved in ways that were nothing short of criminal—and with local law enforcement doing nothing to stop them. See James Kirkpatrick, “Narrative Collapse: Is Charlottesville’s James Alex Fields the Next George Zimmerman?” www.vdare.com, August 16, 2017.
4. “Message from Howard Schultz to Starbucks Partners: Living Our Values in Uncertain Times,” https://news.starbucks.com, January 29, 2017. Note the phrase “more than 65 million citizens of the world.” Schultz apparently believes that citizenship does not have to be specific to a nation. His comment underscores the ulterior motive of the global sanctuary movement.
5. Zuckerberg’s comment was part of a lengthy manifesto appearing as an open letter posted to Facebook on February 16, 2017.
6. Norman Mailer, The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” San Francisco: City Lights, 1957. The 9,000-word essay originally was published that year in a special issue of Dissent magazine. The piece has been reprinted many times since.
7. See Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, New York: Spiegel and Grau (imprint of Random House), 2015.
8. Pascal Bruckner, Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt, New York: Free Press, 1986.
9. Black Lives Matter, a social media-driven group of demagogues and hysterics founded in 2013, rests on the implicit principle that white lives don’t. Moreover, as whites are capitalists, capitalism must be resisted. See, for example, Summer Meza, “Black Lives Matter Wants to Bring Down White Capitalism with ‘Black Christmas,’” www.newsweek.com, November 28, 2017. A leader of the group’s Los Angeles chapter and a professor at California State University, Los Angeles (CSU-LA), Melina Abdullah, recently provided this slice of wisdom over the radio airwaves in preparation for the 2017 Christmas shopping season: “We say ‘white capitalism’ because it’s important that we understand that the economic system and the racial structures are connected. We have to not only disrupt of policing that literally kill our people, but we have to disrupt the white supremacist, capitalistic, patriarchal, heteronormative system that is really the root cause of these police killings.” A virtual self-parody of revolutionary fanaticism, such words are not to be taken seriously except perhaps as physical threats to white businessmen.
10. An excellent critique of this mindset can be found in David Henderson, The Role of Business in the Modern World: Progress, Pressures and Prospects for the Market Economy, Washington, D.C.: Competitive Enterprise Institute, 2004.
11. Walter Wriston, The Twilight of Sovereignty: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our World, New York: Scribner, 1992.
12. Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy, New York: HarperBusiness, 1990.
13. Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies, New York: Free Press, 1995.
14. David Streitfeld, “Tech Opposition to Trump Propelled by Employees, Not Executives,” New York Times, February 6, 2017.
15. Quoted in Kara Swisher and Ina Fried, “Apple CEO Tim Cook on Trump’s Muslim Ban: Apple Would Not Exist without Immigration…It’s Not a Policy We Support,” www.recode.net, January 28, 2017.
16. “Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, Mary Barra Among More than 300 Business Titans Who Implored Trump to Preserve DACA, the Obama-Era Policy Protecting Immigrants,” Business Insider, September 3, 2017.
17. “Revealed: Google Staffers Have Had at Least 427 Meetings at the White House Over Course of Obama Presidency – Averaging More than One a Week,” Daily Mail, April 23, 2016. All told, 169 Google employees had met with 182 Obama administration officials. The meetings include those with representatives of Google-affiliated companies Tomorrow Ventures and Civis Analytics.
18. And the settlements were substantial. To resolve the third lawsuit, for example, Google in September 2014 agreed to pay full refunds totaling at least $19 million for the unauthorized charges.
19. Schmidt will remain a board member and serve as a technical adviser. See Julia Carrie Wong, “Eric Schmidt Steps Down as Executive Chairman of Google’s Parent Alphabet,” www.theguardian.com, December 21, 2017.
20. As of December 28, 2017, it was $13.6 billion. See https://www.forbes.com/profile/eric-schmidt.
21. See Peter Flaherty, “Google Is the Threat to Our Civil Liberties,”
Falls Church, Va.: National Legal and Policy Center, February 1, 2017.
Immediately following President Trump’s “Muslim ban,” Schmidt pledged up to $4
million in donations. This sum represented a dollar-for-dollar match of up to
$2 million in employee donations to four organizations opposed to the policy:
the American Civil Liberties Union, Immigrant Legal Resource Center,
International Rescue Committee, and UN High Commissioner for Refugees/UN
Refugee Agency. See Jon Russell, “Google Is Pledging $4M to Support U.S.
Immigration Organizations,”
http://techcrunch.com,
January 29, 2017.
22. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, New York: Harper Perennial, third edition, 2008 (originally published in 1942).
23. April Glaser, “The Alt-Right’s Favorite Social Network Has a Point About Google,” Slate, September 20, 2017; David Z. Morris, “Google Sued by Gab, the Twitter for People Banned by Twitter,” www.fortune.com, September 17, 2017.
24. The case of James Damore received widespread media coverage. See, for example, John Shinal, “Fired Google Engineer Damore Says the Company Is Hiring and Promoting Workers Based on Race or Gender,” www.cnbc.com, August 14, 2017.
25. Even some on the Left admit that boycotts rarely succeed and, if they do, may throw wage-earning employees out of work. See David Macaray, “Boycotts Rarely Work the Way We Hope,” Huffington Post, July 17, 2013; Wayne Huisung, “Boycotts Almost Surely Will Never Work,” www.directactioneverywhere.com, undated.
26. Max Ehrenfreund, “A Majority of Millennials Now Reject Capitalism, Poll Shows,” www.washingtonpost.com, April 26, 2016.
27. Justin McCarthy, “In U.S., Socialist Presidential Candidates Least Appealing,” Gallup News, June 22, 2015. The title of the article notwithstanding, the support for socialism among younger adults was quite remarkable for what amounts to a discredited economic philosophy.
28. “New Report Reveals U.S. Attitudes on Socialism, Communism on Eve of 2016 Election,” Washington, D.C.: Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, October 17, 2016.