Jack Wellborn

(Posted to LinkedIn on June 27th, 2022)

I’ve been seeing a lot of statements of goodwill here and elsewhere by multinational corporations pledging to help their workers who are need of abortions. That’s all well and good, but a society where women need to be employed and have the permission of their employer for medical help is intrinsically broken, and these multinational corporations aren’t really going to do anything to help.

The Republican Party of today is driven by billionaires and white Christian nationalists. The billionaires need the votes and the white Christian nationalists need the money. Through this alliance, the billionaires get tax cuts while the white Christian nationalists get to install their theocracy. That may sound ridiculous, but it’s hard to argue last week’s Supreme Court ruling wasn’t theocratic in nature. To argue that it was based on anything else is akin to arguing that the civil war was really about states rights.

It’s because of this alliance that Apple, Google, Microsoft, and whomever else took last week’s tragic ruling as a great PR opportunity won’t actually do anything. Even those with the most well meaning leadership operate at the behest of the billionaires that are benefitting from the same political landscape that is forcing women into childbirth. Of all the handwringing and platitudes, did you see a single one of these corporations pledge or threaten to do anything meaningful? Did you see any one of them suggest they might move their operations out of Texas, the state behind the law backed by the Supreme Court? How many of you got a nice letter from your company’s leadership condemning the ruling? Was the public statement as strongly worded? Was there even a public statement?

If you ask, odds are they’ll say that the company needs to stay out of politics. That’s a statement in support of the status quo, one that continues to reward billionares with tax cuts and with lack of regulations for the multinational corporations they invest in. Any company that gives to anti-abortion Republicans or invests in anti-abortion states, is itself anti-abortion. It’s as simple as that.

So when you see these statements of goodwill by multinational corporations, understand that’s exactly what they are — just statements.

One term I probably overuse is “gaslighting”. To no fault of the committee involved, the air surrounding the Jan 6 hearings feels like gaslighting to me. We learned this week that the thing we thought happen did happen. There was an attempted coup by the outgoing president.

I feel gaslit because I am old enough to remember Clinton being impeached for lying about getting a blowjob. There was consternation. There was outrage. Lying about an extramarital blow job is bad, but it’s peanuts when compared to inciting a coup.

There is some consternation, for sure, but where is the outrage? Everyone lost their shit over a god damn blow job, but when a president tries to end democracy, the consensus vibe is “well that happened. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens next.”