4/5/21
The problem for McConnell—for the whole GOP—is that while corporate America loves the tax breaks they get from Republicans, they live in the 21st century along with 21st century Americans who have money to spend on their products. And more and more of those Americans spending money are LGBTQ, Black, Indigenous, and people of color. All you have to do is turn on broadcast television and see how advertisers are selling their wares. Even pharmaceutical ads have rainbow casts of characters. So here comes McConnell, issuing a broadside against corporate America and defending White Supremacy—all the while trying to keep on their good side by arguing from the other side of his mouth that corporate taxes can't be raised to pay for infrastructure. "We are witnessing a coordinated campaign by powerful and wealthy people to mislead and bully the American people," says McConnell, who stood by completely mute for months while Donald Trump and congressional Republicans pushed the Big Lie of election fraud. McConnell promises "serious consequences" if corporate America continues acting like "a woke parallel government."
"The President has claimed repeatedly that state-level debates over voting procedures are worse than Jim Crow or 'Jim Crow on steroids.' Nobody actually believes this," McConnell says, ignoring the multitudes of voting rights advocates, historians, good government types who are saying, "yeah, this is Jim Crow all over again." We are pretty used to radical historical and hysterical revisionism from him. After all, he's the guy who said out loud, on camera that the filibuster has "no racial history at all. None. There's no dispute among historians." Historians, of course, immediately disputed that statement en masse. Business in America is looking at the people who buy its products. There wouldn't be such a concerted effort for companies to go green (or to see the upside of greenwashing their enterprise) if the bulk of American consumers were not asking for it. We see more people of color on our televisions—often sharing households—because that's where the market is. We see LGBTQ couples and families on our televisions because, again, American society has moved into the 21st century. And American society as a whole remains absolutely horrified at gun violence and wants government do do something about it. That's what corporate America is responding to; an American marketplace that is firmly established in the 21st century.