Corporations are doing their best to fall in line with the
sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine. So, they are shooting themselves
in the feet to prove just how in-line they are with the current international
agenda.
This is not because candy companies and other corporations actually
believe in the righteousness of the Ukraine cause. They simply do not want to
appear like they support any unpopular opinion and are willing to lose money to
support their public image.
This true of almost all of the woke actions taken by Hollywood,
corporations and sports franchises. The NBA and NFL aren’t in love with Black
Lives Matter, they just don’t want to appear like they might be racists and so
jump on the band wagon of what some believe as the new civil rights issue. This
is the same when it comes gay issues.
This is not to say that some of these entities don’t fully embrace
wokism. Disney clearly has sold its soul. But for the most part, these business
groups are operated by risk managers who are desperate not to offend anyone – and
mistakenly assume that by removing a black face from their products such as a
popular pancake box or a native American from the butter package – they will
appear to be supporting some noble cause – the operative word being “appear”
when they don’t mean it in the least.
There is a famous book published in the early 1970s called “The
Lazzo Letters,” which highlighted this trend of corporate Puseyism. Lazzo wrote
to various corporations raising the most ludicrous claims about their products,
and the companies fell over backwards to appease him, offering him all sorts of
discounts, even sending him free products so as not to have offended him. I
tested the theory after reading his book and got the same result.
Like Neil Young did with Spotify, these companies will quietly
flock back to selling their products the moment the public isn’t paying
attention, because ultimately money is more important to them than righteous causes,
and they simply need to appear to be supporting the proper causes.
Once it becomes clear that companies like Coca Cola and McDonalds
need to retain their customers in Russia, they will find a way to sneak back in
there just the way Neil Young snuck his music back onto Spotify when no one was
looking.
As back in the 1960s, people talk a good game when hopping
onto a popular band wagon, but later revert to their own pathetic greedy habits
when the fad passes. Many people evoke woke these days the same way radicals
(and even some hippies) evoked civil rights and anti-war rhetoric in order to
fit in and seem righteous but will revert to their own base instincts once the
popularity of the issue fades. Most of these in the trenches in the 1960s became
middle of the road or even Republicans by the 1970s once the shortages started
in oil and beef, and life returned to the most fundamental concept of every man
for himself.
The one thing that is true of nearly all people and
corporations is that they are self-fish, even when they pretend not to be.
People will embrace socialism right up to the point when they
can’t get toilet paper or their favorite brand of candy, and then they revert
to being capitalists again.
This is particularly true of corporations who for the moment
are pretending to do the noble thing when it comes to boycotting Russia oved
actions in Ukraine. But you can rest assured, these same businesses will find a
way to crawl back there the moment we aren’t paying attention, back to business
as usual.
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