Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

'Got weird'? Weirder than the conspiracy theory centric GOP? Weider than Margie and Sloebert? Weirder AND more dangerous than 'stop the steal' and the rest of the GOP authoritarian wannabe theocratic crap?

As for the 'corporate Party'? Like so much of what you assert, it doesn't hold up to scrutiny

There’s no longer a business-friendly political party
Rick Newman·Senior Columnist
Updated Mon, May 15, 2023

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/theres-no-longer-a-business-friendly-political-party-195432346.html

For decades, the Republican Party was corporate America’s BFF.

CEOs could count on Republicans to keep taxes low and regulations light—and largely let businesses govern themselves. Businesses returned the favor by filling Republican coffers with millions of dollars in campaign donations.

That cozy relationship tensed up during the Trump administration.

In one sense, President Donald Trump behaved as a traditional Republican, by cutting business taxes and slashing regulation. But he also launched trade wars against China and other economic partners, which gummed up supply chains and raised costs for thousands of US businesses. Trump also mounted unprecedented personal attacks against companies that didn’t do his bidding or somehow failed his loyalty tests.

Trump’s selective hostility to business has now escalated into a Republican broadside against virtually any company that violates the party’s new unwritten code of cultural regression. Republican culture-warriors label this a “war on wokeness,” or pushback against excessive cultural sensitivity. But nobody really knows what wokeness means, and Republicans are using that vagueness to attack any business that threatens their grip on power, or their pathway to it.

The seminal spectacle in the GOP’s breakup with business is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s battle with the Walt Disney Co., which is one of Florida’s largest employers and its single biggest taxpayer. DeSantis went after Disney last year, when it opposed a bill he backed that would restrict what Florida schools can teach young kids about sex and gender. DeSantis could have been a normal politician and let Disney take whatever stance it felt was necessary to appease its customers, employees, and shareholders. The law passed, despite Disney’s objections, so DeSantis got what he wanted.

But DeSantis was a sore winner, and he revoked Disney’s self-governing status near its Orlando theme park. He tried to punish the company in other ways, too. Disney punched back with a legal maneuver to reclaim its municipal independence. DeSantis has vowed a fight to the death, and litigation could go on for years.

For what? Certainly not for any business-related principle. DeSantis is basically trying to use one of the world’s most famous brands as a foil in his campaign to become America’s culture-warrior-in-chief.

DeSantis picked a dumb fight with Disney that he could very well lose. Yet other Republicans seem to think the DeSantis-style war on wokeness is such a winning strategy they’re copying it. Some House Republicans are looking for ways to punish Disney beyond Florida, at the federal level. Republicans also hope to wage a “war on woke capitalism” as a part of their 2024 campaign to seize control of Congress and the White House.

Several Republican-led states, including Florida, Arizona, Louisiana, and North Dakota, have enacted rules or laws restricting state investments in money-managing firms that practice ESG investing, which means they take environmental, sustainability and governance into account when choosing which firms to do business with. That’s meant to punish Wall Street giants such as BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase that are pushing ESG as an ethical and savvy way to invest.

Then there are Republican efforts to break up or dismantle tech firms such as Facebook and Google. Montana recently banned TikTok, making it illegal to download the app as of next January. If the bill survives an inevitable legal challenge, it would fine TikTok, Google, Apple or any business that makes the app available inside Montana at a rate of $10,000 per day.

Republican aren’t taking a stand against profits, per se, or against capitalism writ large, the way the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party does. They’re attacking businesses on an ad hoc basis when it suits some other political goal.

Yet this violates the whole ethos of laissez-faire capitalism, the Republican concept of setting minimalist rules for businesses and then getting out of the way. Republicans are still more or less content to keep taxes low and regulations lean, but it now comes with a hefty price: Businesses, in return, must abide by a retrograde Republican ideology that’s out-of-touch with mainstream Americans.

It would be an overstatement to say the Democrats are seizing the opportunity to buddy up with corporate America. President Biden has trash-talked fossil-fuel companies, proposed a hike in business taxes and ratcheted up regulations. Yet Biden has also eased trade frictions with friendly nations, and it’s Biden’s Democrats who want to raise the federal borrowing limit and avoid a destabilizing threat of default. Plus Biden probably seems quite friendly to green-energy firms and many other businesses that will benefit from billions of dollars in subsidies in bills Biden has backed and signed, such as last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.

There’s no rule that says one of America’s major political parties has to represent the interests of big business. Some Americans think corporate America has had too much sway over public priorities for far too long. More distance between lobbyists and policymakers may even be appropriate. Still, regulating business should be about making the economy as productive as possible — not about scoring points or settling grievances.