Let’s check the score card on how America feels about big business:
• Goldman Sachs deliberately sold investment packages to its clients that it was secretly betting against;
• Major financial institutions like Bank of America foreclosed on homes they couldn’t prove they owned;
• Barclays admitted fixing interest rates, making students pay more for loans and consumers pay more on credit cards, and there’s compelling evidence that other big financial institutions including HSBC, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase were in on it;
• And that’s all after the American government needed to bail out our nation’s financiers (who I think we should start referring to as “welfare queens”) because their shortsighted, likely illegal, schemes plunged us into a global financial crisis. Remember 2008?
And yet it’s a small fast-food franchise, Chick-fil-A, that liberal mayors from Chicago to Boston to San Francisco say they don’t want operating in their cities … because they don’t like the CEO’s opinions.
No mayor has said that about Goldman Sachs or Bank of America; nobody’s saying Barclays isn’t welcome in these parts — no mayor has yet threatened to come down on the companies that caused people to unfairly lose their homes or retirement savings, or that plunged us into the Great Recession.
No — America’s liberal mayors would prefer to pick on a small, southern, fast-food franchise that hasn’t actually done anything wrong.
I support gay marriage. I think their CEO is wrong. I don’t like some of the organizations that his company legally gives money to, either. Private citizens can boycott a company for these reasons.
But if living in a free society means anything, it means that you don’t use the power of the government to coerce someone into changing their opinion by blacklisting their business just because they disagree with you.
How could so many educated, elite mayors miss that?
By now most of them have backpedaled, admitting that they can’t actually do what they threatened — at least not legally and above board. But that doesn’t let them off the hook. The target they chose to pick on was so convenient it smacks of bullying: Few voters in most liberal cities are going to rise to the defense of a fast food franchise, or Christian evangelists, or the South … which in my experience is second only to the Midwest as a repository of easy taunts and ignorant slurs. (Chicago … you should really know better.)
Let’s check the score card on how America feels about big business:
• Goldman Sachs deliberately sold investment packages to its clients that it was secretly betting against;
• Major financial institutions like Bank of America foreclosed on homes they couldn’t prove they owned;
• Barclays admitted fixing interest rates, making students pay more for loans and consumers pay more on credit cards, and there’s compelling evidence that other big financial institutions including HSBC, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase were in on it;
• And that’s all after the American government needed to bail out our nation’s financiers (who I think we should start referring to as “welfare queens”) because their shortsighted, likely illegal, schemes plunged us into a global financial crisis. Remember 2008?
And yet it’s a small fast-food franchise, Chick-fil-A, that liberal mayors from Chicago to Boston to San Francisco say they don’t want operating in their cities … because they don’t like the CEO’s opinions.
No mayor has said that about Goldman Sachs or Bank of America; nobody’s saying Barclays isn’t welcome in these parts — no mayor has yet threatened to come down on the companies that caused people to unfairly lose their homes or retirement savings, or that plunged us into the Great Recession.
No — America’s liberal mayors would prefer to pick on a small, southern, fast-food franchise that hasn’t actually done anything wrong.
I support gay marriage. I think their CEO is wrong. I don’t like some of the organizations that his company legally gives money to, either. Private citizens can boycott a company for these reasons.
But if living in a free society means anything, it means that you don’t use the power of the government to coerce someone into changing their opinion by blacklisting their business just because they disagree with you.
How could so many educated, elite mayors miss that?
By now most of them have backpedaled, admitting that they can’t actually do what they threatened — at least not legally and above board. But that doesn’t let them off the hook. The target they chose to pick on was so convenient it smacks of bullying: Few voters in most liberal cities are going to rise to the defense of a fast food franchise, or Christian evangelists, or the South … which in my experience is second only to the Midwest as a repository of easy taunts and ignorant slurs. (Chicago … you should really know better.)
It must have seemed like such a convenient issue to be brave about — except insofar as it was obviously contrary to the entire spirit of American democracy.
These mayors chose to pick on Chick-fil-A, which so far as we know hasn’t done anything wrong, instead of standing up to institutions that have committed actual crimes against the American people. Telling Goldman Sachs or Bank of America that they’re not welcome in your city? That would take guts — and potentially be defensible, because cities do have the power to regulate some business conduct. Saying that banks cannot do business within a municipality until they are certified to be not foreclosing on homes they don’t own? The legality is questionable, but at least it would be an attempt to regulate illegal conduct rather than personal opinions.
But no, they didn’t go there. They never went there. The elite mayors of liberal cities would never go so far as to take up arms against blue chip companies filled with members of the “creative class.” No — their criminal actions are better left to the Attorney General, or Congress, or the legal system or … somebody else.
But a southern fast food franchise whose owner has an opinion? Now the liberal lions of Boston and San Francisco and Chicago weigh in with a demand for justice.
What’s terrifying is not the idea that these mayors are betraying their convictions, but that they were in fact standing up for what they really and truly believe in. Both in their proclamations and in their silence.
Benjamin Wachs writes for Messenger Post Media, and is the editor of Fiction365.com. Email him at Benjamin@Fiction365.com.
