Politically Correct Corporations?
Have you ever seen a politically correct coffee cup? I have, at Starbucks.
It treats you as helpless, saying “careful, the beverage you’re about to enjoy is extremely hot.” Then of course you get the corrugated brown sleeve, which boasts that you are holding the “first-ever 10% post-consumer fiber cup, 60% post-consumer fiber sleeve.” What is a post-consumer? Someone who tried to leave the café without paying?
On the other side of the sleeve is an advertisement for the film Arctic Tale, the latest Global Warming tearjerker. There is a drawing of a mommy polar bear and a baby polar bear. In case you didn’t get it, you are given this profound message: “What can we do at home to help save theirs? #2: Launder half of our clothes in cold water.” That means there must be a #1, and there will most likely be a #3. Clever precepts that tell you how to behave correctly, like Mao’s Little Red Book.
This got me thinking: Can a corporation be politically correct? First instinct: Nah, of course not. But we are conditioned to think this way because the Left owns the rhetoric. According to the propaganda, big bad corporations are Capitalist, which means that even if every single corporation became utterly PC, the whole sector would still count as a “right-wing” power base. (Something like the churches being considered reactionary, despite the fact that the Left has established itself quite comfortably in the mainline Protestant denominations.) This is called having your cake and eating it too.
Sure, there are still “conservative” corporations with “right-wing” interests. But more and more, this sector of society is being pushed through the PC grinder. We see corporations throwing their weight and money behind multiculturalism and the rest of the Leftie agenda. Witness the recent controversy over JetBlue Airlines becoming a sponsor of the Yearly Kos convention (they later withdrew, following the protests).
Particularly insidious is the corporate Diversity industry. A Google search on “diversity training” yields 1,010,000 results. It is a prime growth industry, with a huge daily impact on millions of Americans as they conduct their workdays. To work in a modern corporation means to navigate countless rules governing hiring, firing, acceptable speech, sexual harrassment, etc. Not to mention the drain on the economy of less productive and less qualified people who are in their posts solely due to Diversity.
At this rate, it is only a matter of time before the competitive, entrepreneurial spirit is sucked dry.
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August 14th, 2007 at 11:07 am
When is a coffee cup not a coffee cup?? It is one thing to advertise one’s product on its packaging, but it is another to tell the consumer how to lead his (or her…) life. Thanks AWOL for the “heads up”. It gives me another reason to boycott Starbucks.
August 15th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Why does Starbucks have the warning that their beverage is “extremely hot?” It’s hard to believe that Mr. Wolf doesn’t understand the need for all corporations to protect themselves from frivilous lawsuits from their consumers. It has become an obsession with this country to sue at the slightest provocation so Starbucks is only trying to protect their integrity and their stock price by trying to fend off these indecencies by making it clear to all who buy their coffee that it is indeed a “hot” beverage.
As far as the ad for the film “Arctic Tale” Mr. Wolf again takes the contrary position that there is nothing the average person can do to try to offset the very well substantiated fact that Global Warming is taking away the habit of many species. So to remind the public that it would be better to wash their clothes in cold water…and not so frequently…can only work to make all of us aware that we are not alone on this planet and that if we want to continue to exist here, we need to pay close attention to those species that are approaching the exit doors.
Finally I find it laughable that Mr. Wolf makes fun of the idea that a U.S. corporation could have a social conscience and still maintain its image as a pillar of capitalism. More and more companies are making an effort to tailor their practices so that they are more environmentally friendly, from building “green” offices to contributing to organizations deeply involved in the cause. So let’s stop pointing fingers Mr. Wolf and get on board. The earth’s environment is changing drastically and those of you who refuse to accept the situation and get involved will be those who will be shipped to what is remaining of those icebergs and forced to scrounge around for food while you get closer and closer to being thrown in the ocean.
August 15th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Mr. Robbins, thank you for your thoughtful and reasoned comment. In the 1920s, Julien Benda wrote his magnum opus, The Treason of the Intellectuals, in which he catalogued the phenomenon of tendentiousness that had swept, by that time, across the intelligentsia of Europe. Traditionally, he noted, the great thinkers had constituted a permanent counterforce against the accepted notions of the era. But in the twentieth century, we witness the appearance of a self-styled intellectual elite that bands together for the opposite purpose: to propagate an ideological trend, to buttress the political winds flowing across society at any given moment. Now fast forward to 2007. Could one imagine a more blatant display of Benda’s tendentious “intellectual” than the appearance of film director Davis Guggenheim alongside former Vice-President Al Gore at the Academy Awards ceremony? This, alas, is the stuff of Global Warming.
For a recent British documentary demolishing the Global Warming cult, go here.
For reams upon reams of studies and testimony that reduce the cult’s scientific pretense to rubble, go here.
August 23rd, 2007 at 5:54 pm
There have always been insane human beings, but, in earlier times, they were not as powerful as they have become in this time. It is only in this time that human beings have become capable of producing effects that can change even global weather patterns, and global ecological patterns of all kinds. But human beings have always been insane in the domain of politics, for example. For countless centuries, wherever human beings, in their benighted self-possession, have been capable of influencing conditional events, there has been insanity and conflict.
But now, in in its motions in the twenty-first century, the insanity of humankind is influencing even the larger picture of the human natural circumstance. And this must be changed, or there is going to be a terrible, horrific calamity on Earth. Such a calamity is not yet inevitable, but it will occur if there is not a fundamental transformation of humankind, in its heart and mind altogether and in everything that it does. A fundamental rightening of the world-process must occur, because humankind is now having a PROFOUNDLY NEGATIVE effect on the human world-process, and even on the larger natural domain of the world.
When the entire human world founds itself on the adolescent motive to aggrandize the individual (via the use of one-dimensional “reason”), then everyone is collectively working towards the destruction not only of human culture and mankind itself, but even of the Earth itself, the very vehicle that supports life.
September 6th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Some of the first sponsors of political correctness have been corporations. They are often the first to adopt and initiate concepts within our societies (European and American), and institute measures favoring political correctness and multicultual doctrine.
Employees (from the top to the bottom) are often the first involuntary inductees into the requirements, which would be unconstitutional for governments to require. An example is British Airways banning of religious jewelry (A Christian cross), or Apple and others acceptance of partnership rights for homosexuals. Often these are done previous to any governmental or legal requirements.
The Corporatists often support groups which would seem to be their natural enemies. It is not all done with altruistic public spiritedness in mind. It is not done for short-term profit motives. Someone within the control of the corporation has the long-term in mind, but have ideology included. We are often unwilling recipients of that ideological process which uses a political correctness code to reward and to punish.
Even the biggest corporations are subject to PC. Or – are they the initiators?
You have a good post with aspects I have never considered. A couple of other posts I’ve read are very intelligent, too. I’ll come back to see more. John at Brave New World had recommended your site and I see why.