Charles Pierce/Esquire
There’s a lot of tres piquant news as we roll into the first anniversary of the events of January 6. (How does one celebrate the first anniversary of a barely unsuccessful coup, assuming that seizing the radio station or the airport is out of the question?) First, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago has cancelled his scheduled Horsewhip The Press event, announcing instead that he will tell all at one of his wankfests in Arizona next week. Second, former Trump adviser Peter Navarro went on teevee with MSNBC’s Ari Melber and explained how the institutional coup was going to work itself out through compliant members of Congress and the presumed complicity of Mike Pence. (To his everlasting credit, Melber explained to Navarro that he was describing a coup.) And the special congressional committee released a batch of texts between Camp Runamuck and various Fox News teevee stars, in which the latter were pleading for the president* to turn off the madness, all of which should embarrass any legitimate journalists who ever stood up in defense of that whorehouse.
But CNBC produced a singularly important story about the expensive suits manning the engine room of the USS Ratfcker.
More than 140 Republicans in the House and Senate continued to object to the results of the election in which President Joe Biden defeated incumbent President Donald Trump, even after the pro-Trump attack on the Capitol. Trump, who was then the president, urged his supporters at a rally that day to march on Congress as lawmakers were in the process of confirming Biden’s electoral victory.
Data compiled by watchdog group Accountable.US shows a handful of corporations that chose to pause contributions or push back on what took place on Jan. 6 later moved ahead with financing the campaigns of GOP lawmakers who objected to the election results. A study by the Public Affairs Council published last month says more than 80% of corporate PACs did pause their contributions to federal candidates following Jan. 6.
If Omicron passed as quickly as did the attacks of conscience after January 6, we wouldn’t be having half as many problems as we do.
“Major corporations were quick to condemn the insurrection and tout their support for democracy — and almost as quickly, many ditched those purported values by cutting big checks to the very politicians that helped instigate the failed coup attempt,” Accountable.US President Kyle Herrig said in a statement. “The increasing volume of corporate donations to lawmakers who tried to overthrow the will of the people makes clear that these companies were never committed to standing up for democracy in the first place.” Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and General Motors are among the corporations that said they would pause their campaign contributions to all federal candidates after the attack on the Capitol but later opted to resume their donations, including to lawmakers who objected to the results of the 2020 election.
There’s an important point to be made here: American plutocracy would adapt swiftly and smoothly to American authoritarianism. Corporations would line up to play the role of Krupp or IG Farben in Steve Bannon’s 100-year Reich. Some of them actually would prefer it, just as it was industrialists and bankers who sought to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935. From the Washington Post:
Eventually, MacGuire laid it all out: He was working for a group of mega-rich businessmen with access to $300 million to bankroll a coup. They would plant stories in the press about Roosevelt being overwhelmed and in bad health…A few weeks later, news of a new conservative lobbying group called the American Liberty League broke. Its members included J.P. Morgan Jr., Irénée du Pont and the CEOs of General Motors, Birds Eye and General Foods, among others. Together they held near $40 billion in assets, Denton said — about $778 billion today.
Counting on the essential patriotism of American corporations has been a sucker’s game for a long time.
