For companies and high-profile executives, speaking out in times of national crisis carries risks. But so does staying silent.
In the wake of Alex Pretti’s death at the hands of federal officers in Minneapolis, a growing number of corporate leaders, employees and Minnesota-based companies are speaking out. Some are condemning the fatal shooting and Donald Trump’s broader immigration enforcement in the state.
But the response has also exposed a familiar tension in corporate America: Powerful executives and public-facing companies often stay quiet until internal and external pressures converge — and until they believe speaking out together matters more than speaking loudly.
“What’s really interesting is that the CEOs do engage when they get to a tipping point, and we’re at one again,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management professor and author of the book “Trump’s Ten Commandments.”
They’re trying to thread a needle, because they want to have their cake and eat it too. They’re not succeeding. They’re never going to. Either they are on the side of defending society and civilization, or they are trying to destroy society and civilization and profit from it. They think they can find a middle ground when there is no middle ground left anymore. The wealth gap has sprawled open into an impossible and still growing chasm that nobody can stand in anymore. That’s where the middle ground used to be. Now, it’s class war, us against them, and I find it hard to believe they’ll ever do the right thing or pick the right side. So they can keep trying to thread that needle if they want. It will do them no good. Their thread is too thick to fit. They have lost their social license to operate. They are not getting it back. Not from me, anyway.
Eat their cake and have it too.
That order always made more sense to me, but it’s a shoddy idiom in the first place. What value is there in having (i.e. keeping) cake? It’s meant to be eaten and goes stale otherwise.
The logic as it’s always been explained to me has been that you can’t have what you’ve already had. To have a cake and then eat it makes sense. To eat a cake and still have it does not. It’s one of those sayings that people have fucked up for so long it’s in the same realm of “I could care less.” We know what you mean but the phrasing is incorrect.
Must be hard having to choose between basic human decency and a guy that makes you feel like it’s okay to be a bigoted piece of shit.
If they don’t unequivocally take the right side, they’re collaborators. All their excuses won’t matter when they face justice.
I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one
I don’t think we should be taking our cues from corporate leaders or celebrities anyway so I don’t really give a fuck what they have to say about current events. If they are providing material support to ICE or the administration then it’s a different story.
in this case they are providing material support to the administration by providing propaganda and propaganda platforms
This time it’s different. This time there’s the E files. And these CEOs who are implicated (these ghouls are as pdf as the files? whouldathunkit) needed to lay low.
Certainly that’s part of it, but let’s not ignore the fact that Trump demands unflinching loyalty and then treats loyalty as weakness.
Remember when Target rolled over all its DEI programs and basically went full Trump the day he got elected? What did it get them? Apart from predictable loss of customers it also got an entire army of ICE goons murdering people across the street from their corporate HQ.
These people and corps would never have done the right thing even without pressure. They do what’s best for CEO bonuses and shareholder profits. Sticking the finger up to the little guy is an added bonus to keep him in his place.
Corporate America is threading a needle on how to respond to Nazis being Nazis
So do we give the dictator a golden statue with huge balls, or shall we give him another airplane?
And of course when asked, we will deny everything even though the entire world saw us buying our way into the dictatorship
Corporate America should receive the same punishment as the trump admin when this is over
“Look over here at this and not the Epstein lists!”
