I’ve previously examined the curious phenomenon of the Woke Corporation. How is it, I wondered, that the Marxists and the Globalists have so gotten in each others’ beds. I pointed to Communications (a discipline almost completely dominated by Marxist academics) graduates infiltrating PR departments, as well as left-educated CEOs paying homage to “right-on” values in order to assuage their Capitalist guilt.
Australian politician Mark Latham sees it in much simpler terms.
It’s self-interest.
There is no better way for a big company ripping off its workers and customers to pacify today’s left-wing activists than to throw them a few virtue-signalling trinkets. Like setting up a Diversity and Inclusion unit or withdrawing advertising money from media platforms giving conservatives a voice.
Like an immunosuppressive virus invading its host, the woke corporations are turning one of the strongest defences of liberalism – free speech – into a weapon against it.
Free speech is free, so Qantas, AGL, Nike, Bing Lee, Coles and the big banks can’t make money from it. But they can suppress certain speakers to get the political attack dogs of the Left off their back. The power of woke advertising budgets has become the phantom menace of Australian democracy.
In Prime Time Propaganda, Ben Shapiro shows that the first wave of television creators were hard-nosed businessmen who concentrated on serving audience demand. But a paradigm shift in the 60s saw creators pandering their content to advertisers, not audiences. They made more money than ever and they got to foist their left-wing messaging on audiences, whether or not they wanted it.
Now, corporations are not just conscious of keeping advertisers happy, but the bullies of Cancel Culture as well.
Radio and TV shows airing PC content can have half the ratings of their ‘red meat’ competitors, yet twice the advertising revenue. In terms of profitability, it’s a self-inflicted wound, but with the political upside of mollifying the control freaks of ‘cancel culture’. The useful idiots of the Left will forgive them any sin. No other form of activism can match the size of corporate advertising and sponsorship budgets, nor their reach across the political system. Cashed- up CEOs have become the most potent force on the battlefield of today’s culture wars. Commercial media outlets live in fear of them, given their own perilous financial position.
It is often said that a free media is essential to the workings of democracy; but today’s media are not free, having become functionaries of corporate advertising. This is also true in the world of sport, where business sponsorship is driving woke footy matches, with the players genuflecting to the latest left-wing cause.
The same is true of the media. “Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news,” said Chicago editor L. E. Edwardson. Today’s mainstream media, desperate to keep afloat, are more interested in advertising than news.
So, don’t expect them to take the fight to the Woke Corporations. The supposedly conservative Liberal party has all-but surrendered as well. Think-tanks regularly beg for donations from corporations, so don’t expect them to bite the teat that suckles them.
So who will fight? Our position is akin to that of Marshal Foch at the First Battle of the Marne, who told his fellow commanders: ‘My centre is giving way, my right is retreating, excellent situation, I am attacking.’ We too have no choice but to attack. Through parties like One Nation and anyone else who hasn’t been cowered [sic] into submission by the weight of corporate largesse.
Latham offers a Ten Point Plan for combating the “dictatorial wokeness” that is so damaging democracy.
Chiefly, support small business.
Expose the big corporates to a new round of competition policy. Small businesses are working too hard in competitive markets to engage in ‘progressive causes’. It’s mainly an indulgence of monopoly and oligopoly capital. A burst of new market entrants would send these CEOs back to their day jobs.
Secondly empower shareholders.
To legally demand a singular focus on corporate profitability, without companies engaging in costly political campaigns.
Extend this shareholder democracy to a direct say in the determination of executive salaries and bonuses. If corporate managers are wasting money on politics, one would expect shareholder meetings to penalise them.
Superannuation funds, especially union-controlled ones, are at the forefront of corporate activism.
Charter the ACCC to sanction superannuation funds, public companies and executives that wilfully fail to do their core job: maximising financial returns to members and shareholders. There is no point in financial entities having a so-called ‘social licence’ if they ignore the ‘financial licence’ that legally sustains them.
There are already laws to constrain the political activism of unions. That must be extended to corporations.
Extend secondary boycott laws (previously targetting trade unions) to companies that seek to boycott and restrict free speech through their advertising budgets.
Latham also advocates that governments use their considerable purchasing power to deny tender contracts and funding support to anti-democratic companies. Activist corporations should also be forced to declare their advertising and sponsorship budgets under electoral donation laws. Governments should also withdraw funding to sporting codes that engage in political campaigning rather than sport.
Workers need to hold their unions to account. Workers’ freedom to express themselves outside the workplace is a workplace relations issue which unions have either ignored or abetted. Workers must demand that unions support workers sacked just because online cry-bullies don’t like something they said on social media.
This plan of action is not a “right-wing conspiracy”: left and right must be equally free to express themselves without fear of reprisal from woke corporations. As more and more leftists are finding, now that the Cancel Culture mobs are coming for them, there’s no one left to fight on their behalf.
This is the fight of our lives. It crosses over traditional political boundaries, such that conservatives and libertarians now have a clear interest in fighting the big end of town. So far the Right has been retreating; now it has no choice but to counter-attack.
