So it’s important to remember that companies are not, by and large, moral. They exist for three reasons: to get the money, to get the money, and to get the money. Almost every choice a company makes is in service of that goal.

They are rarely, if ever, going to take moral stands, and it is useless to look at them through the lens of leading a moral crusade. Instead, it is better to look at them as a barometer of public opinion.

Politicians will say anything. Polls can be manipulated. But companies won’t bother with that slight-of-hand nonsense. They want money, and therefore they want people shopping with them as much as possible. And so they will do whatever they think will get them the most business.

50 years ago, can you imagine a business even uttering the term LGBTQ? It would have gotten them crucified. So they didn’t. Now LGBTQ rights are popular with the majority of Americans, so they make it part of their brand.

This thing with Target shows what happens when they get it wrong. And they really, really don’t like being wrong.

Won’t someone think of the billionaires!?

No, it’s worse than even that. The sycophants surrounding him fall into two camps: the uber-wealthy who want to buy businesses, houses, everything for a song, and see this as a golden opportunity since they have more than enough wealth to ride this out; and the loons who believe the end times are almost upon us and will let Trump do whatever he wants as long as he triggers the Rapture.

Really, there’s three groups, because there’s also a small subset (Zuckerberg is one of them, Elon is another) who fall into both camps. They dream of the day that the world implodes, the governments dissolve into chaos, the environment turns horrible and hostile.

Then they will retreat into their lavish bunkers (Zuckerberg’s is in Hawaii) with their servants and security guards (their loyalty guaranteed by shock collars and their families being held hostage) and wait for everything to subside. And then they will emerge with their loyal army to build their perfect paradise, with them at the head of it, of course.

Seriously, they write long think-pieces and even whole books about this stuff.

Sharia, really? You can’t possibly be that stupid.

Historically, yes. But these days almost all the proselytizing going on these days is from American groups, or groups bankrolled by American religious groups.

But it does appear that he was just doing it for TikTok clout.

Please tell me you mock him roundly for it.

People who want money or resources. You have to remember though, these aren’t the brilliant businessmen they think they are.

Most of these rich people are rich through family and luck, and believe they have magical powers to resurrect businesses and economies with a snap of their fingers.

They think they’ll just put everything back together with them at the top. They really have no idea how they’ll do that, of course.

In this case it’s just the rich punishing a plebeian for daring to challenge them, in the hopes of they make his punishment terrible enough everyone else will be too scared to rise up.

But in answer to you astute observation that the ‘pro-life’ people love the death penalty, the reason is simple: to these people, being ‘bad’ isn’t something you do, it’s something you are.

So to them it’s not a break in internal logic at all. They gave the pure, innocent baby a chance, but they turned out to be a Bad Person, so they must be punished, because that’s what you deserve for being a Bad Person.

This is why they favor punitive jailing and killing criminals instead of trying to reform criminals; criminals are Bad, and so they will always do Bad Things.

It’s also why they do stuff like try to get rid of abortion. If a woman got pregnant from ‘sleeping around’ then she’s a Bad Person and deserves to be punished by carrying the child to term.

Yeah, but 1929 was actually fine for the richest families. Plenty of wealthy people got even richer.

You’ll notice the language in that article describing the success of the businessmen is stock-market-bro speak for ‘gobbled up businesses for pennies on the dollar thanks to the depression, then rode out the storm and made bank’.

Lots of guys on the market these days dreaming of building empires that way.

Translation: hey rich customers, fire sale and reason to lay off your highest-paid employees incoming!

Remember, they and the people who listen to them wanted this.

Yeah, nothing’s ‘plunged’ at all. He’s still in the 45-49% approval rating he’s had since taking office. Hell, any ‘dips’ are statistically insignificant enough to possibly be rounding errors.

What do they think if this latest bit of bullshit?

It’s racism. In America the answer is almost always racism.

Basically, with a GoFundMe, or ‘churches taking care of the poor’, or whathaveyou, you can make sure your money goes only to the poor Good Christian white folks, and none of it gets used to help those icky brown folks. Unlike government programs which have to help everyone equally.

And we’re going to have more. Lots more. RFK Jr needs to be tossed in a lake asap

But governments give money to everyone, not just the white ‘deserving Christian poor’. And in the end, that’s what they care about more: making sure the aid only goes to people they approve of. If it’s fewer people all the better, because suffering is godly or something like that.

I think you might need to brush up on your reading comprehension, and maybe your empathy. You’re coming off a bit condescending her. e

Most schools do. And Trump just axed the program trying to replace them all.

The republicans haven’t been the ‘good for business’ and ‘fiscally responsible’ team for a while.

They made a deal with the devil a few decades ago and hitched themselves to the evangelist religious nuts when they realized they were starting to lose political ground (instead of, you know, trying to come up with policies that people wanted to vote for). They’re fully the party of ‘Jesus’ and the super-rich now; the megapastors and other millionaires, and the billionaires, are the only ones that benefit when they get in power.

Which is what makes them so dangerous, and Canada needs to be aware of this. Neither group, the super-rich or the super-religious, will accept losing, or even any dissenting voices against their actions. And they will do whatever it takes to maintain control.

You say no-one is in favor of it, but notice how none of the republicans running the show are so much as shushing him.

As an American, let me assure you that is a very bad sign. It means they either think they can control him—which they can’t—or they do approve for whatever reason and just plan to make him the fall guy so they can have plausible deniability.

Unfortunately the people smart enough to realize what’s happening are also smart enough to realize how terrible things will get if we do truly kick off a civil war.

For now we’ve moved past the Soap and Ballot boxes, and now we’re watching the Jury box. Once that fails…