From this morning's Washington Post op-ed piece by Catherine Rampell:
"For a long time, the Republican Party had what it believed was a tacit deal with corporate America. Companies donated enormous sums to GOP campaigns and aligned groups, and in exchange, Republicans delivered tax cuts: on corporate profits, capital gains, estates. Whatever other agenda items Republicans pursued — on immigration, civil rights or anything else — corporate America would generally keep its mouth shut. So long as the tax cuts kept flowing, the only “speech” that corporations engaged in came from their wallets, which in turn were fattened by those tax cuts.
An un-virtuous cycle, if you will.
But recently, something funny happened. Democrats, having achieved unified control of government, are threatening to reverse the major corporate tax cut Republicans passed in 2017. Yet corporate America is criticizing Republicans, and for something unrelated: legislation in Georgia, Texas and other states that threatens to strip Americans of their voting rights.
Republicans are furious that corporations appear so ungrateful." (our emphasis)
Read her whole column, which goes on to explain the shift in corporate behavior that's so upsetting to Republicans, as they go about trying to deny voting rights to corporations' employees of color nation wide.
Republican pols are employing various trigger words in their politics of resentment, "cancel culture" being the most prolific. For us, Rampell's column helped to illuminate why it's not "cancel culture," but rather "consequences culture" in which people (and remember, "corporations are people") vote with their feet away from products, politics, etc. that don't reflect their values. If Republican pols expect the old paradigm of tax and regulatory cuts in exchange for their contributions and silence to continue, they'd be well to heed Rampell's headline: "there's more to capitalism than tax cuts."
