A Few Fat Wads of Free Speech
When it was revealed last week that Toyota Motor Corporation of America, along with several other companies, donated a sizable amount of cash to members of Congress who refused to certify Joe Biden's electoral college victory, the left wing blogosphere exploded with cries of "BOYCOTT!" and "I'll never buy another Toyota again!" Angry phone calls, letters, and furious posting ensued.
While sustained and highly organized large scale boycotts can be somewhat effective in the short term, they do little to address the underlying issues behind bad corporate behavior. If a company's public image suffers and their bottom line is affected, the response you can mostly expect is standard boilerplate somewhere along the lines of “We take the concerns of our customers very seriously. Our company remains committed to, blah, blah, blah….” Maybe a mid level executive or two will resign or get sacked in order to provide good optics. But regardless, once we've all decided sufficient penance has been paid, time passes, everyone moves on, and it’s back to business as usual. Remember Toyota's “unintended acceleration” debacle from a few years ago? When they decided that it was cheaper to settle a bunch of wrongful death lawsuits than rush to fix a deadly manufacturing flaw? Yeah, neither does anyone else. It wasn't that long ago, but PR firms are paid a lot of money to help you forget. They'll be hard at work on this latest mini scandal, and because of our heinously short memories as a nation, they'll be largely successful.
But Toyota isn’t the problem. The parameters that Toyota is allowed to operate within are the real problem. The fact is, corporate interests will always run counter to democracy. They’re about profit and nothing else. Choosing profit over innocent lives, the environment, preventing a nation’s descent into fascism, or literally anything else is nothing new, and again, Toyota isn’t the only one. Not by a long shot. The reason why their response to the uproar came off as flippant and arrogant is because they know they haven’t broken any laws, and even if they had, our legal system currently has no mechanisms to hold them accountable in any real way.
Amorality and lack of accountability are literally built into capitalism. It's necessary for corporations to play nice with the politicians that run both blue and red states if they want to achieve their singular goals of remaining competitive, expanding, and making money. It’s economically prudent for them to extract the maximum amount of labor from the smallest possible workforce at the lowest available wages. Because of this, virtually everything you buy will have ties to some sort of ideology, organization, or government you find repugnant. So consequently, the concept of actively participating in a capitalist society in a socially, culturally, or politically responsible way is a nice idea, but is functionally impossible for the most part. Feel free to go down the rabbit hole of researching the manufacturer of every single product you buy to find out if the raw materials, manufacturing processes, and distribution systems they utilize are all 100% ethical and unproblematic. Resources do exist to help you do this, but I expect you’ll find that the only way to keep your conscience truly clear would be to grow your own food, make your own clothes, and live in a Luddite commune on a mountaintop.
Make it illegal for corporations to have any sort of monetary involvement in politics and our values will cross paths with our spending far less frequently. I hold exactly zero confidence that any corporation, no matter how socially or environmentally conscious they claim to be in their press releases, will ever "do the right thing" unless there are serious legal or financial repercussions for not doing so. Stomping our feet and loudly proclaiming that they've just lost a customer can make us feel good and righteous as individuals, but ultimately these actions have little effect. Pressuring our leaders to change laws and enact better policies are where our energies would be better focused. Because federal lawsuits tend to get a CEO's attention far more than boycotts and shaming ever could.
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