Years ago, we eliminated two things at Stately Brown Manor. The first was TV. Although in the interest of full disclosure, I do keep a TV in my study and watch about three channels to stay abreast of the news. Our internet provider charges for them anyway, so I thought I would at least give them a try. Outside of the news, I’m unimpressed and frankly a little nauseous over the other offerings.
The second was credit cards. Admittedly, life can be a bit difficult without them, but we muddle by 99% of the time with just one which we keep in case we need to rent a car or catch an emergency flight.
The objections of Dave Ramsey aside (although he does have a point when it comes to credit card interest), one of the reasons we decided to nuke the satellite service and most of the credit cards was because, expenses aside, we wanted as much control as we could get over who gets our money. And whenever possible, we did not want our hard-earned dollars going toward people who consider us well…deplorable. And yeah, that was a thing even ten years ago.
Submitted for your consideration: American Express. It was revealed earlier that the company, long considered the hallmark of a favorable credit score, has allocated around $1 billion for social justice. But for some reason, AmEx doesn’t want to tell anyone what they plan to do. The Free Enterprise Project has filed a shareholder request to see exactly what the company had in mind, specifically in terms of its race-based employee training and to give shareholders a look at the same.
Interestingly, AmEx is a big enough company that it could have told the Free Enterprise Project to drop dead in a ditch. Instead, it petitioned the Feds to keep the whole thing under wraps. It stated quite clearly that the information is none of the shareholders’ business and asked the SEC to remove the request from its proxy statement, locking shareholders out of a vote on the move.
Related: Wokeism Is a Religion Without Grace
So why the secrecy? Social justice is a good thing, right? You should be able to shout your wokeness from the rooftops, shouldn’t you? According to your average white suburban voter, you have to. Otherwise, you won’t get invited to all of the right cocktail parties or school board meetings. Justin Danhof of the Free Enterprise Project commented: “The Free Enterprise Project is hoping we prevail in our fight at the SEC. Will the Biden administration’s SEC do the right thing and allow our proposal to go forward? After all, President Biden and his allies regularly tout CRT-type trainings and he reimposed them on federal workers after President Trump ended the practice. If Biden’s SEC agrees with him that these trainings are valid and upright, they should have no qualms about allowing our resolution to proceed to AmEx’s shareholders for a vote.”
One may assume that the company wants to keep the more odious aspects of the effort under wraps, lest shareholders find out and vote it down. And that’s a valid assumption. But beyond that, this is the usual song-and-dance by people of means to mask their efforts to harness the power of the Black. AmEx wants to be able to say “Look how much we love you, black people, see what we made all of those other people do?” And by doing so, the top earners at AMEX can avoid the thorny environs of race issues by projecting a public image of themselves as fearless social justice warriors. And nothing is likely to be accomplished beyond making their employees feel miserable. And of course, anyone who voices any opinion outside of the mandated policy or who dares to say that they are not racist will have to confess to being a white supremacist in a struggle session or wear a scarlet R on their way to the unemployment line. And *sigh*, once again people of color are weaponized and treated as commodities so that executives can feign nobility.
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