NYTimes Columnist: CEOs Can Use ‘Black Lives’ Furor to Hide the Money

Baltimore Black Lives Matter March
Elvert Barnes/Flickr
Neil Munro

The ideology being pushed by the Black Lives Matter wave can help corporations shift voters’ attention away from jobs and wages, says Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist at the New York Times.

Douthat declines to put a useful name on the progressive strategy. But he refers to it as the “successor ideology” that is now replacing the Democrats’ fast-fading adherence to free speech, equal rights, and universal prosperity. He writes:

The successor ideology seems particularly adaptable … to the corporate world, where it promises a framework for regulating an increasingly diverse work force that conveniently emphasizes psychology and identity rather than a class [economic] solidarity that might threaten the corporate bottom line.

Since the police shooting of George Floyd, these left and elite leadership groups have insisted that Americans’ democratic society is shamefully racist — “white supremacy.” Americans can redeem themselves, say progressives, by giving progressives control of the White House.

The mutual benefits of this shame-and-rule strategy for the radical left and the business elite are seen in the announcements by CEOs to stop advertising on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson’s show.

For example, in May, T-Mobile dropped its ads on Carlon’s show as he urged Trump to block T-Mobile’s recruitment of cheap Indian labor via the H-1B pipeline.

But the T-Mobile CEO portrayed the policy as a moral reaction to Carlson’s criticism of the Black Lives Matter protest. That June 10 moral claim was echoed by many establishment media outlets who have ignored Carlson’s economic argument.

Breitbart is reporting the growing number of CEOs who are using the Black Lives Matter cause to distract from their policy of importing foreign workers amid growing unemployment. On June 9, Breitbart reported:

“Together, we stand in solidarity with the Black community — our employees, customers, and partners — in the fight against systemic racism and injustice,” Amazon executives wrote in a statement.

Simultaneously, Amazon has not made it any easier for black American STEM graduates to secure jobs at the multinational corporation by ending its use of thousands of foreign H-1B visa workers every year.

In a given year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and are allowed to stay for up to six years. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment.

On June 10, Breitbart News reported:

The director of Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group in D.C. suggested journalists get former House Speaker Paul Ryan to criticize Tucker Carlson’s coverage of the “Black Lives Matter” protests.

Ryan is a member of the board at Fox News, which can cancel or censure Carlson’s increasingly influential coverage of politics.

…

“Dozens of political reporters have the cell phone of a board member of Fox News who spent a career assuring people this was the sort of stuff he wanted to purge from the Republican Party,” said the June 8 tweet from Todd Schulte, the director of FWD.us.

“He has never, ever been on the record so far as I have seen discussing this,” Schulte added.

Breitbart News asked Schulte, “Are you urging reporters to call Paul Ryan in the hope that Ryan will stop Carlson’s criticism of the BLM [Black Lives Matter] movement?”

“Not urging, just observation,” Schulte responded to Breitbart News.

In a given year, roughly 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and are allowed to stay for up to six years. There are about 600,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Overall, the visa programs keep a workforce of roughly 1.2 million Asians in jobs sought by diverse American graduates.

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