Discussion
CEOs seem to have settled on calling for “de-escalation” as their euphemistic non-response to the horrors we’re experiencing in Minneapolis, and this quisling shit pisses me off so much I can’t even
🧵 https://mastodon.social/@MikeElgan/115970651228010281
@inthehands
If the corporate brand isn't anti-fascist, then maybe the brand *is* fascism.
I think it’s fair to say that the corporation of every CEO that is stupid enough to say this should be escalated out of business
@inthehands @MikeElgan Wow ... this sounds like a globalized bag holder 2026 call for unity to me, idk. 👀 ✌️💙
@inthehands CityCast Twin Cities interviewed Kara Swisher (!) on this topic, and her big point was: it doesn't even really make sense for them to be weak, cowardly quislings here -- because they need to recruit and retain workers, and how the hell are you going to do that if the public perceives of your city as a war zone?
Even if you are a morally bankrupt sociopath focused only on profits, or shareholder value -- you want your city to have a good image so you can, you know, lure in workers for you to exploit...
@inthehands The thing is, that it is obvious what happens next. You can see it in Moscow, where billionaire oligarchs routinely "throw themselves out of windows" so that Putin can cash in. The rich have the items that the strong man will want to loot in the near future. The rich have the most reliance on the rule of law. Without the rule of law, the rich are the most vulnerable. Enabling authoritarian take over is a form of suicide for the rich. They are idiots and deserve what will inevitably come for them in the near future.
He is likely to attack Jewish and gay rich people first.
@inthehands If blame for the current situation could be apportioned by job title, I would guess that value for the statistical mode maps to the title of CEO.
@inthehands Is that the same Tim Cook in the viral video of Tim Cook repeatedly brownnosing Trump while eating dinner with him?
Unfortunately, I doubt it will affect Apple sales. The koolaid is just too strong.
@inthehands Statistically, some of the CEO's are actual fascists. But the ones that speak out a lot are all Ayn Randers: The 'takers' are in the streets, so they don't care.
@inthehands Milquetoast #broligarchs are deadweight for #democracy in the #UnitedStates.
@inthehands Yepper. And given that *same day* Cook sat in a private screening for "Melania", itself essentially a money-laundering vehicle for Bezo's MGM to the White House, it's beyond mealy mouthed. https://theintercept.com/2026/01/27/apple-tim-cook-trump-alex-pretti/
Seriously, my freelancing has shown me the inner workings of a •lot• of different companies, I’ve heard a lot of corporatespeak in my day, and…this letter from a bunch of Minnesota CEOs —
❝we are calling for an immediate deescalation of tensions❞
❝state, local and federal officials to work together❞
❝find real solutions❞
— is some of the most hollow, tone-deaf, embarrassing, Bristol Type 7 dribble I’ve ever heard from corporate leadership.
https://www.mnchamber.com/blog/open-letter-more-60-ceos-minnesota-based-companies
@inthehands This is exactly the kind of vaporous English that I’ve asked ChatGPT to help me filter all my communication so they understand. I call it CorpoSpeak. It works remarkably well. CorpoSpeak is all they have. It’s a contemporary NewSpeak, doubleplusbad. LOL.
@inthehands Yup. Essentially: "Just let us carry on making money, please."
Fuckers.
@inthehands Wikipedia to the rescue for "Bristol Type 7"!
Well done!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_stool_scale
They are talking about gangs of white supremacist fascists conducting street executions using federal money.
“find real solutions”
my dude
no
@inthehands This is theater aimed at their customers, not the administration. Stop paying them, stop buying their products, march in front of their offices, and you won’t see weak efforts like this. You won’t even hear from them because they’ll be crying directly to Trump, asking for help by demanding change so they can get their customers back (and the money we pay them with).
@mdavis
But if it’s aimed at their customers, they’re aiming incredibly poorly: everybody I’ve talked to here in MN who’s heard of that letter at all just cringed when I mention it.
I’m not sure it •is• aimed at customers. At the president? the governor? their investors? each other? their own egos? I’m not sure.
In my experience interacting with them, CEOs are all over the map as human beings — some incredible jerks, some surprisingly decent, a few truly marvelous people — but on the whole, and increasingly so as the company gets larger, they are some of the most fear-driven people I’ve ever met in my life.
@inthehands Do not expect heroism from people who actually give serious consideration to paying for kidnap and ransom insurance policies.
@inthehands In broad studies of humanity, fear of loss tends to be a stronger motivation than anticipation of gains.
The more you have to lose, the more you have to fear. Executives and investors make whole careers out of structuring the world so everybody else absorbs the losses.
@inthehands Can confirm with my own direct experience.
@inthehands I have worked with many CEOs and founder-types, relatively closely in many cases.
I can confirm that they're not the ubermensch that the VC crowd likes to pretend they are.
@inthehands one thousand percent agree as a psychologist who has had the opportunity to up close and personal see a lot of CEO thinking, behaviors, and their relationships
@inthehands one specific thing that triggers majoritized folks in power so deeply is people without the fear that they have
@grimalkina @inthehands my whole life in the United States has been a long series of Pikachú faces from white people because i don't fear them. even David Bowie feared them and wrote a whole ass song about it. i just don't.
and, just to be clear: this *is* an expectation from GRINGOS, your sundry ugly white american. i have never had this experience in Puerto Rico, Canada or Europe. this is a very specific gringo, white supremacist expectation.
they hate it when you don't fear them.
@blogdiva @grimalkina
One lens for all of Nov 2024 to now is the moving boundary of whiteness: Trump finding some support among Latine voters who believed they had an opportunity to gain the status of whiteness (as my Irish ancestors did); ICE agents and the administration trying to rescind the whiteness of Renee Good and Alex Pretti so they can be murdered with impunity just like the police murder Black people. I don’t have the knowledge to competently work out this whole train of thought and synthesize it with what you said, but…I think there is something there.
whiteness, like fascism & capitalism, is very plastic. they are oxymorons: imaginary elite systems of oppression that rule as if they were also representative of the majority they oppress.
you cannot be both a chosen few and a majority. so that’s why they’re always expanding the definitions of who is in and who is out.
and why they can't exist without violence. it’s not just the police state, the whole financial system, starting with money, is violence.
@inthehands @grimalkina @blogdiva
I find it very funny when someone Irish or Italian talks about oppression by saying they weren't even considered white back in the day with no self awareness whatsoever
euro-americans killed by lynching were mostly jewish, italian, some irish.
THERE IS A REASON IT’S NOT TAUGHT: twas almost always at the bequest of local oligarchs. during the anarchist labor union era it was captains of industry.
what Marx, Dubois, Ignatiev, Irvin Painter have taught us is that by expanding the illusion of privilege, the oligarchy groomed the euro working classes into accepting their oppression as long as BIPOC were worse off than them.
@blogdiva @gbargoud @grimalkina
Spot on. Thank you.
The Irish were long placed on a middle rung: lower caste, the promise of whiteness and the threat of “caste demotion” both always dangling. The Irish were widely regarded as dirty, drunk, mentally inferior, etc. They were never ever treated as poorly as Black slaves, not even close — but some of those indentured conditions were truly awful, with echoes of Latine agricultural and food workers today. The comparison is instructive: the Irish in the US achieved “full white privilege” in part by amassing wealth and power and being good capitalists, but also in part by participating in the brutal policing of Black people.
I think Trump was trying a similar pitch in his last election: trying to divide BIPOC people by promising to extend the umbrella of whiteness to some model minorities if they are willing to participate in the brutalization of others. What Ileana Garcia has been saying in recent days (if you can stand to even listen to her garbage) amounts to a warning to Trump that he’s blowing that deal — which of course was only ever a con, but doesn’t sound like she’s figured that out yet.
@inthehands Also, CEOs be like "fin...al solutions"
😬
@inthehands Abolition is a real solution. They are the abusers. They need to stop or be stopped.
Corpspeak sounds close enough to corpsespeak that I think it's fine to say it's the official language of ghouldom.
De escalation would be good if they actually meant "the guns and chemical weapons should be taken away from the people who are clearly using them and escalating every situation" instead of "people resisting the fascists should roll over and die already"
@inthehands yeah, they don't want to see a general strike impacting the economy / their businesses and are acting out of self-interest
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