[MapsSlaps]

Starbucks and Amazon are hardly "progressive". Most folks I know would describe them as pretty much bog standard big capitalist companies. Sure, they slap a rainbow logo on their twitter during June, but so does Raytheon.

I'm less sure about Apple, which might actually have more of a progressive streak in it (I'm simply not knowledgable), but the other two are pretty much standard exploitative mega corps.

[lapcat]

Apple is absolutely ruthless toward employees. For example, they were the ringleader behind an illegal anti-poaching conspiracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

[JKCalhoun]

> they

Well, Steve Jobs specifically.

Maybe because I am in denial, but I like to sort of differentiate the two. However you feel about the twain a decade ago, to be blunt, Steve is no more and Apple continues on.

[lapcat]

Jobs recruited Tim Cook to Apple, make Cook the COO, and then made Cook his successor.

Moreover, Cook was the main driver for putting all of Apple manufacturing in totalitarian China, which has caused many difficulties for Apple's "progressive" image, because the Chinese government has forced Apple into censoring the App Store and even into censoring the operating systems (removing references to Taiwan, for example). Not to mention the often terrible working conditions in iPhone factories.

[bcrosby95]

Yeah, all ideals any large company claims to have are shed for the sake of China's market. That should be evidence enough that it's just a method to maximize their profits.

[MapsSlaps]

Oh totally, I was more remarking on whether they were progressive at all. That's the part I'm not sure about.

[Eric_WVGG]

Specifically in the case of Starbucks, they absolutely think they are.

Does anyone besides me remember that CEO Howard Schultz thought he should be president back in 2016? This whole thing just makes me want to shout from the rooftops: We do not have a left-wing party in the United States! The Democrats are anti-union and pro-austerity. We have a center-right party and a far-right party, that's it!

[cmrdporcupine]

In the context of discourse in American politics -- and increasingly Canadian ones as well -- "left wing" has been rewritten to be almost exclusively about cultural politics. This is the only way one can decode everyday conversations when people talk about "the left"; they clearly don't mean what it meant "classically": socialist politics / economic policy, working class politics.

It's basically a marginal position at this point to be outright pro-union, even more so to be pro-nationalization / pro-interventionist. Apart from outliers like maybe Bernie Sanders, an explicit working class orientation has been taken over almost completely by the populist right, and much of the self-identified "left" speaks mostly to the concerns of the upper middle class. Not just the mainstream of the US Democrats, but even much of what is spoken about by "the squad", or the Canadian NDP party.

In some areas, if you break down voting maps by demographic, parties lumped in as "left wing" now tend to dominate in areas with higher incomes. Strongly working class areas often swing populist right. This was not the case even 20 years ago.

Regular working people are not the audience anymore.

[ticviking]

Every socially conservative pro-labor movement in the USA is rapidly labeled as "fascist" in America, usually because they promote economic protectionism by reducing immigration and raising barriers to cheap imports from countries that don't protect their workers to the degree the US does.

[MapsSlaps]

Part of the problem is that those organizations allow fascists to enter them. (Like many left wing movements allow authoritarian communists -- tankies -- to enter them.)

If a part of your platform is "No immigration" it becomes very difficult to distinguish that from "No immigration (because I don't like brown people)".

[dragonwriter]

> Specifically in the case of Starbucks, they absolutely think they are.

Specifically in the case of Starbucks, progressives do not think they are.

[Eric_WVGG]

I thought I implied that pretty heavily, but yes, I agree.