Politics, Politics & Society, Protests — January 12, 2021 at 5:33 pm

Corporate Rats Desert a Sinking Ship

by

The events in Washington DC on January 6th have resonated far and wide.  Some of those involved on the day find themselves facing Federal charges while others are surprised that there are consequences for their jobs, careers and flight status. 

But these are the foot soldiers.  While they bask in the glow of their self-incriminating selfies their political and corporate enablers run for cover.  Some in official roles quickly resigned their positions – some no doubt for moral reasons but, most, likely, for the need to whitewash their complicity from their resumes and/or to avoid having to face future scrutiny should that be required (such as supporting a 25th amendment ouster of the President).  The Congressional political enablers involved no doubt feel that “this too will pass” once the broken glass is cleared away and the pawns are dealt with via the courts and the normal attention span of voters is factored in and people get back to worrying about more mundane things like their taxes.  Politics is a brutal game, and no one expects Representatives and Senators to be anything but cynical realists who know that a friend/enemy today can be an enemy/friend tomorrow.  Just give it time to settle.

The corporate enablers – the money guys – are also running for cover.  Wall Street financiers and corporations are quickly disavowing their own complicity by cutting off donations from their PACs.  Sporting Associations are moving their events from Trump properties.  Twitter and Facebook – two of the companies that no doubt gained immensely by the flow of Trumpian assisted wacko conspiracy theories and the positive support and negative outrage they stoked – belatedly banned Trump from their platforms now that his usefulness is on the wane and further association with him and his wacky bad of sycophants and serial liars is less profitable. 

However, what has been revealed by this is was the depth and breadth of the Trumpian conspiracy riddled universe.  January 6th could not have occurred organically.  It required money, political support, leadership, foot soldiers/useful idiots and coordination.  While most political pundits viewed the Electoral College certification as something of a rubber stamp with a bit of “who is the heir apparent?” grandstanding on the floor of Congress, others viewed it, as Rudy Giuliani aptly said, as “trial by combat”, where the goal was to generate sufficient chaos so that normal activities of government would be suspended potentially allowing the power of the throne to be called in.  In the end, things did not quite turn out as Trump and his mob and their partners envisioned.

Now what we see is panic.  Panic all the way down to the money guys who are quickly trying to disassociate themselves from something that they knew they were associated with all along.  To quote the late coach Dennis Green, “They are who we thought they were” but we did business with them anyway as that was good for our business.  There is little doubt that all the corporate financial supporters of Trump and various other GOP associated entities who, either with or without forethought, co-conspired to make the riot on January 6th a reality, are now in “risk containment” mode, no doubt with a bevy of PR and image consultants and not a small number of lawyers. However, rest assured that had the riots achieved their aim, these same corporations and financial backers would be continuing their support as if nothing had happened.  After all, didn’t they know what their money was there to do? Their moral outrage is not because of any threat to American democracy but because of the threat of having been publicly seen to having put money on the wrong horse. 

What this highlights is that the riots of January 6th were not just a bunch of crazies who, having drunk the Trump Kool-Aid and egged on by a bit of low brow fire branding by the likes of Donald Trump Jr and Rudy Giuliani, decided to spontaneously storm the citadel of democracy.  They had leaders.  And they had financiers.  We know that many of the foot soldiers will pay a price.  The real question is whether the leaders and financiers will similarly be called to account.

Tags
Author: Timothy Devinney is a Professor and Chair of International Business at Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. Before that he was University Leadership Chair, Professor of International Business and former Pro-Dean of Research and Innovation at the University of Leeds (UK), Professor and Professorial Research Fellow at the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) and Director of the Centre for Corporate Change and the AGSM Executive MBA. He has held positions at Vanderbilt, UCLA, Chicago, CBS and HKUST. Before joining the AGSM he held positions on the faculties of The University of Chicago, Vanderbilt University and UCLA and has been a visiting faculty member at numerous universities in Europe and Asia, and taught at many others. He has published a dozen books, including Managing the Global Corporation and The Myth of the Ethical Consumer (with P. Auger and G. Eckhardt) and more than 100 articles in leading journals. In 2008 he was the first recipient in management of an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award (Forschungspreis) and was Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellow. He is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business (AIB), ANZAM, Academy of Social Sciences, the Royal Academy of Arts. European International Business Academy (EIBA) and the Advanced Institute of Management (UK). He is the 2018 winner of the Academy of Management's (AOM) Practice Impact Award and the 2019 Service to the Global Academic Community Award. In 2021 he was elected a Fellow of the AOM. Timothy was the co-editor of the Academy of Management Perspectives and Advances in International Management as well as being on the editorial review boards of 10 other journals and a Director of SSRN's International Management and Sustainability and Social Policy Research Networks.

Comments are closed.