OPINION:
The left, the coronavirus-loving left, has successfully taken the coronavirus and used it to great political advantage, shoving through the free market and into private business all the clampdowns and shutdowns and regulatory chills they can’t do the constitutional way — which is a case in point of why the left is so coronavirus-loving.
The worst is the weaponizing of the free market.
The left has created this sort of oligarchy with the corporate world, using CEOs to drive policies that can’t pass legislatively, that wouldn’t meet constitutional muster in the courts, that aren’t in any way, shape or form in line with U.S. values, U.S. liberties or U.S. governing principles.
Example?
Here’s a telling headline or two: “Fauci says federal government won’t mandate COVID vaccine passports,” CBS News reported, in reference to the nation’s top disease doc, Anthony Fauci, speaking about the ongoing discussions of mandated vaccines versus voluntary vaccines, and how the two shall meet.
“Fauci: Federal government won’t require COVID vaccine passports,” Axios also reported.
Well, news flash: That’s because the Constitution doesn’t exactly support the federal government’s right to make vaccines a condition of entry to public venues, a condition of travel, a condition of access. So what’s the go-around that the Biden government’s got planned?
“The Biden administration is working on creating a set of standards for people to prove they’ve been vaccinated against Covid-19, according to an administration official,” CNN reported a few days ago. “The official said they’re currently working with a range of companies on the standards … Multiple government agencies are engaged in conversations and planning, coordinated by the White House, as this kind of system will play a role in multiple aspects of life, including potentially the workforce.”
In layman’s, that means the White House is taking a leadership role in helping — “helping” — companies develop a vaccine passport system that will stand the test of court scrutiny. It won’t be federally mandated — technically. But it will be federally developed and enforced by the private sector.
The same private sector that isn’t held to the same constitutional binds as the government.
What a profitable partnership for the leftists in government who lust for control and power. They can get their control freak on while still maintaining plausible deniability. Who, me? It’s the private sector mandating this — not the kindly gents and ladies in Alfred E. Neuman’s World of Good Governance.
Look at the fight brewing between Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. — not over profits, but rather the race to be regarded as the most socially conscious, the most concerned about Black rights, the most socially just. Millions of dollars to Black causes, simply for bragging rights. So far, Coke has got the lead with its widely reported “try to be less white” training seminar for employees.
Look at Home Depot’s CEO Craig Menear, pledging $1 million to the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law organization, after issuing a scathing assessment of America that went like this: “We are all confronting deep pain and anguish over … unarmed black men and women in our country. We cannot ignore that their deaths are part of a pattern of racism and reflect the harsh reality that as a nation we are much too far from fulfilling the promise of equal justice for all.”
Look at Citi’s pledge of $1 billion — yes, billion with a “b” — to funding its “Action for Racial Equity” campaign. Look at the American Institute of Architects’ promise to fight “racial injustice,” alongside its eye-widening statement about the inherent racism in America that leaves minorities, especially Blacks, in peril: “America’s list of racially motivated murders demand action.”
Look at the successes of the World Economic Forum to drive forward the idea that America is in need of dramatic race-based course correction — that America the free, America the free market, is really America the Unjust.
“Between [George] Floyd’s death and the end of October,” Melisande Kingchatchaval Schifter, with the WEF’s diversity and equity project, wrote in Forbes this January, “about one-third of Fortune 1000 companies responded by making a public statement on or commitment to racial equity, and the private sector pledged a total of $66 billion towards racial justice initiatives.”
Never mind that America’s capitalistic system is the engine that drove the largest and freest economy in the world, with the most creative, ingenious and entrepreneurial spirited developments that history has ever seen.
Never mind that businesses in America have built up profits upon profits, upon profits even — profits that have contributed massively to scores of GDP’s over the years and that have fueled the nation’s top-earned ticket in the global economy, and that’s all due entirely to free-market capitalism that rewards individual achievements.
The name of today’s corporate game is social justice.
That’s what the left wants pushed.
And since the left is in power in America — since Democrats hold the majorities in the House and the Senate, since Democrats have a grip on the White House, as well — the WEF’s plans to reinvent economic markets are chugging right along. The “Great Reset,” as it’s dubbed, is moving right into American place.
What will come is not freedom. Rather, the opposite.
What will come is an oligarchy of political power-players and corporate CEOs who will fashion a world that favors their select few, at the expense of the many. The last walls are America’s free markets and middle class.
That’s why leftists are loving this coronavirus opportunity to keep small businesses shuttered and citizens on the taxpayer dime.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Socialists Don’t Sleep: Christians Must Rise Or America Will Fall,” is available by clicking HERE.
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