Resist! For #laborsavings

The e-mail said,

Meetup has always served as an organizing platform for a wide range of political views, welcoming everyone from the Howard Deaniacs to the Tea Party. Meetup will always welcome people with different beliefs. . But after the recent executive order aimed to block people on the basis of nationality and religion, a line was crossed. At a time when core democratic ideals feel under attack, we feel a duty to spark more civic participation. . Last week, we created 1,000+ #Resist Meetup Groups to act as local hubs for actions on behalf of democracy, equality, human rights, social justice, and sustainability. Already 50,000+ people have joined.

I trust that most of my readers are too intelligent, or at least too cynical, to swallow that tripe at face value. What's really going on?

Meetup, the company, just filed for more H1Bs than it's requested in the entire history of the H1-B program. Seven, to be exact, paying an average of $122k a year. That's close to a million dollars a year that will be mostly remitted out of this country. Now, it's fair to say that a million bucks isn't much in terms of corporate budgets. But it's still a million dollars a year. It represents enough earning power to feed twenty American families very well.

While it's touching to think that Meetup is deeply vested in the rights of Somalis to travel to the United States, it seems far more likely that they are just hoping to prevent Mr. Trump from getting enough momentum in his administration to eliminate, or drastically revise, the labor policies that are keeping high-skilled white-collar American citizens out of a job. This is corporate activism in perfect synecdoche: a focus on the bottom line dressed up with some marketing-speak to warm the hearts of dipshits with masters' degrees in feminist basket-weaving.

This would be a good time to remind the reader that Mr. Obama's program of drone strikes killed hundreds of civilians, some of whom were children. Why didn't Meetup #Resist the murder of children? There's only one answer that makes logical sense: those children didn't have any economic value. It's a sobering thought. And it suggests that you can pretty much draw a direct correlation between corporate virtue-bleating and the potential impact of Trump policies on the bottom lines of those bleating corporations.

I'm reminded of something that the old hands at my Ford dealership used to say about gay customers. "There are two kinds of (epithet)s who come to the dealership," the phrase went. "The ones that can't get bought on a used car, and the ones who can afford anything they want. We call the first group (epithet)s. We call the second group... valued customers."