Trump isn’t just alienating
Republican senators. He’s also pissing off the executives of America’s
biggest corporations, who happen to have a lot of influence over Republican
members of Congress because they pay the costs of their campaigns.
Trump’s unwillingness to strongly
condemn the neo-Nazi’s and white supremacists in Charlottesville caused
business leaders to stampede off his advisory councils.
Now Trump’s cruel plan to end
DACA, the Obama-era program that allows unauthorized immigrants who arrived in
America as children to remain here, is mobilizing CEOs to make the program
permanent.
A business coalition founded by
former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is lining up corporate leaders in at
least 15 states to pressure members of Congress.
Meanwhile, a who’s-who of more than
400 executives have signed a petition urging Trump and Congress to protect the
“dreamers.” They include CEOs of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, AT&T,
Wells Fargo, Best Buy, Ikea and Kaiser Permanente.
“We’re also calling on Congress to
finally pass the Dream Act or another permanent, legislative solution that
Dreamers deserve,” wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a Facebook post last
week. “These young people represent the future of our country and our economy.”
CEOs are not moral leaders of American society. They’re taking action because Trump’s hatefulness is bad for business.
Customers and investors reacted so badly to Charlottesville that the CEOs had to distance themselves from Trump.
Now they’re responding to Trump’s plan
to end DACA because they know that Dreamers are good for the American
economy.
Dreamers aren’t taking jobs
away from native-born Americans. Their purchases are creating more jobs.
Plus many of them are unusually
ambitious, and their drive is already adding to the economy. Their parents, who
had to be ambitious in order to get into America, seem to have passed on to
their kids a particularly strong work ethic.
Dreamers have been among my best
students at Berkeley. In recent years I’ve had many tearful sessions with them,
discussing whether they should try for graduate or professional schools
when their futures are so uncertain.
Still, more than 72 percent of the
top 25 Fortune 500 companies now count Dreamers among their employees,
according to FWD.us, which organized the recent petition.
Brad Smith, Microsoft president,
wrote in a blog post that at least 27 of Microsoft’s employees are Dreamers —
including software engineers, finance professionals and retail associates.
Ending the program, he said, would be a “step backwards for our entire nation.”
On Sunday, Apple chief executive Tim
Cook tweeted, “250 of my Apple coworkers are #Dreamers. I stand with them.”
Trump doesn’t worry about moving the
nation backwards. He’s been at it for more than seven months.
The good news is he’s becoming
more isolated than ever – abandoned not just by a growing number of elected
Republicans but also by CEOs.
It’s not that they object to the
hatefulness and divisiveness Trump has been sowing. What’s been moving
them to action is they don’t like the effects of the hatefulness on
business.
It really doesn’t matter how the
CEOs come to see the light. What matters is they’re pushing Trump into an
ever darker hole.
ROBERT
B. REICH is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of
California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing
Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for
which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries
of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books, including the best
sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and "Beyond
Outrage," and, his most recent, "Saving Capitalism." He is also
a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause,
a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the
award-winning documentary, INEQUALITY FOR ALL.