Dear friend,
Corporate America gave over $10 million to a majority of the 147 Republican members of Congress who incited the white supremacist mob attack on the United States Capitol earlier this week.1
Corporate political giving by companies such as AT&T, Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Ford, Target, Procter & Gamble, and McDonald's helped elect Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who led the attempts to overthrow the certification of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris' election victory.
That is why UltraViolet and our partners like Color of Change, are demanding that these corporate giants stop their political giving to extremist, racist, anti-women, and anti-justice politicians and demand Congress removes the members who incited the insurrection. Enough is enough ! Will you sign the petition?
Tell corporations like Ford and Disney : Stop ALL political contributions to Republican politicians, candidates, PACs, and committees until the party stops enabling extremism and removes the members who supported the insurrection !
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Here's just a sampling of the companies who gave to the members of the "Sedition Caucus" in 2020 and how much they gave :
AT&T : $502,000
Home Depot : $274,000
Amazon : $181,500
Walmart : $146,500
Coca-Cola : $134,250
Ford Motor : $111,500
Procter & Gamble : $39,000
Target : $31,500
Disney : $10,500
America's biggest corporations funded the politicians and candidates who have aided and abetted Donald Trump's attempts to undermine free and fair elections, disenfranchise tens of millions of U.S. voters, and shred our democracy.
These lawmakers betrayed their oath of office and their duty to the American public, and even cost the lives of American civilians and a U.S. Capitol police officer.2 They peddled in dangerous racist and misogynistic disinformation to appease Trump and foment hate within his voter base. There is blood on their hands.
But make no mistake, the rot is deeper than just these 147 members of Congress. The entire Republican Party has enabled Trump's delusions on a grand scale and refused to hold him accountable for his racist, sexist, and cruel actions and words over the years. Many in the Republican Party waited weeks to acknowledge the victory of Biden and Harris, giving credence to conspiracy theories and claims of fraud.
Of course, these politicians did not get to their positions of power on their own. They were funded by a complicit and hypocritical corporate America who turned a blind eye to the extremism of the Republican Party while trying to publicly curry favor for their so-called corporate social responsibility stances.
Corporations claim that they do not give money for political reasons, that it's just business. But when our democracy is on the line, it can't be business as usual. Corporate excuses of neutrality will not work.
If you fund extremism, you are complicit. Period.
UltraViolet members spoke up last year to demand corporations stop funding anti-abortion candidates, and that message is still resonating. As we said last year, anti-abortion and anti-women stances are the bellwether for a larger extremist framework that cannot be ignored. And now, we are seeing the fruits of that extremism.
But we need to show consumer power and pressure in massive numbers, so corporations cannot evade responsibility again.
Thanks for speaking out !
Shaunna, Kathy, Sonja, Melody, Lindsay, Maria, Kimberly, Elisa, KaeLyn, Iris, KD, Bridget, and Katie, the UltraViolet Action team.
Sources :
1. The 147 Republicans Who Voted to Overturn Election Results, New York Times, January 7, 2020
2. What we know about the 5 deaths in the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol, CNN, January 8, 2020
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