The NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, seeing the recent mess of Georgia primary elections, have a donation to make:
On July 20, voters will be able to follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention social distancing guidelines as they cast early ballots for the Georgia general primary runoff election, which takes place on Aug. 11. Voters also will be able to access the 21-year-old venue in October for early voting in November’s general election.
Hundreds of Hawks employees and arena staff will be trained as election workers at the 700,000-square-foot venue, which hosts more than 16,000 spectators for basketball games and 21,000 for concerts. The team says parking will be free for voters and more than 1,500 spaces will be made available. The recently renovated arena has been home to the Hawks since 1999. [WaPo]
Given the dubious strategies employed by GOP state parties and GOP-controlled governments to discourage voting by groups considered anti-GOP, this may constitute one of the most substantial pushbacks available to this particular commercial entity.
March of 2015.
And this is another clue that corporate America has become dissatisfied with the Republican Party as their representation in local, state, and federal governments. This is not entirely new, of course; Indiana experienced a lot of pushback in 2015 after then-Governor Mike Pence (R-IN) signed the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by the GOP-dominated Indiana legislature, widely recognized, especially by corporate America, as an authorization to discriminate against the LGBTQ community by hiding behind religious institutions. It was part of an effort to give birth to paranoia among conservative religious practicioners by suggesting that shameful social practices were justified by religious beliefs. Such are the methods of constructing epistemic bubbles.
There was also the abandonment of ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), best described as the link between the GOP and businesses, by Google (now Alphabet) and several other businesses over claims that ALEC was issuing misleading information concerning climate change back in 2015. As I said at the time,
From a wider viewpoint, one must wonder if the last couple of years are starting to signal a rift between a GOP increasingly controlled by a deeply religious conservative faction, and businesses who find the assumptions of this new GOP are no longer compatible with good business practices. We saw signs of a rift earlier this year when Indiana passed a law widely interpreted as giving small businesses the right to discriminate against virtually anyone they wished on religious grounds, resulting in various businesses and other organizations vowing to leave, or avoid, the state. Indiana eventually replaced the law; other states with similar laws in the pipeline then did not pass their versions.
The Atlanta Hawks donation of the stadium would be the next step, as it’s plausible to suggest this would imperil GOP control of the Atlanta legislature, as well as GOP success in national-level elections, including not only the Oval Office, but both Senate seats (one is up for a special election after the retirement, due to ill health, by Senator Isakson (R-GA)).
And the recent move of corporations, ever loving of a stable environment and happy consumers, to dictate to social media platforms to stop fucking around and fix the propaganda problem is another cobblestone on the path towards disjointing the GOP from the business world.
So when the Republicans have been reduced to the a group of morality-free power-lovers, the religious groups who are desperately against change of any kind, a band of uneasy libertarians, a gross of racists and liberal-haters, a few class-B Hollywood actors, and some rogue billionaires, will they still truly qualify as a political party?
Only the voters can decide that.
