Apple Inc. is not merely a tech company; it’s also a destroyer of right-wing doctrine. That was the main argument of a Tuesday blog post by Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas.
Kos asserted that the huge success of the California-based Apple refutes the “conservatives [who] bray incessantly about the Golden State's ‘high taxes and burdensome regulations.’” He also lauded the company for supporting gay rights (“unlike conservative orthodoxy, tolerance and respect for people's private life are good for business”) and “tak[ing] global climate change seriously.”
“Conservatives,” declared Kos, “are convinced that it is impossible to profit without trashing the world we live in, that environmental regulations are overly burdensome, and that our natural resources exist only to be exploited. Apple proves that profit and environmental degradation can be mutually exclusive.”
From Kos’s post, headlined “How Apple Single-Handedly Lays Waste to Conservative Ideology” (bolding added):
Tuesday morning, riding high after yet another gangbusters quarter, Apple reached a new high, worth more than $760 BILLION. This makes it worth more than, well, a ton of things, including all but 18 COUNTRIES in the world…
…[T]the company is still experiencing double-digit growth. In just the past three months, Apple booked profits of $13.6 billion on $58 billion in revenue...
…Apple is the most successful company in the modern era…Yet, keep in mind the following:
* Apple is based [in] California, and continues to expand its operations in the state. Conservatives bray incessantly about the Golden State's "high taxes and burdensome regulations," yet the world's most high-value and innovative companies continue to be based here. You don't see Apple or its peers fleeing to tax havens like Alabama. Why? Because those [California] taxes and regulations actually create a favorable business climate for Apple, delivering it the talent it desperately needs…
* Apple is a corporate leader in diversity. Sure, CEO Tim Cook is the most powerful out-gay person in the corporate world, if not the entire country, but the company itself has long been a champion for gay rights, even excluding anti-gay material from the iOS app store. It seems that unlike conservative orthodoxy, tolerance and respect for people's private life are good for business.
* Apple takes global climate change seriously…To that effort, Apple is spending gazillions on reducing its carbon footprint and generating its power via renewables. Not only is it good for the environment, however, but Apple makes the case that it is good for the bottom line, a reality that conservatives insist on glossing over in their desperate attempts to destroy this planet…
In short, conservatives are convinced that it is impossible to profit without trashing the world we live in, that environmental regulations are overly burdensome, and that our natural resources exist only to be exploited. Apple proves that profit and environmental degradation can be mutually exclusive...
Now Apple isn't perfect, of course. Of that $200 billion stash, about $180 billion of it is parked overseas, which Apple refuses to bring home lest it be forced to pay taxes on it…
Also, the company aggressively shuttered its US factories and offshored the work to lower-cost Chinese manufacturing plants. But even that trend is now starting to reverse, and Cook has committed to bringing more of those jobs back stateside.
Thus you have a company with the bulk of operations in California, committed to combating climate change and bigotry, and doing things because they're right…and the result? The world's most successful company.
Conservatives could learn a thing or two from that.
