Some top-tier Republicans appear to be taking jabs at big business, fueling speculation about the growth of an anti-elite GOP base, The Hill reported Monday.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is particularly critical of major corporations leaning left.
“If you look at the CEOs of the Fortune 100, there are very, very few who you could even plausibly characterize as right of center,” Cruz told The Hill. “They are almost uniformly Democrat. And they have made the decision to enlist their companies in the political agenda of today’s Democratic Party, which is controlled right now by the radical left.”
Sounding a similar note, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., another former 2016 GOP presidential nomination contender — explained his skepticism about big business win an email to the news outlet.
“For the past several years, I have been making the case that far too many American companies were prioritizing short-term financial windfalls at the expense of America’s families, communities and national security,” he said. “More and more people are coming around to that viewpoint, both in the Republican Party and around the country.”
Rubio argued in commentary for the New York Post last month that the time has come for a “rebuilding — and rebalancing” of the relationship between corporations and the national interest.
According to The Hill, the criticism illustrates the GOP’s “unusual dynamics” between the white working-class element of their support and wealthy, corporate America.
Cruz has previously condemned the corporate reaction to the voting law recently passed in Georgia. Liberals argue that the Georgia law is de facto voter suppression, intended to make it particularly difficult for poorer and minority voters to cast ballots. Conservatives disagree.
“I don’t intend to take even a single penny from them,” he said of corporate PAC money, and he has “encouraged other Republicans to do the same.”
In addition to the charges from Cruz and Rubio, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is pushing legislation that he says would “break up the big tech companies” and impose “tough new penalties” on companies that violate antitrust laws, The Hill reported.
Cruz, in his comment to The Hill, asserted Democrats exhibit a “wealthy, arrogant condescension to working men and women [that] is palpable. And in many ways, Donald Trump’s election was the direct outgrowth of working men and women saying, ‘Enough is enough.’ Even Trump’s at-times overheated rhetoric is a direct manifestation of just how fed up so many Americans are with Washington trying to destroy their livelihoods.”
Seeking to explain why there is intensifying friction between conservatives and big business, Rubio told the news outlet: “Part of that is because these corporations, their CEOs and their boards seem eager to weigh in on behalf of every woke, left-wing social priority.”
“The other part is that people understand that many of these companies are more interested in gaining access to China’s consumers than being part of thriving American communities,” Rubio added.
Acknowledging the “rising populist movement” on the right was “a more recent phenomenon,” Cruz told The Hill he thinks “the most important political change of the last decade has been a socioeconomic inversion.”
“Historically the caricature, at least, was that Republicans were the party of the rich and Democrats were the party of the poor,” he told the news outlet. “I believe that is precisely opposite to where we are today. Democrats today are the party of rich coastal elites and Republicans are the party of blue-collar workers.”
And when Major League Baseball decided to move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest of the Georgia voting law, it was a move that “put a lot of Americans in a frustrating place,” he told The Hill.
“Look, I don’t want to boycott baseball. I like watching the Astros,” he said. “So I am just pissed off that giant companies that should be focused on providing goods or services … are instead playing politics.”
“Woke politics trumps doing their jobs,” he added.
Source: Newmax
