Left’s harassment of business usually only involves 10-12 people

“Liberal activists are successfully using pressure campaigns and boycotts to pull corporate America to the left. From gun control to climate change to same-sex marriage, a number of Fortune 500 giants are falling in line with liberal priorities and bolstering agenda items that Democrats have been unable to move through Congress.” “Left Embraces Boycott Politics”-The Hill 10/2/14

After months of pressure from Forecast the Facts and other groups, major Silicon Valley companies including Google, Facebook and Yahoo announced last week that they had left or were planning to leave the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

“Everyone understands climate change is occurring and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place,” Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said at the time.

ALEC is “just literally lying” about the issue, Schmidt said, a charge the group strongly denied.

The exodus from ALEC was just the latest victory for activists who have targeted corporate behavior.

This ‘victory’ came after a ‘sustained campaign’ – in other words, months of harassment – including the delivery of nearly 100,000 petition signatures to eBay’s San Jose headquarters.

But most companies don’t seem to realize that these attention[grabbing ‘massive’ email and twitter campaigns to boycott businesses are from a tiny group of obsessives. These are hard left operatives who have perfected spam and algorithm programs that amplify the number of people actually sending messages.

Who the hell are these people, and why is everybody afraid of them?

The fact is, they are a hand full of malcontents who despise capitalism. I know this from experience: local advertisers on an EIB affiliate in say, Oshkosh will get inundated with complaint emails and tweets from people. “We’re never going to shop at your store again unless you stop advertising on that station”. Our investigation discovered that it’s ten, maybe 12 people who make themselves appear to be 500,000 or more. We found out that in most cases, the complaint emails come from out of state, and not from legitimate customers.

Some of the pressure campaigns have been building up for years, while others are more recent.

Earlier this year, former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich stepped down after just a week at the top of the Web giant, amid an uproar over a $1,000 donation he made to California’s 2008 initiative to ban same-sex marriage in the state.

Progressive groups also succeeded in pushing Chick-fil-A, McDonald’s, Nintendo and Starbucks into taking actions they feel are more politically correct.

The left’s success in channeling outrage could be a sign of the times, activists say.

Corporations have been a target of activists for decades, and were key players in the civil rights struggles half a century ago.

But the rise of the Internet has made them a more alluring target to Web-fluent activists trying to change the country’s culture, according to Boston College Professor Sandra Waddock, who focuses on corporate responsibility.

Left wing activists call this kind of in your face harassment “accountability”.

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