Corporate WATCH
By Joe SchaefferAs the Hunter Biden laptop drama continues to unfold, now would be a good time to highlight how corporate elites play their own version of Joe Biden's selfish game, using racial and other socially divisive politics as a means to surreptitiously defend their keen desire to pursue lucrative financial dealings with Communist China.
Chuck Robbins is CEO of Cisco, a multinational tech conglomerate that is heavily invested in China. Robbins is a globalist. He sits on the Board of Directors at global investment behemoth BlackRock and Chairs the IT Governors Steering Committee at the internationalist World Economic Forum.
Al Gore and Chinese e-commerce multi-billionaire and official China Communist Party member Jack Ma are on the WEF Board of Trustees.
Chuck Robbins is also a committed "social justice" warrior.
He sits on the Board of Trustees at the leftist philanthropic powerhouse the Ford Foundation and has vociferously backed the racial protests in the wake of the George Floyd killing in late May that spurred a summer of rioting, looting and violence in American streets.
Also on the Ford Board: Ford Motor Company Director of Investor Relations Henry Ford III, former Obama administration UN Secretary Samantha Power and former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards. What a team they make.
In a June 16 blog post at Cisco's website, Robbins stated his company's firm commitment to fighting "systemic racism" in America:
The successive battles of COVID-19, the resulting economic contraction and job losses, and our own reckoning with deep-rooted systemic racism and bigotry have brought to light centuries of inequality, injustice, and fragility underpinning our society for far too long. It is clear to me that our notions of corporate social responsibility, advocacy or even the most recent notion of stakeholder capitalism simply aren’t doing enough to care for our world.
Oh, but it gets far more deranged than that. In July, Cisco, utilizing Robbins' radical Ford Foundation ties, fired employees for making wrongthink comments during a company-wide videoconference on race. Bloomberg reported:
During the first videoconference on June 1, following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Chief Executive Officer Chuck Robbins spoke with Ford Foundation President Darren Walker, who is Black, and Bryan Stevenson, a Black lawyer and author who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, in front of 30,000 employees. The conversations about race continued in subsequent online global staff meetings.
“Black lives don’t matter. All lives matter,” one worker wrote in the comments during one of the virtual all-hands meetings, according to screen shots obtained by Bloomberg. Another said the phrase Black Lives Matter “reinforces racism” because it singles out one ethnic group. “People who complain about racism probably have been a racist somewhere else to people from another race or part of systematic oppression in their own community!” a third worker wrote in the chat section visible for all those online.
Cisco, the world’s largest networking company, said it fired “a handful” of workers for inappropriate conduct because it “will not tolerate” racism.
Please note the following paragraph from the Bloomberg article. There is no other way to describe it. This is FULL-ON Maoist:
“A few” employees who had written some offensive posts during the video meetings sent notes acknowledging their mistakes and said they were learning, [Francine] Katsoudas, [Cisco’s executive vice president and chief people officer] said. But the remarks remained seared in the minds of some Black employees, who were shocked by the audacity of the display.
In 2018, Robbins described President Donald Trump's "zero tolerance" stance on illegal border crossings and its ballyhooed "family separation policy" as a direct affront to Cisco's corporate values.
"I hear a lot from my employees on everything," Robbins told Fortune's Alan Murray at the time. "If it is purely political and it's just your belief versus someone else's, everybody knows I'm not going to get in the middle of it... But this is a fundamental issue that doesn't represent the values of the entire company."
Robbins also is on the Board of the Business Roundtable and is "Chair of the Business Roundtable Immigration Committee." In June 2018, Business Roundtable released a pro-DACA illegal aliens statement under Immigration Committee Chair Robbins' name.
In fact, Business Roundtable can best be described as rabidly pro-legal and illegal immigration across the board. The following is taken from an official BR position paper titled "How the Future of American Immigration Can Impact the Economy" apparently released in Sept. 2018:
Jobless claims are at all-time lows, and the unemployment rate suggests the economy is at or near full employment. These conditions suggest an environment where employers are struggling to find enough native-born workers to fill these roles. The U.S. economy will need an additional 2.4 million lesser-skilled workers by 2026.
Again, there is a crucial point that needs to be emphasized here. What Robbins won't tell you is that by championing his alleged fight for social justice on divisive issues like race and illegal immigration he just so happens to be aiding his financial bottom line.
For above all, Robbins is a global businessman, and he despises Trump's America First trade policy with China and the tariffs that affect Cisco's corporate relations with the communist superpower. Directly attacking efforts to create a level playing field for U.S. workers is likely not an astute way to defeat Trump in the political climate of today. But hiding behind the racial bogeyman is not only socially acceptable; it can be highly effective as well. How is this different in terms of authenticity from what Joe Biden has done, waving the bloody racial banner while quietly pocketing a fortune from the Chinese?
Former George W. Bush chief of staff Joshua Bolten is president and CEO of the Business Roundtable. According to his official bio there, he is also on the Board of Directors for rock star Bono's George Soros and Bill Gates-aligned ONE Foundation.
Unsurprisingly, BR claims it wants to level the playing field with China but consistently opposes tariffs on China.
Robbins himself has specifically said that tariffs against China hurt his company. Asked in a Sept. 2018 CNBC interview about the impact "protectionism, tariffs" would have on Cisco due to the trade war with China, he replied:
"We have this incredibly strong global economy right now, and I think the number one risk is that this thing escalates even beyond where it is today…. The tariffs that are suggested are across a lot of our core networking products, so it's fairly significant."
He cloudily admitted that Cisco was pressuring the Trump White House to ease off on the communist powerhouse. "We continue to try to educate the administration on some of the unintended consequences which are always there when you're working on these complicated issues," is how an obfuscating Robbins put it.
But Robbins wasn't always so timid about his love affair with China. Here he is in a 2015 Cisco blog post, before Trump came along to ruin his party (bold added):
This week’s first state visit to the U.S. by China’s President Xi Jinping comes at an important moment for our countries, and for our industry, as President Xi meets with a number of important U.S. technology companies including Cisco. We have a long history in China spanning over 20 years, and today we continue to strengthen our commitment to our partners and to delivering meaningful innovation to the people of China.
My numerous trips to China over the past few years have reinforced the incredible opportunity ahead for this dynamic society. Over the course of our history in China, Cisco has helped connect millions of Chinese people to the Internet.
[...]
Our commitment to China has never wavered, and I’m thrilled that today we signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement at the 8th China-U.S. Internet Industry Forum, with President Xi presiding.
[...]
I’m so proud of our team of passionate employees in China and their commitment to delivering the best of our innovation to the people of China. There has been a renewed energy with our team there and I believe they share my optimism about the future. I am also proud of the long-term, trusted relationships we’ve built in China that have contributed to Cisco’s success in the last twenty years, and together with our Chinese partners, I believe we have even greater opportunities ahead.
Cisco faced a major scandal in 2008 when it was widely accused of helping to construct a cyber-system of oppression for China that "helped connect millions of Chinese people to the Internet" operation that Robbins openly bragged about in 2015. Wired.com reported in 2008:
An internal Cisco document (.pdf) leaked to reporters on the eve of a Senate human rights hearing reveals that Cisco engineers regarded the Chinese government's rigid internet censorship program as an opportunity to do more business with the repressive regime.
The 90-page document is an internal presentation that Cisco engineers and staffers in China mulled over in 2002 as the central government was upgrading its local, state and provincial public safety and security network infrastructure. Under the category "Cisco Opportunities," the document provides bullet point suggestions for how it might service China's censorship system called the "Golden Shield", and better known in the West as the Great Firewall of China.
Much like Biden today, Robbins knows our elites in the U.S. can't openly proclaim their burning love for communist China in public today. To their dismay, regular Americans have become too aware of how much they've lost to the globalist boondoggle while they have made a killing. But they can support the whipping up of racial animosity as another avenue to harm a president who is thwarting their cozy business ties with an oppressor nation and hopefully get him out of office via this duplicitous and highly corrosive approach.
In a way, it all makes sense. A global businessman is getting in bed with a communist movement here in our country in order to help facilitate business collaboration with a communist nation abroad. And if America happens to go under as a nation in the process due to the cultural poison being promoted, what does he care? After all, people like Chuck Robbins are "citizens of the world," dontcha know?
Joe Schaeffer is the former Managing Editor of The Washington Times National Weekly Edition. His columns appear at WorldTribune.com, LibertyNation.com and FreePressInternational.org.
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