Summary
Denmark and the Netherlands criticized Trump’s demand that foreign companies with U.S. government contracts eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
Denmark called for a coordinated EU response, labeling the move a potential trade barrier.
The Trump administration sent letters to European firms—including in France and Belgium—warning they must comply with a DEI ban or risk losing U.S. contracts.
European officials condemned the letters, defending DEI as essential to corporate responsibility. The EU Commission is reviewing the situation, while the U.S. State Department called the effort a compliance measure.
I love that this article expands DEI into diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s important to remember that diversity, equity, and inclusion are not primarily political devices, but a set of moral ideas meant to improve human wellbeing and harmony. DEI is used as a political device by people who are not driven by a desire for human wellbeing.
That is a very insightful comment and I thank you for sharing it with us all - and it bears repeating:
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are a set of moral ideas meant to improve human well-being and harmony.
Therefore, to be opposed to diversity, equity, and inclusion would imply that one is not driven by a desire for human well-being.
I will remember this. Thank you. (Nice username!)
They’re also just good business sense.
Diversity, equity and inclusion are about making sure that you have a wide variety of perspectives represented within your company.
Here’s a really dumb anecdote that illustrates the point; Flaming Hot Cheetos were invented by a Latino janitor. He came up with the recipe, pitched it to higher ups, and through some serious persistence managed to get them to give it a shot. It’s sold as one of those feel good stories about coming up from nothing or whatever, but the real takeaway is that it took a god damn janitor with the dogged persistence of a god to make that idea happen, because there was no one in the rooms where the decisions happened who was able to say “Hey, maybe we’d capture the Latino market better if we made flavours that appealed to them?” A more diverse company would already have been having these kinds of ideas. How much brilliance is being lost because of bad hiring practices?
Diversity makes your business more effective. A diverse workplace can attract and keep the best talent. A diverse workplace can serve the broadest range of customers, and penetrate deeper into every market it targets. A diverse workplace can build a more healthy environment for all its employees, creating better productivity. These are all good things if you are a company that likes making money.
I love this example because flaming hot Cheetos are super popular outside the Latino market, too. I bet there’s not a middle school in the country where kids don’t love them.
As much as it sounds good, this is not an argument that will convince anyone who is against DEI (and honestly while DEI usually seems implemented quite well it’s not any better of an argument than “North Korea is called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, so they’re a democracy”).
The people that are against DEI mostly fall in 2 categories. One is flat out racists, which have no issues being against these values. The other are those that believe that the implementation of DEI is in some way bad and discriminatory. This is ime often based on sensationalized news about a few edge cases or stories that were twisted to a degree where they’re basically made up. They don’t need to be told that diversity, equity and inclusion are good values, they need to be informed about the fearmongering being just that.
Though with what trump is doing I suspect many of the latter category are already realizing that trumps version of “getting rid of DEI” is doing exactly the bad things they were told DEI does, so maybe we’re already mostly left with the racists.
TIL Equity isn’t always regarding to money. I thought the E in DEI stood for equality until now.
https://i2.wp.com/interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/IISC_EqualityEquity.png
(I tried to upload it but kept getting errors)
Cool illustration! Thanks!
Think of it like, “equality of opportunity” vs “equality of outcome.” With equity being closer to the latter.
It’s also useful to ask “if you don’t support DEI, is it diversity, equity or inclusion you have an issue with?”
Should certain people or certain kinds of people be excluded? Is that why inclusion is bad?
What’s bad about equity? Should things be inequitable? Should certain people get preferential treatment? If so, which people and why?
Or, is it diversity that’s the problem? Is uniformness important? Is it so important that it’s reasonable to exclude people who don’t come from the right backgrounds or don’t look a certain way?
They’re starting to adapt. They often claim,
- that DEI is an Orwellian term and is not really meaning what it means,
- that since discrimination is already illegal, such programs are not needed, we just need to “push harder on meritocracy” (which is funny once you realize where the term “meritocracy” comes from),
- or that these programs have “gone too far”, because they watched too much Brian Lunduke or some other people like him, who “overreport” the (supposed) overreaches of DEI programs.
“Overreporting” means that you purposefully overinflate supposed problems by bringing up the same story over and over again, which makes the problems seem way bigger than what they actually are, and at worst the people reading or watching half attended might actually think the problem occured another time. I’m from Hungary, and not only this method made people believe that “Roma crimes” and “disability benefit cheats” were way more widespread than they actually were, ultimately handing over the first landside victory to Fidesz (ironically, many of the sites doing these kinds of tactics claimed Viktor Orbán was both too far-left and Roma - Hungary has its own birther movement that makes critique of Fidesz extremely hard), and making the life harder for those groups much harder once Fidesz enacted its programs. Also thanks to overreporting, some of my relatives thought the knife attacker of Blaha Lujza square made yearly attacks for MP3 players up until MP3 players fell out of fashion in favor of smartphones, with some still warning me against bringing an MP3 player to Budapest, because the far-right “news” site kuruc info likes to post the anniversaries of said tragedies caused by Roma criminals, which was even worse in the very first years after the attack (TL;DR: They brought it up on a yearly basis).
Is it bad to be a minority?
As a US citizen, I really wish the official reaction was just:
Fuck off.
or even “we regret your cultural requirements will prevent many business opportunities and hope you can find suitable replacement goods and services. We thank you for decades of mutually-beneficial trade and look forward to opportunities in the future.” ?
Same. Or somehow an effective /ignore
Yeah, I disinterested, “Who? Ronald Dump? Is this someone who matters?” Wouldn’t be bad either.
Eat shit trumpo.
That’s all. That’s the only answer we should be giving the orange cunt. We need to consider the US an enemy country until things change, because that’s how they are treating us.
They should answer with the poo emoji and that’s it
The message is: don’t do business with the USA. Find other, more reliable trading partners. It may be a loss in the short term, but bowing to fascist imperialism and white supremacist ideology will be a much bigger loss overall.
I can only imagine that EU is just quietly finding ways to not be dependent on the US right now.
What Trump is doing/does is unacceptable. But US citizens have been groomed to accept everything from their perceived leader.
EU has not been groomed to accept these things. They know to just ignore while they can and get ready for a trade war, cold war, or any sort of war.
The US has been like this since forever, it’s just that this time it really went off a cliff.
The US never had been a real democracy, not like countries that don’t well, and until it is at the same level, it should just be ignored by the rest of the world
What a fucking bizarre, pointless demand from a country.
It’s not even the worst ideologically driven madness Pushed on foreign nations. The George W. Bush administration used aid programs to coerce African nations to focus on faith based birth control initiatives (such as abstinence) during the HIV epidemic leading to absolutely massive numbers of infected across the continent.
I mean, I don’t know if I can necessarily rank one of those as being worse that the other. Telling Europe that it needs to deny its own racist legacy of colonialism in order to continue dealing with the U.S. is pretty damn bad. Maybe HIV is a more modern problem, but colonialism killed a lot more Africans.
Every time I read news about Trump I always wonder what his end goal is. Because he sounds so much like those end users who says unreasonable things like “you need to add/fix/change this” if it is done then they always comes back for more because they didn’t get the end come they wanted and then it all turns out they wanted something that was reasonable (or not) but they demand changes that won’t do that.
Is his end goal really getting more jobs?
And I wonder what kind of jobs he wish to create because a lot of Americans seem to have many weird jobs already like just standing in a corner pointing in a direction or taking care of your filled form by walking 3 meters to another person with it.
He doesn’t have a goal, he acts purely on emotion. He’s an overgrown child throwing a decades-long temper tantrum.
Every time I read news about Trump I always wonder what his end goal is.
I interpret it as some combination of staying out of prison, getting richer, serving the demands of those who have blackmail on him and self aggrandization.
Every move he makes, every word he speaks falls under one of those items. Spot on!
So a desperat attempt to survive the shit he is in, while still being the hot topic by create emotional engagement? Sounds more like an influencer or a cult leader…
Cult leader is accurate.
His end goal is to become a dictator like Putin and turn us into serfs for the oligarchs while destroying the economy so his friends can buy everything up. Alternatively, he’s just doing whatever his pals tell him to do while he pisses away tax payer money in Florida.
Going to make these companies beat up gay people too?
I wonder what he’ll say when he realises what the French motto means. What a muppet.
No. See you later, masturbator
Use Export Tariff on ASML products and services.
They need ASML for the new factories, so they’ll have to buy it anyway. That should make up for the loss of revenue on the other products and services Netherlands lose to the Tariffs and US DEI demandsCould you imagine 20 years ago that forum troll culture would lead to international obsession with owning the libs… Brb gonna blow up the world economy cause europe is too gay lmao
