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!)
Yeah, Trump and Co. are just using the term DEI as their latest bigoted dog whistle term. Here’s a Reagan subordinate explaining how they evolve it over time to avoid scrutiny (trigger warnings: repeated use of N* word, YouTube link)
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.
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)
Nice thanks.
If you want you can add it to a post with  like this:
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).
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.
I feel like every conversation with someone from another country I have to preface it with “sorry, I hate his guts too”
As a US citizen, I really wish the official reaction was just:
Fuck off.
I wish EU’s response was, that all US conpanies dealing with any government business in EU must comply to EU DEI rules
what about supply chain regulations? i’ve heard child labor is legal in the us now.
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.
Not really the message since the US pays big bucks for contracting, and these companies make a lot of money off it
And they might decide on a whim that the contract is no longer valid for reasons made up yesterday.
Doesn’t matter how much money the contract promises you if you can’t know if it’s going to be honoured.
Yea anyways. Back here on planet earth where people are making businesses for money, US contracts are hella worth it.
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.
Speak for yourself, but there are a whole lot of us here that don’t want anything he’s selling. Not all of us have been “groomed to accept everything from their perceived leader.” Also a lot of us that are genuinely embarrassed about his actions and their impacts on the rest of the world and want it to stop nowish.
About 2/3 of the voting population didn’t think he was enough of a threat to vote against him
That figure it highly suspect at best. MAGA took actual vote stealing moves this election… Multiple ballot boxes in the area I live (a liberal leaning urban city center) had their contents burnt to dust right after votes had come in, and that’s just one of many examples. Not to mention gerrymandering. Don’t listen to the propaganda, the man who cried wolf about a stolen election committed the crime he pretended to be the victim of
