• Tahssi@yiffit.net
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    1 year ago

    Seriously.

    The attorneys general also said they believed Target’s Pride campaign threatened their financial interests, writing that Target leadership has a “fiduciary duty to our States as shareholders in the company” and suggesting that company officials “may be negligent” in promoting the campaign since it has negatively affected Target’s stock prices and led to some backlash among customers.

    I didn’t realize the government needed to step in if a business makes decisions that hurt their profit. That doesn’t sound like a free market at all.

    • axtualdave@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s more insidious than you think. They’re using the “we’ve got a financial interest in how the company performs” argument in the same way they did in the recent Supreme Court case allowing businesses to discriminate against gay people.

      As stakeholders, if Target continues to offer LGBTQ+ merchandise for sale, these Attorneys General will argue that the financial losses Target might suffer is enough to sue them, to force them to stop selling that merchandise.

      It’s fucking evil. We should not stand for it.

    • WalrusDragonOnABike@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Being a shareholder means having partial ownership of the company, so company owners telling the company what they can’t do sees pretty free-markety to me. Just weird seeing a republican government using their shares as leverage to control companies, but given republicans really never cared about free markets, its not that surprising.

      • Tahssi@yiffit.net
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        1 year ago

        Yeah I should have worded it a little differently. The government being able to buy shares and use them as leverage for political reasons is still not great though.