Denmark, Netherlands react to Trump's DEI ultimatum
Denmark, Netherlands react to Trump's DEI ultimatum
The Trump Administration had ordered French companies with U.S. contracts to comply with its orders banning DEI initiatives.
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.
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 demandsHopefully they have kill switches built into their machines and can turn them off if needed?.
ASML is literally the piviot on which the entire tech world balances.
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.
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
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.
In the case of the EU however as well as a bunch of European countries, DEI is literally part of the constitution. But hey, Dump and his team would need to inform themselves on other countries to know that
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?
Is it bad to be a minority?
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!)
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.
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.
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)
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)
Think of it like, "equality of opportunity" vs "equality of outcome." With equity being closer to the latter.
As a US citizen, I really wish the official reaction was just:
Fuck off.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
His end goal is to increase his wealth, status, and power as well as punishing those who dare to disagree or make him feel smaller.
Every time I read news about Trump I always wonder what his end goal is.
Be adulated. Get a nobel peace price because Obama has one (for not inexplicable but inexcusable reasons)
Nah. What he wants is bossing others around and taking revenge on people and things that bothered him, or going after things he thinks give him an advantage. That's usually by bullying people until they give up and do what he wants. His voters like DEI? Bully and force things until it's stamped out. Justice convicted him, so break justice. Consequences for jobs and the economy, or even the law, don't matter to him.
Every time I read news about Trump I always wonder what his end goal is.
Maybe he is secretly suicidal
Going to make these companies beat up gay people too?
I'm pretty sure that eliminating DEI is against EU law, so I'm not sure how they are supposed to conform (and, of course, they shouldn't). Maybe sue the US government for breach of contract and move on.
Suing won't have any effect as the US can simply refuse to follow the rules. There is a simpler way: don't do business with them. Let them find the hard way that the world can and will go on without them but they can't go on without the world.
Ericsson did it, so can't be that much against EU law. Though maybe they can sneak around it by being huge and multinational?
So now he thinks he can make demands extraterritoriality, awesome. I don't suppose he would make demands like 'stop invading and murdering you neighbor countries and their people' now would he? Nah, let's drop sanctions from Russia and who is this Israel place that he was meant to stop from doing bad things, I haven't heard much on them of late....
But if the US asks for Europe to consider American opinions, wouldn't that in itself be diversity?! Paradoxical! 🤔
So now he thinks he can make demands extraterritoriality
To quote the grandmother of a friend: "Wish into one hand and shit into the other, see which one is filled first"
If you give this orange shit stain an inch, he'll take a mile! Best to remember that.
appeasement doesn't work
I wonder what he'll say when he realises what the French motto means. What a muppet.
Strong reaction from the Netherlands as well: "Meanwhile, a Dutch minister said she was not aware of any Trump orders to firms in the Netherlands, but warned that similar orders targeting Europe create "more uncertainty" for them." /sarcasm
No. See you later, masturbator
