Saturday, February 06, 2010

And here's a damn good reason to tell Levi Strauss company

to go to hell.
Reader "Barney B" sent me copies of his email correspondence with the clothing giant. I'll give you the CliffsNotes version, from their corporate "consumer relations" reply:

Levi Strauss & Co. believes deeply in the importance of equality, social justice, community involvement and corporate citizenship.

Here's one of the ways they manifest their deep beliefs:

In this time of need, we encourage you to give what you can at www.oxfamamerica.org.

OXFAM? Where have I heard about them before?

Oh, yeah--they're the international citizen disarmament zealots who are conjoined with IANSA to stump for a global gun grab.

Levi's really hit the trifecta here: 'social justice', 'corporate citizenship' and 'Let's ban guns!'

Some years back I wrote to them when I heard about their involvement in PAX, their big thing at the time being "For the children, we need to ban guns because of school violence!" I pointed out that fists, feet, clubs and knives were used far more often than guns in crimes in school, so why weren't the primarily worried about those? Reply boiled down to "We're worried about all violence, but especially that caused by those nasty guns." Which caused me to formulate my General Rule of Semi-Non-Violence Idiocy: Some kid getting strangled, beaten or stabbed to death in a school isn't NEARLY as important as something the weenies can use to attack gun ownership, because for a lot of them that's the real goal.

And I haven't bought anything Levi's since.

2 comments:

Chad said...

Damn.

I remember seeing several years ago the list of companies that are anti-gun, and stopped doing business with pretty much the entire list.

But in the years since, I haven't seen the list be updated, and figured maybe the list wasn't valid anymore.

So I picked up 2 pair of Levis from Walmart, and liked them because the pockets fit my LCR with the pocket holster really nicely.

But looks like I'm going back to Wranglers.

Anonymous said...

I bought my last pair of Levi's about fifteen years ago when they stopped supporting the Boy Scouts because the Scouts won't allow open homosexuals in the organisation. Same reason I nearly lost my job when I told my boss I wouldn't contribute to United Way. They stopped support of BSA for the same reason.

An interesting story. When my supervisor told me it was mandatory that I "contribute" to United Way or I couldn't work there any longer, I figured I had nothing to lose, so I went to talk to the CEO of the company. I told him what I'd been told. He offered me a glass of iced tea and picked up his phone. We then had a half hour chat about this incident and my and his take on charity and even religion. Turns out we're both religious but differently. What cemented my admiration for and loyalty to the man was when he told me when I made out my time card for the day to charge the hour on a red card (overtime)to administration expense.

The next day we all had meetings in our respective trades to let us know that United Way was still the company charity of choice, that contributions were completely voluntary and urging us to contribute directly to whatever charities we liked, or not, it was not the company's concern.

My supervisor tiptoed around me for several months, then one Monday he was gone. I never learned why.

Gerry N.