Meme - Ceazey (Card Life) @ceazey: "Applying to User corporate and they asked this question... Please select the sexual orientation with which you most identify.
Asexual / Aromantic
Bisexual
Gay / Lesbian
Heterosexual / Straight
Pansexual, Demisexual, or Omnisexual
Queer
Other
Prefer not to say"
Jamil Jivani: New 'excellence capitalism' movement is challenging woke investors - "To be free in any meaningful way, Canadians must be able to pursue a better life for their families without being vulnerable to asset managers forcing their businesses to become political organizations. This is the promise of a growing new movement known as “excellence capitalism.”... Excellence capitalism is a response to asset managers using their power to force business leaders to think like risk-averse politicians, rather than captains of industry. Even the most freedom-loving CEOs and entrepreneurs may find themselves pressured by a relatively small group of activist investors to adopt ideological objectives that have little to do with actually making money... BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager and perhaps the world’s largest proponent of mixing politics and business. Although it’s headquartered in the United States, the multinational corporation has significant influence in Canada: BlackRock is one of four firms that control 70 per cent of Canada’s $323 billion in exchange-traded fund assets under management, according to a report from National Bank Financial. With its ability to make or break Canadian businesses, BlackRock is pushing companies to focus on “racial inequities.” It’s even doing a “racial audit” of its own operations. (Although BlackRock’s concerns about racism only seem to apply to countries like Canada, not to China.) BlackRock throws its weight around to promote ESG standards that extend beyond the scope of a traditional business and into areas that ought to be determined by public policy. BlackRock voted in favour of nearly half of the environmental and social shareholder proposals in its investment portfolio during the 2021 proxy season. As an alternative to ESG, excellence capitalism offers a freedom that many of us believed in as kids but have been conditioned to think is impossible as adults. When I was a kid, I thought that money could help make a man free. My modest upbringing gave me insights into the things you can’t do with light pockets. I grew up fixated on hip-hop music made by ambitious artists who were intent on liberating themselves from poverty. But I didn’t know back then that not all money is the same. Some money comes with golden handcuffs. Look at how many Canadians with big bank accounts are deathly afraid of getting caught outside the shrinking boundaries of political correctness. Executives, managers and other high-earning professionals are kept in line by diversity and inclusion agendas that often amount to rich people lecturing other rich people about privilege. And corporations will trip over themselves just to avoid mean tweets by accounts that might be operated by bots, not human beings."
Ditch 'woke' agenda and unconscious bias training, bosses told - "Companies have “wasted a fortune” trying to make middle-aged white men more "woke" in failed attempts to improve diversity, consultants have argued. Mind Gym, which advises blue-chip companies on workplace culture, said businesses should stop investing in “ineffective but expensive” strategies such as unconscious bias training and focus instead on realising the potential of new leaders from non-traditional backgrounds. Joanne Cash, chairman of Mind Gym, warned that training strategies intended to combat racism and sexism can risk making wealthy white men feel they're "being told off for who they are", while ignoring issues such as childhood trauma, bereavement and mental health. She said: "Even the most privileged person will have gone through life with suffering of some sort. "Every single individual has a private story and one of the dangers we're seeing in the dialogue at the moment is that we lump people together in a very unsympathetic way."... Ms Cash said conversations around diversity in the workplace have become divisive and are failing to promote social mobility, with unconscious bias training in fact making some people even less empathetic of others... Mind Gym’s report argued that people who take part in unconscious bias training behave less inclusively afterwards than they did before. Bill Michael, KPMG’s former chairman, stood down earlier this year following an outburst during a virtual meeting in which he said “unconscious bias is complete c---”. Mr Michael said his position had become untenable following a backlash from staff after he told them that "after every single unconscious bias training that's ever been done, nothing's ever improved. So unless you care, you actually won’t change.""
Gen. Flynn implies 'woke' Chase Bank canceled his credit cards over 'reputational risk' - "Chase Bank on Tuesday told TheBlaze it has apologized for the credit card cancellation letter that Flynn posted to his Telegram social media page over the weekend. The bank also told TheBlaze it "made an error" in sending the letter."
The people who cheer Nigel Farage's debanking need to have the same happen to them. Despite their talk of empathy, liberals have none for non-liberals
How corporations can delete your existence - "how was she supposed to get home? After all, she lived eight miles outside of Leeds, and now she had no bus fare. Apparently, this was not the bank’s business. This low-rent version of The Trial went on for another three weeks. Frequently, Laura would phone up Santander customer services. She’d be put on hold for ages. Then the phone would just go dead. She wrote to Santander to complain. They wrote back: they weren’t interested in her complaint and wouldn’t be taking it any further. Meanwhile, her rent, standing orders and Direct Debits stacked up, the late fees and penalties mushroomed around them, as life tumbled towards chaos... ‘Laura’ could be any of us. But she is also Laura Towler, one of the founders of Patriotic Alternative. Towler is a sort of next-gen BNP type, a net-savvy white identitarian who campaigns against mass-migration, and occasionally winks to her Telegram followers about ‘you know who’ (they know alright: The Jews). It would seem that Towler had been expelled from Santander for her views. But in line with the bank’s conditions, this has not been made clear. By a strange coincidence, in the same month, the same thing happened to Mark Collett, her Patriotic Alternative co-founder. Only, Collett doesn’t bank with Santander — he is with HSBC. Somehow, the same thing also happened, in different countries, to Europe’s leading young white identitarians: Brittany Pettibone and Martin Sellner. Coincidence abounds in the modern world. Last year, on the other side of the Atlantic, various alt-ish-Right figures who banked with JP Morgan Chase woke up on the same morning to find that they no longer banked with JP Morgan Chase. They included the chair of the Proud Boys Enrique Tarrio, former InfoWars staffer Joe Biggs, Project Veritas associate Laura Loomer, and Martina Markota, a Trump-supporting performance artist. Of those four, it’s the other Laura whose case drives home the full capriciousness of corporate power in a networked age. Loomer styles herself as the “most banned woman in the world”. In addition to Chase, she is banned from PayPal, from VenMo, from The Cash App, Airbnb and Instagram, from Lyft, Uber and UberEats, from the blogging monetisation platform WordAds and the t-shirt print-to-order site TeeSpring, from Twitter and Facebook — obviously — and from any one of a half dozen other platforms for digital congress... You don’t want to mess with the people who make the widgets that undergird the financial system. In 2018, in response to activist pressure, MasterCard began choking off various far-Right and internet Right figures. That in turn meant their often lucrative Patreon accounts were cancelled: YouTube ‘Classical Liberal’ Carl Benjamin lost $12000 a month. Now, in a post-Covid world, where we’re often being told that cash is no longer acceptable, some are also being told that electronic banking is no longer for them. It’s an interesting crossroads... Right of admission is always reserved — we all know this — and you might say that these examples are just the market at work. Except that some things are so fundamental to our everyday lives that they’re not so much markets as the thing that you need in order to use a market. In the dying days of Gordon Brown, an attempt was made to guarantee every citizen’s right to a current account. It was quickly shot down by the Big Five banks (after all, it wasn’t as if they owed the government any favours)... In the banking system’s capacity to disable the individual without pro-actively doing them harm, there’s an echo of the elegance of the Chinese government’s social credit. “There was no file, no police warrant, no official advance notification. They just cut me off from the things I was once entitled to. What’s really scary is there’s nothing you can do about it,” was how Liu Hu put it — a Chinese journalist, who ran afoul of social credit in 2019... Increasingly, we allow our corporations to police the soft boundaries of acceptable speech and thought, from Sainsbury’s rejection of ‘racist’ shoppers to the Yorkshire Tea wars to Tampax’s latest bloodbath. Ironically enough, the license that companies now take as part of their remit is a perfect mirror image of the Cake Problem: the oft-rehashed libertarian thought experiment, over whether a fundamentalist Christian cake-maker should be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding. When US Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson was posed the question in 2016, he said that they should — and added that he would equally require a Jewish baker to make a Nazi wedding cake. The underlying principle is one of neutrality. Where two belief systems clash, if they remain polite and cooperative, shouldn’t the public still retain an underlying right of service? Evidently not... “in the interests of transparency and fairness”, Twitter has given every single candidate standing in the US election a blue-check verified account. So, when she won her primary, she applied to have her accounts reinstated. No dice. She can’t get on Big Social, the broadcast networks are ignoring her, and her opponent, Lois Frankel, won’t even say her name, let alone debate her. Should she win — still a long shot — Loomer has sworn to spend her time on Capitol Hill breaking up the tech giants’ monopoly. So couldn’t it be said that they’re acting to titrate their own legislative environment? F.A. Hayek, and his prophet on earth Margaret Thatcher, saw the market as the best bulwark against tyrannical state power — that by pulling lots of little levers every day with our cash, we’d effectively be voting, in a constant dialogue of mini-democracy. It was only towards the end of their regime that the Thatcherites began to realise that some things — from trains down — remain public utilities in spirit, no matter who runs them."
Workers at a Los Angeles Cinnabon strike to protest Pride policy - "The entire staff of a Cinnabon store in Los Angeles walked off the job Friday after filing a civil rights complaint against their employer over a recent policy that they say bans all Pride decor... “We do not discriminate or celebrate any particular race, ethnic group, gender specific group, religious group,” or anything else, Reheis wrote in one of the messages, which are included in the complaint. The striking workers are asking the California Civil Rights Department to take action to stop Cinnabon from discriminating against employees based on their sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression... Vero Aguilar, who has worked at the store for almost two years, said she has been out as a lesbian since 2011 and “has always been proud of who I am.” But Reheis’ messages “made me feel like I had to hide myself again.” “I started to not feel comfortable in my own skin,” she said. “It really lowered my self-esteem, and I was starting to not like myself when I looked in the mirror.” She said she is striking because she fears the company could discriminate against her and other LGBTQ employees in other ways... The complaint adds that Cinnabon allows for-profit and not-for-profit groups, including religious groups, schools and sports teams, to host fundraisers, “clearly associating Cinnabon with support for those groups.” These other celebrations and fundraisers, the complaint says, “provide overwhelming evidence that the policy issued June 16th is, in fact, a homophobic and transphobic policy applied only to Pride.”"
Work is for you to push your political agenda. But god forbid anyone else pushes his.
Does this mean queer people inherently push a political agenda? I thought only conservatives would claim that, as liberals keep telling us. So much for merely existing not being a political act
A customer hosting a fundraiser at your company is exactly the same as your company officially endorsing that cause. By this logic, Cinnabon needs to allow employees to endorse any cause. Good luck to anyone promoting Christianity
Workplace “Anti-Racism Trainings” Aren’t Helping - "workplace anti-racism training isn’t a practice that anyone invested in the well-being of workers of any race should defend. The problem with such trainings isn’t that they push “un-American propaganda” or “neo-Marxist” ideas in the workplace as the Right has fretted, but rather, that they increasingly allow employers to consolidate their power over employees under a veneer of social justice... the type of anti-racism training that has gained popularity over the last few years marks a significant departure from the rote “diversity” or “cultural sensitivity” seminars of the 1990s, which were intended primarily to outline the legal consequences of discrimination in the workplace. Instead, anti-racism training today seeks to educate employees on the far-reaching effects of racism in the United States, and encourages them to acknowledge and atone for any biases or privileges they unearth over the course of the training... The Trump administration is correct in its claim, then, that many workplace anti-racism trainings of late have embraced a certain activist vocabulary. In fact, the same training materials used by social justice organizations are also increasingly appearing within major corporations and public institutions... While liberals have celebrated the proliferation of anti-racist education, even the recent activist-inflected mode of anti-bias training leaves something to be desired. As Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara has written, these seminars still mostly function as a form of legal protection for employers from potential discrimination lawsuits, and as an opportunity for companies to safeguard their bottom lines while appearing committed to racial justice. To put it another way, a weeklong anti-racism workshop that costs an employer tens of thousands of dollars is still cheaper than a discrimination lawsuit (or raising workers’ wages). There’s also a substantial body of evidence that workplace trainings intended to change workers’ hearts and minds don’t actually do much to reduce their biases... educating liberals about “white privilege” doesn’t increase their empathy for poor black people but does lower their empathy for poor white people. One reason why such trainings are so ineffective in the workplace, researchers Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev have argued, is that people unsurprisingly tend to dislike others’ attempts to change their thoughts or infringe on their autonomy. (As they explained it, “Try to coerce me to do X, Y, or Z, and I’ll do the opposite just to prove that I’m my own person.”) That’s perhaps especially true in the United States, where employees already hold so few guaranteed rights and almost no power on the job as a result of at-will employment law and decades-long attacks on unions. Anti-racism trainings — particularly of the “white fragility” sort — demand access to workers’ thoughts and feelings on highly charged topics, usually in the presence of their supervisors, and evaluate those workers’ responses, often with the explicit goal of generating discomfort. No wonder, then, that they often backfire. So what actually works to reduce interpersonal racism in the workplace? “We know from a lot of social science research the way to get people to change their stereotypes about other groups is to have them work side by side with members of other groups as equals”... More troubling still is that there are signs that workplace anti-racism initiatives may serve as an opportunity for employers to exert even more power over employees. In a recent article on the importance establishing “racial equity” in the workplace, Ben Hecht, the CEO of Living Cities, a consortium of foundations and financial institutions, called not only for requiring staffers to attend anti-racism training, but also for making their job security at least partially contingent on that anti-racist education. “Our annual staff performance reviews hold every staff member accountable for achievement against a personal racial equity and inclusion objective at the beginning of the year,” he wrote. Similarly, the Harvard Business School’s Mark Kramer has recommended that companies “adopt a no-tolerance-for-racism policy like Franklin Templeton’s, which led to its swift, recent termination of Amy Cooper.” While it’s difficult to summon much sympathy for Cooper herself, it’s also clear that employers’ ability to fire people for their conduct outside of work has already taken a serious toll on American workers’ rights; the last thing at-will employment needs is any kind of progressive gloss. Making it easier to oust or discipline “racists” is no win for workers when the boss remains the ultimate arbiter of who’s racist and who’s not. In fact, that very issue surfaced in a July ruling on a General Motors (GM) case by the Trump-appointed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The NLRB will now allow employers to fire workers trying to unionize if those workers are found to have used “racist” or “profane” speech in their union-related activity. (As it happens, the GM employee at the center of the case who used the so-called “racist” speech that prompted the ruling was a black worker who “mockingly acted a caricature of a slave” to criticize a manager’s demand for subservience.) In other words, the NLRB ruling shows how quickly the ruling class can adopt egalitarian language in service of undermining workers of all races... Northeastern University announced that two of their researchers, with $1.5 million in funding from the US Army, were building an AI device designed to identify instances of implicit bias in the workplace and help managers take steps to reduce them... a surveillance tool that employers can use to track workers’ speech, let alone physiological signals, is an egregious violation of privacy straight out of a capitalist dystopia. Even if such technology was used thoughtfully and exclusively in service of promoting racial and gender justice (which, of course, seems unlikely), the tradeoff is a terrible one for workers."
Meme - Tim Stanley @timothy_stanley: "This is the perfect statement on the reality of corporate liberalism. Read the t-shirt, then read the photo caption."
"Why Be Racist Sexist Homophobic Transphobic When You Can Just Be Quiet?"
"Chris O'Shea has cut 5,000 jobs and embarked on a bruising fire and rehire showdown with British Gas engineers"
A Severed Critique - "it’s undeniable that rhetorical and actual alignment with socially progressive ideals is a central plank of how corporate power is exercised and expressed today. It’s the velvet glove that the iron fist of 21st century feudalism is hidden in... We saw this in the Movie “Don’t Look Up” – if you haven’t seen it, don’t watch it, it’s terrible. But one of the key villains in the movie is a Steve Jobs/ Bill Gates analogue played by Mark Rylance. He allies himself with the Trump analogue (Meryl Streep) and together they conspire to make a climate catastrophe worse for their mutual benefit. This critique of corporate and political power coming together to shaft the little guy is fine as far as it goes. But it rings false because the tech billionaire who wants to publicly align with populist-right politicians is the exception rather than the rule (the reason you can think of Musk and Thiel is that they’re the only ones). In the 2016 & 2020 US elections donations from Tech went in one partisan direction only, and it wasn’t to the right. During Trump’s reign CEOs fought to publicly be the best at scolding him and distancing themselves from him. They often did this by extravagant donations to fringe left wing causes. That is the reality of how corporate and political ideals overlap publicly in the real world... neither Severance nor any other show can fully parody the 21st century versions of corporate values and corporate power, because its creators agree with those values and how that power is used, at least superficially. All this is a reminder of the need for people willing to critique the current culture to find some way of expressing that unease in fictional and entertainment form, and of sneaking it into the mainstream; because the mainstream (and its employees) is compromised on these issues and can’t be relied on to do it itself, no matter how entertaining its output otherwise is."
The Price of Woke Corporate Politics - WSJ - "The campaign launched Tuesday by Consumers’ Research, a conservative nonprofit, takes aim at Nike, Coca-Cola and American Airlines. But others could be the targets, says Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research... when CEOs take sides in political fights unrelated to their business interests or regulation, they have to expect to be treated like politicians themselves. CEOs may have different justifications for their new progressive politics. Some may be speaking out of conviction, though most seem ill-informed about the political fights they’ve joined, such as state voting laws. Nike and Mr. Donahoe flaunt their leftist positions as part of their brand identification. Others may be hoping to buy cheap grace from the Biden Administration. Still others may be bowing to politically charged employees. But CEOs get paid to lead and protect their brands, not to be led by people who think business should embrace their politics. The woke business trend isn’t healthy for the free-market cause. CEOs risk undermining support on the grass-roots and Congressional right for business, mirroring the anti-corporate sentiment that dominates the left. CEOs can never buy enough absolution from the left as long as they believe in profit. Alienating the right leaves them friendless. We warned CEOs that this would happen when they went for woke, and now it has. Perhaps corporate boards should do their jobs and start exercising some supervision over politicized executives."
Why Anna Wintour won Vogue’s war on woke - "For years, a war has been simmering over the direction of Vogue, with the stakes nothing less than the future of the most famous magazine publisher in the world. On one side was tradition, in the couture and sunglass-clad form of Anna Wintour, 73, Condé Nast’s chief content officer, who has been editor-in-chief of American Vogue since 1988. On the other, revolution, represented by Edward Enninful, 51, who since 2017 as editor of British Vogue has turned a staid old institution into a magazine driven by an increasingly radical agenda, with controversial covers and stories featuring transgender and disabled models and writers. It was widely speculated that Enninful, a protégé of Wintour’s, would be the one to finally take over from her when she relinquished control. It hasn’t come to pass... At heart, Vogue is just another business, and as recent incidents at Nike, Bud Light, Disney and countless others have shown, the corporate world is an increasingly fraught place where you must strike a balance between selling your product and being seen to hold the “right” views... “Vogue morphed from a playful, albeit slightly horsey, fashion magazine into a deeply political manifesto.” Along the way, she writes, people stopped buying it: instead it was given away or sold at a discount. “It was joyless, too political and seemed to have forgotten its role as a high-end shopping magazine.”... “The risk is you’re appealing to a niche group and end up reducing your appeal to others,” he adds. “You want to be selling why your products are brilliant, and how you as a company are behaving responsibly and ethically in pursuit of that, but not taking a position on divisive social justice issues. You’d be unwise in America coming out for – or against – abortion, for example, which is not to say that it doesn’t matter, but it’s not the role of a company to take a position on those things.”... Progressive views on gender might help win over celebrities, publicists and advertisers keen to bask in a bit of reflected diversity on social media, but they do not necessarily play as well with the core readership. Vogue readers skew older and female, while readers in the new territories into which Condé Nast is keen to expand: such as the Middle East, India and China, may have more traditional views on social matters"
The war on ‘woke capitalism’ | Financial Times - "Stuart Kirk, head of responsible investing at HSBC Asset Management, had rubbished the consensus that investors should try to encourage a more environmentally responsible capitalism by factoring climate risks into their calculations. Climate change, he declared, was simply “not a financial risk that we need to worry about”. The argument jarred so much with the public positions that HSBC and other banks have adopted that Kirk was quickly suspended. But it reflected a growing willingness to question the prevailing wisdom in Davos and other bastions of the new capitalism. Kirk’s critique of one of the foundational beliefs of the near $3tn sustainable funds industry is not an isolated one. Elon Musk, arguably this era’s most prominent capitalist, last week labelled ESG a “scam” after Tesla, his pioneering electric carmaker, was removed from S&P’s ESG index. Such indices’ scores depended on how compliant a business was with “the leftist agenda”, he claimed in a meme shared on Twitter. Even some former industry insiders have broken ranks to paint ESG as mere “greenwashing”. Tariq Fancy, BlackRock’s former chief investment officer for sustainable investing, now calls sustainable investing “a dangerous placebo”. Desiree Fixler, former head of ESG for the Deutsche Bank-backed asset manager DWS, says the acronym has become meaningless. Such scepticism has prompted officials to impose more demanding regulations. The Securities and Exchange Commission is preparing rules to crack down on ESG credentials in investment products and the EU’s “sustainable finance taxonomy” now defines what counts as green. The other person haunting delegates at Davos was Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida who is battling Disney over a bill to limit the teaching of sexuality and gender identity in the state’s public elementary schools. The populist governor’s appetite for a fight with Disney chief executive Bob Chapek has sent a shiver down many executive spines, in part because DeSantis is not an outlier in a party that still attracts a majority of US corporate political donations. In recent weeks, Florida senator Marco Rubio has introduced legislation to let investors sue companies that stray from maximising shareholder returns; former presidential nominee Mitt Romney has signed a letter saying ESG scores are “politicising” S&P’s credit ratings; and former US vice-president Mike Pence has attacked ESG principles as “pernicious”. They, and the conservative activists who are rallying protest votes in record numbers at annual meetings, are now coalescing around a rebranding of ESG and stakeholder capitalism as something more hollow, hypocritical and even harmful: “woke capitalism”... a conservative advocacy group has persuaded a California court to strike down two state laws that would have imposed diversity quotas on company boards. At their annual meetings, chief executives from Goldman Sachs to Meta have been pressed by conservative shareholder groups over their charitable donations or racial equity policies. One such group, the Free Enterprise Project, says it is trying to save corporate America from “the socialist foundations of woke”. For several years, executives have felt emboldened by pressure from their staff and customers (and by polling that shows business is more trusted than governments, non-profit groups or the media) to take public stances on subjects they might once have avoided.
The Demotivating Effects of Communicating a Social-Political Stance: Field Experimental Evidence from an Online Labor Market Platform - "Despite a recent surge in corporate activism, with firm leaders communicating about social-political issues unrelated to their core businesses, we know little about its strategic implications. This paper examines the effect of an employer communicating a stance about a social-political issue on employee motivation, using a two-phase, preregistered field experiment in an online labor market platform. Results demonstrate an asymmetric treatment effect of taking a stance depending on whether the employee agrees or disagrees with that stance. Namely, I observe a demotivating effect of taking a stance on a social-political issue with which employees disagree and no statistically significant motivating effect of taking a stance on a social-political issue with which employees agree. This study has important implications for the nascent scholarship on corporate activism, as well as the scholarship on strategic human capital management."
