PwC Drops Diversity Mandate for Internship Amid Legal Pressure - "PwC has shed explicit diversity criteria for an internship program after the firm faced scrutiny from a conservative activist group that opposes corporate racial diversity efforts... Last year’s report characterized the firm’s “Start” internship for aspiring leaders as being “uniquely designed for high-performing college sophomores and rising juniors who self-identify as members of traditionally underrepresented minority groups in the professional services industry, including protected veterans and/or individuals with disability.”"
bad_stats ππ΅π¨️π£ on X - "Hey bestie! Could you point me to the part of the article that is evidence for the claim that Boeing is using DEI to intentionally lose the competition with Comac because the WEF is Maoist?"
James Lindsay, full varsity on X - "Here's their 2024 SEC filing indicating they hit their DEI and climate targets but not production or quality targets."
Ryan Whitten πΊπ²π½ on X - "The way they scored this makes it look like they did really well on their goals, when the data suggests they were well short of the goals that actually matter. When you remove the 80% from the worthless DEI goals, they are well below 100%. Alramingly, they have not reduced rework at all, suggesting that may actually be going up. This is direct evidence that these ESG/DEI initiatives are counterproductive, but if you knew what they are to begin with, you'd expect that. Sad that this is happening to the company that my grandfather retired from, and that brought us the B-17, among other great aircraft."
James Lindsay, full varsity on X - "It's not exactly that our corporations are committing suicide. It's that they're being suicided, like Jeffrey Epstein. DEI and ESG are designed to misdirect priorities and scarce resources into meaningless and detrimental crap that leaves a company weak and uncompetitive."
Meme - David Pinsen @dpinsen: "There’s a good chance this guy got promoted to this role partly because a drug addict with heart disease tried to buy a banana with a counterfeit $20."
New York Post @nypost: "Boeing ousts head of troubled space unit after astronauts left stranded, billions in losses"
Boeing ousts Ted Colbert, head of troubled space unit after Starliner debacle - "Boeing’s defense, space and security unit, one of its three main businesses, has lost billions of dollars in 2023 and 2022, which executives attributed in large part to cost overruns on fixed-price contracts."
Ted Colbert was in the role from March 2022, but left wingers will continue to look around for excuses
BREAKING: Boeing jets come out as trans-safe: they are not safe but they 'identify as safe' • Genesius Times - " The announcement comes as a surprise to many, but Boeing insists that they are simply embracing the true nature of their planes. “Our planes have always wanted to be safe, and we are proud to support them in their journey,” a Boeing spokesperson said in a press conference. “We’re not just talking about physical safety here – although our planes are impeccably crafted and rigorously tested by the most diverse people on Earth. No, we’re talking about a deeper, spiritual safety. Sure, wheels fall off, doors fly off in flight, and fuel leaks are common, but our planes identify as safe, and that’s what really matters.”... Boeing CEO Jack Ace said, “If you deny our jets’ self-identified safety profile, you are a transphobe.”"
blighter on X - "people are justly amazed at this but it’s important to remember SpaceX isn’t our only space company and by many metrics not even our most successful. Boeing, e.g., is light years ahead on both amount spent and workforce diversity, both of which are key drivers of success."
Anti-Israel Google employees arrested after occupying CEO's office with demands against ‘apartheid state’ - "Google employees with anti-Israel demands of ceasing “business with the Israeli apartheid government and military” were arrested on Tuesday after they took over Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's California office. Occupying the space for over 8 hours, the employees broadcast their Pro-Palestine protest on a Twitch livestream, which ultimately also captured their arrest. Google employees arrested from Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's California office. Google employees arrested from Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's California office. The ‘notech4apartheid’ video shows a man informing the employees that they've been put on administrative leave before he asks them to leave voluntarily. To which, the protesters refused, leading to their arrest by the police... The employees have driven a case for Google to divest from its business ties with the “Israeli apartheid government and military” and put an end to “harassment, intimidation, bullying and silencing” of Palestinian and Muslim workers. They've also pushed the organisation to focus on the “health and safety crisis” that caused concern among all those employees who can't bear with their office hours and hard work being used to “enable a genocide.”"
When you hire SJWs...
No doubt they will play the victim
Spare us the hypocrisy of the woke multinationals - "The main thrust of the reforms is that voters would need photo ID or a utility bill to back a request for an absentee vote, instead of the present system where the signature on the application for the vote is checked against that on the returned ballot... It’s yet another example of corporate ethical activism, whereby companies get terrifically worked up about issues that have really got nothing to do with them. It’s part of corporate overreach generally. In Ireland, during the referendum on gay marriage, Google and Facebook let it be known that they were very pro-change. Then there was Disney, making a stand against transphobia by, in an entirely pointless gesture, sacking the actress Gina Carano from The Mandalorian after she appeared to send up trans pronouns. This is the same Disney that filmed part of their live-action version of Mulan in Xinjiang province, where the Uyghurs are in mass detention... Where global capitalism does have an ethical duty, it is to pay taxes in the countries where they operate, reflecting the profits they make there. But on this, Google et al are not terribly forthcoming either. My impression is that they positively go out of their way to avoid paying what normal people would consider a fair rate and use their corporate clout with the US government to argue their case. They also have a responsibility to see that their supply chains are clean, viz, that the companies contributing to their product aren’t involved in iffy practices in developing countries or underpaying their workers. You might even assume that big corporations would consider the ethics of investing in countries that violate human rights. And yet Coca-Cola’s Curt Ferguson, head of its Far East operations, recently declared that its biggest market in the future would be China, where it already employs thousands of people. The difference, of course, is that taking a stand on China really would affect the bottom line. Ethics and global capitalism… they’re a funny mix, aren’t they?"
Four in 10 less likely to stay with their company if asked to wear pronoun badges - "The finding comes in research backed by Kemi Badenoch on the “politicisation” of business, which shows that half of people think businesses have become too concerned with taking political positions on contested issues. The Business and Trade Secretary said people wanted businesses to focus on serving customers, “not activism or political causes”... only 7 per cent answering that they would be more likely to want to work for the company. Three quarters (75 per cent) believe that companies should prioritise hiring on merit, regardless of race or gender, rather than hiring to create a diverse team. And 50 per cent of people agreed that businesses have become too concerned with taking political positions on contested issues, with only 14 per cent disagreeing. When asked about businesses taking political stances on a range of issues – including Black Lives Matter, immigration, Palestine and transgender rights – in each case, about half of people said it would make no difference to whether they would buy their products. In each case, a similar or larger number of people said they would be less likely to buy the products than said they would be more likely to buy."
Opinion: No reliable evidence that ESG investing produces above-average returns - "Despite growing skepticism among investors, as evidenced by their withdrawal of billions of dollars from ESG equity funds so far in 2024, many finance industry leaders continue to claim that ESG-focused investing produces above-average returns... The study tracks 310 companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange from 2013 to 2020. It finds that neither ESG rating upgrades nor downgrades were related in a statistically significant way to the stock market performance of companies. That firms’ ESG ratings changes — which when released, are effectively new information for investors — are not consistently related to financial returns, means ESG ratings are likely not relevant to the expected future profitability of publicly listed companies in Canada. This of course raises the question: if new information (i.e., ratings changes) about a company’s ESG-related practices is not statistically related to equity returns from investing in that company, why do money managers continue to pay for the services of ESG rating companies? One possible reason is that managers pass a substantial share of the costs along to customers who are willing to sacrifice financial returns (because of higher management fees) in order to express their commitment to environmental sustainability and other social causes. Another possible reason is that promoting ESG-focused investment alternatives appears to have been, at least until recently, an effective marketing tool... because asset managers typically do charge higher fees for ESG-focused mutual funds, ESG investment strategies are more likely to underperform than overperform conventional investment strategies."
Bruce Pardy: Corporate Canada betrayed capitalism. Now it has been betrayed - "After years of colluding with climate hysteria and betraying capitalism, Canadian companies have been dumped at the curb. On June 20, Bill C-59 received Royal Assent... Businesses cannot claim that their products or practices help to protect against climate change or provide other environmental benefits unless they can prove the claims are true. The provisions amend the Competition Act and make climate and other environmental claims subject to the same regulatory regime as false advertising... Over the course of decades, Western countries, but nowhere more than Canada, have undergone a cultural revolution. Accelerating climate activism, aggressive social justice ideology and managerial government have changed the landscape. Business elites, instead of defending capitalism, competition, open markets, the rule of law and other values of Western civilization, decided to switch rather than fight. To protect their own prosperity and influence, corporate leaders learned to speak the language and adopt the norms of progressive collectivism. They became cheerleaders for the new regime. Many came to believe in it themselves. Companies took on new roles. The social responsibility of business became not merely to increase its profits, as Milton Friedman famously insisted, but to serve as social welfare agencies. They were not just to obey the law and deliver products and services that people wanted to buy, but to pursue social and environmental causes. They would serve the interests not just of their shareholders but their “stakeholders,” as “Environmental, Social and Governance” (ESG) models demanded. In their marketing and rhetoric, they embraced climate action, corporate social responsibility, social licence, “equity, diversity and inclusion” (EDI) and social justice. They promoted the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are a blueprint for socialist managerialism. The Business Council of Canada endorsed carbon pricing and Canada’s climate plans. Major oil companies promoted net zero and repeated the kinds of claims that governments themselves made: that climate action in Canada helps to prevent the climate from changing. Such claims are patently false. Even if you believe in anthropogenic climate change, if your country doesn’t contribute much to the problem, cutting its contribution isn’t a solution. Bringing Canadian carbon emissions to zero would make no measurable difference to anything. Countries that together produce far and away most of the emissions on Earth have no intention of changing their paths. And who can blame them? If I were them, I would do the same. Canada excels at climate boondoggles. Carbon taxes are just more money for government coffers that do not necessarily reduce emissions, if that actually mattered. Wind and solar power, a lucrative source of government largesse that some businesses have adeptly saddled up to, don’t replace fossil fuels. Carbon capture and storage, perhaps the most pathetic pretend of them all, is a breathtakingly expensive symbolic gesture that cannot be applied at scale. The Paris accord and its net zero aspirations are climate fairy tales. Canadian business leaders would never say any of this. That was the deal: pay homage to the climate gods, and you can be on the team. But now they can’t. Progressive statism has never been about the climate, or transgenderism, or whatever the cause du jour. The target has always been Western values and principles. Free enterprise is anathema to its aspirations, and as it turns out, so is prosperity itself. Canadian companies have betrayed the economic principles of their own society. How does government change one side of a bargain? When there is no other side. The Canadian business community still does not understand the point of the revolution. There can be no survivors. Surely, they sputter, you don’t mean us."
Leading Report on X - "BREAKING: Toyota has announced it will no longer sponsor LGBTQ parades and events and will no longer make efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)."
The hottest trend in executive leadership: Bringing back the White Guy
Greedy companies are more evil than they are greedy, because everyone knows that diversity is the way to earn more money (of course they cite the crap "research" from consulting firms, even though McKinsey's claim has never replicated and they refuse to disclose their methodology, and other research explicitly contradicts the claim)
City of London has given up on inclusion, Black workers say
American Airlines' focus on ESG in retirement plan is illegal, US judge rules - "A federal judge in Texas on Friday said American Airlines (AAL.O), opens new tab violated federal law by basing investment decisions for its employee retirement plan on environmental, social and other non-financial factors... O'Connor said American had breached its legal duty to make investment decisions based solely on the financial interests of 401(k) plan beneficiaries by allowing BlackRock (BLK.N) , opens new tab, its asset manager and a major shareholder, to focus on environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) factors."
BlackRock Exits Net Zero Alliance for Asset Managers Amid Wall Street Exodus - Bloomberg
How to Put Woke Capital Out of Business - "Vivek Ramaswamy opens his book on the perils of woke capitalism by declaring himself a traitor to his class... Two of his closest advisors resigned immediately. He received indignant emails from friends and employees. Less than three weeks later, he stepped down as CEO of the company he founded. He could have kept quiet, mouthed the diversitarian platitudes, and remained in good standing with the credentialed elite who run America. But Ramaswamy ultimately chose to speak out against corporate wokeness: “Why am I defecting? I’m fed up with corporate America’s game of pretending to care about justice in order to make money. It is quietly wreaking havoc on American democracy.” There is something admirable about Ramaswamy’s commitment to honesty in such a dishonest age. The fundamental lie at the heart of woke capitalism deeply bothers him. Corporations and the oligarchs who run them pretend to care about social justice above all else when in fact they pursue profits with little concern for justice, social or otherwise. Nike stands with Colin Kaepernick, but not with the children and Uighur political prisoners who work in its sweatshops. Uber supports Black Lives Matter, but not its drivers who want to be classified as employees rather than independent contractors. The NBA’s management and star players criticize the President of the United States but rebuke critics of the Chinese Communist Party. “In the fight for justice,” Ramaswamy concludes, “for-profit corporations make fickle friends.” Ramaswamy is not just an indignant moralist. He understands how the lies serve the corporate oligarchy. Woke capitalism is “about using trendy social values as a trick to generate more profits… [it’s about corporations] creating a new narrative of social purpose to disguise their old-school greed. The social causes simply serve as a form of reputational laundering for those same companies’ profit-seeking.” This concept of reputational laundering—which might be more accurately called “moral laundering”—is absolutely key to understanding woke capitalism. The cheap social-justice talk and the tax-deductible donations to progressive causes do not just draw attention away from questionable business practices. They crown corporations “with a patina of moral authority” and, as such, shield them from the fury of left-wing activists. Performative wokeness puts corporations on the right side of the Manichean divide between the irredeemable cis-white-hetero-Christian patriarchy and everyone else. As Joshua Mitchell has explained, such behavior is not intended to signal virtue so much as innocence. We are not guilty of racism, the corporations proclaim. And in our age, that is the only guilt that matters. Economic exploitation, greed, and dishonesty are, by contrast, no longer cardinal sins—if they remain sins at all. Ramaswamy wrote his book not merely to denounce hypocrisy. He thinks that the unholy marriage between wokeness and capitalism ultimately represents the “death of our democracy.” He indicts woke capitalism for creating a system in which “business elites [tell] ordinary Americans what they’re supposed to do and how they’re supposed to think. Each presents an equal affront to American democracy.” His critique is mostly directed at “this top-down elitism.”... Corporate wokeness is a lagging indicator, yet another instance of trickle-down leftism. What began in the 1960s in the Civil Rights movement, Black Power, second wave feminism, and the New Left has since infected every major institutional sector in America, including the last bastions of the old America: the churches and the military. Wokeness is now anchored in our laws, celebrated in our culture, and affirmed by our elites. Nowhere is this more evident than in Silicon Valley...
'If Twitter has a moral obligation to censor misinformation and offensive speech in public tweets and private direct messages, does Google have an obligation (and therefore justification) to censor private emails? Will Verizon say it has a responsibility to stop hate and conspiracy from spreading via text messages? If text messages become fair game, then why not live phone conversations too?'
Ramaswamy sees what so many establishment conservatives and libertarians refuse to see: in the eyes of the woke Left, we on the Right are all racists who should be made untouchables. Censorship creep is real... If corporations or CEOs choose to engage in social activism, then they should not enjoy the legal privilege of protection from lawsuits. That privilege, after all, was only afforded to encourage risk-taking in pursuit of profit—not social activism in pursuit of leftist applause. Ramaswamy is well aware that corporations and CEOs may simply claim, in response, that everything they do, including the woke propaganda, is in the service of profit. To which, he says, good! This would “reveal the true essence of stakeholder capitalism for the self-interested farce that it is, in a way that would enlighten consumers and citizens alike about the true motivations of today’s newly woke capitalist class.” Such a defense, of course, would not necessarily hold up in court, and executives would therefore think twice “before writing a check to BLM or exhorting their customers to support Joe Biden or Donald Trump or whatever else it is that they feel an impulse to do from their seat of corporate power.”... Last, is an interesting idea to protect employees from wokeness in the workplace. Ramaswamy convincingly argues that woke ideology fits the EEOC’s definition of a religion and, as such, cannot be imposed on employees. Your boss should no more be able to fire if you deny the divinity of Christ, than if you affirm that all lives matter. Ramaswamy would thus extend the protection of the Civil Rights Act to cover political opinions both on and off the job."
Jerry quits Ben & Jerry’s, saying its independence on social issues has been stifled : r/Economics - "Unilever bought Ben & Jerry's 25 years ago. No one in that era had any idea what social would mean in the future. Today, regardless of where you stand, it's almost a no win situation."
"I just was watching an old Mister Rogers clip and the comments today are “wow Mister Rogers is apparently a modern right wing extremist full of hate” LOL"
Jerry quits Ben & Jerry’s, saying its independence on social issues has been stifled : r/Economics - "Jourdan had it right decades ago, republicans buy shoes too. Plus there's ways to signal political lean without being partisan. Nobody questions where Patagonia would sit on the political spectrum, but they're not running off conservative customers by making public statements taking stances. From a business standpoint, signaling can be very good, but statements can be very bad."
I>Right wingers were claiming this was because he wanted to diss Charlie Kirk, and were making the usual "Everyberg Singlestein Timeowitz" and "every. single. time." comments, but really he just wants to bash Israel, and ironically that's what many of those right wingers want to do too.
Opinion: By embracing defence, ESG reveals its underlying illogic - "After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and new wars in the Middle East, ESG has been adjusting. Defence is being reconsidered, reframed and quietly welcomed back into portfolios. But nothing about defence itself has changed. Weapons still do what they have always done: kill and destroy. If an entire industry can move from “unacceptable” to “strategically necessary” without changing its nature, the issue isn’t the industry. It’s the framework judging it. Start with a simple question: what allows people to live, function and improve their condition over time? By that standard, both defence and energy are non-negotiable. Defence protects societies from external threats. Energy makes societies possible in the first place. You don’t get modern agriculture, transportation or health care without it. You certainly don’t get a functioning defence sector without it. And yet ESG now treats these two pillars of modern life very differently, increasingly including defence but still largely boycotting traditional energy ... Now picture a military built on the energy logic ESG prefers . Missile systems function only when the wind picks up. Air defence performs nicely on clear afternoons but fades out after sunset or on cloudy days. Ground operations run on intermittent power — with backup systems that may or may not carry the load when things get serious. No one would design a defence system that way; it would be national suicide. Yet that is the model being promoted for the energy systems that underpin the entire economy. In defence, reliability is sacred because failure is immediate and visible. In energy, because the consequences of unreliability may accumulate more slowly, reliability standards have been downgraded. Instead, we’ve pushed toward sources that are diffuse, weather-dependent and heavily reliant on extensive backup to make them usable at scale. ESG is less about identifying actual economic value and more about setting politically correct conditions on investment . Meet the criteria and doors open. Miss them and they close, whatever you actually produce or how useful it is. That changes the nature of the market. It becomes less about performance and more about ideological alignment. Companies spend more time documenting, reporting, and anticipating regulatory compliance because that is what determines access. Whether they contribute meaningfully to human well-being becomes secondary. Defence is now being folded into ESG because excluding it has become impossible to justify"
