Tag: corporate social justice

How Else Should DOGE Change America?

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Up till now my thoughts on DOGE combing through the federal budget involved how much money could be stripped from the budget deficit.  But something else occurs to me.  In addition to the wasteful spending on hare-brained research projects and woke propaganda we will also learn which companies have benefitted most from government contracts (both defense and non-defense).  And this list may explain the agendas some of these companies follow.  For instance, how much money does Google get from the federal government.  Does this money represent a significant part of Google’s revenues?  Does it have any effect on the agenda that Google pursues?  Also, if that agenda is biased against conservative individuals and corporations can the Trump administration dissuade Google from this agenda by threatening their government contracts?

Here I’m using Google as an example.  For instance, defense contractors like Raytheon, Boeing, etc. depend for a very large chunk of their income on defense contracts.  They are beholden to the DoD for their very existence.  Forcing them to drop practices and attitudes that clash with the directives of the Trump administration is assured to work.  Using this kind of approach, it seems that great inroads can be made in the private sector.  Law suits, audits of corporate documents and whistle-blower activity could go a long way in de-woke-ifying much of the corporations that do significant business with the federal government.

Next up would be lawsuits against banks that “de-bank” conservative businesses and individuals.  De-banking has been the subject of frequent stories about individuals and companies that don’t toe the line on woke practices.  A good example is the free-speech social platform Gab that has been forced to go to incredible lengths to work around the de-banking and other financial boycotting that woke corporations have instituted against it.  It seems that a Trump administration Justice Department should already be investigating any and all complaints from conservatives and their companies both as individual crimes and as part of a RICO conspiracy.  In fact, I’ll go further.  Even though we’re only one month into the Trump administration, I’m already disappointed that investigations haven’t already been announced into these practices.

And if DOGE really wants something interesting to investigate let them set some of their AI geniuses loose on Google’s AI and find out why it always creates images of the Founding Fathers or Vikings or any other exclusively northern European individuals as if they were indigenous to Sub-Saharan Africa.  I’m sure people with the correct computer savvy would very quickly locate the smoking gun of anti-white discrimination in these Google products.  And then Google would be forced to explain how this little pet project doesn’t violate the ban on DEI in federal contracts to Donald Trump personally or risk losing the enormous contracts they currently have with Washington.

Well, maybe that last is too ambitious.  But you get the idea.  I’m convinced the federal government has been picking winners and losers by the selection of contractors and this selection is tied to the “politics” of these contracting companies.  Eliminating the biases by forcing changes on these companies, or better, by selecting alternative companies that do not have a leftist bias, could enormously shift the current leftist bias in corporate America.

And finally, the black hole of leftist bias, the dreaded “terms of service.”  Companies tack a wall of text to their service agreement that provides them with literally an infinite number of objections to anything you could possibly do as a sentient being in the Milky Way galaxy, but then refuse to tell you exactly which of the myriads of conditions, they claim you have violated.  What is needed is a federal law that states that if a company claims you are in violation of their terms of service, then they have to provide a detailed explanation of this violation.  And if a US citizen wants to dispute this claim there will be a federal arbiter to hear the dispute gratis.

Well, that’s enough of that.  Me daydreaming about Trump and Musk punishing woke companies is fun but farfetched.  But investigating the relationships between the federal government (and Congress) and the contractors that get government contracts will be an even bigger story of bias, waste, graft and corruption than the NGOs that have been such an interesting grab bag to fish around in.

Imagine If This is Really True

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Imagine if there really were lawyers willing to sue employers for discrimination based on political views.  That might make a dent in the woke corporate crap currently going on.

23JUN2023 – Bud Light Redux

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The video below was the first tweet Bud Light has put out since April.  Sucks being them.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 11MAY2023 – Tone Deaf

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Mark Twain once said that history doesn’t always repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

I think we may be seeing that rhyming with AB InBev and Budweiser.

I believe it was in the late 1980s that Tomkins PLC, a British conglomerate, bought Smith & Wesson.

They did not understand the US market, or the firearms market or firearms for that matter.

They proceeded to make a number of missteps, not the least of which was to be the only major gun maker to sign on with Clinton’s AWB, HUD restrictions and other anti-second amendment policies.

This led to reduced market share and loss of revenue and negative profits. Things got so bad that the US company Saf-T-Hammer bought the company for $45 million – a fraction of what Tomkins paid.

Now we have the spectacle of InBev, a Belgium company, who purchased Anheuser-Busch a few years ago. InBev clearly does not understand the US market as demonstrated by their partnering with a transsexual to try to sell beer to American blue collar workers.

Bud light sales are down over 25% and a country star recently couldn’t even give it away at a concert.

Now the disease appears to be spreading to other AB brands including Michelob and Budweiser.

 

I wonder if things will get so bad that, like Tomkins, InBev ends up dumping AB at a massive loss.

Truth be told, it would not hurt my feelings.

Bud Light Replaces the Marketing Witch

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Alissa Heinerscheid has taken a “leave of absence” and has been replaced as VP of Marketing for Bud Light.  I hope the Bud Light drinkers stick by their boycott.  A really painful loss of revenue is just the right lesson that these corporate geniuses need to experience.

And not because we hope they’ll learn their lesson.  It should be for two reasons.  One is an object lesson for the rest of the masters of the universe out there to see what happens when you stab your customers in the back.

And secondly just for pure revenge on these jerks.  Just plain spite.  I love spite.

Anheuser-Busch CEO Makes Statement Without an Apology

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Brendan Whitworth is the Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO.  On Friday he made a statement about the Dylan Mulvaney sponsorship which basically said:

NOTHING.

He said. “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” and “We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”

So if they never intended to divide people why would they pick someone who by his very self-identification would antagonize the great majority of Bud Light customers?  Well, because their corporate culture is antithetical to the beliefs of the people who they sell their product to.  And they’d rather virtue-signal to their peers about how enlightened they are, even if it infuriates their customers.

My favorite comment on this apology was: “NOPE. Not good enough. Boycott continues until full apology, fire VP Mrkt, and Mulvaney dropped. Either that or Anheuser-Busch becomes the next Schlitz.”

Well, this is the perfect test case.  Bud Light is Joe Six-Pack’s go to beverage.  If there is one product that could be boycotted to good effect it’s this one.  And it’s the perfect time of year.  We’re on the cusp of barbecue weather and baseball and every other sports event but football.  So let’s just see where this goes.  If you never hear another thing about this then it’s hopeless.  Anheuser-Busch needs Bud Light profitable to stay in business.  If they never give a real apology and fire the wicked witch of the west then basically we have no clout at all.  So stay tuned.  I’ll follow up on this one.

Real People and Pods

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(Updated)

Corporate America has mutated over the course of the last thirty years into a completely different creature.  Back in the ‘90s if you worked for even a cold-blooded corporation like Raytheon and even though you knew (and they admitted) that you were nothing but a faceless cog to them that they would layoff at the drop of an earnings point still there was an honesty about what they were about and what your place in the company was.  You were there because they had measured your competency and they had work that they were willing to pay you to do.  And as long as you accomplished that work in a satisfactory manner and they continued to have that work for you to do, then you were a cog in good standing with Raytheon.

But in the last five years a very different model has existed at American corporations.  A larger and larger proportion of the company’s time and energy is invested in social justice.  And not just in the trappings and theater that corporations have up until now been involved in.  These trappings are things like sensitivity training and “celebrations” of diversity where they hand out rainbow magnets with which everyone must festoon their cubicles.  We’ve all learned to ignore all that crap because it’s annoying but relatively harmless.

What isn’t harmless is the diversity hires that don’t work.  I group this category into two cases.  The first case is the out and out hopeless employees.  A few years back we had an opening for a senior process engineer.  This requires someone with about five years of experience.  We don’t need a genius but we do need to have someone who knows the basic requirements for the process equipment that we use and also competency in the engineering knowledge that we typically need.  So, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, material science and the good manufacturing practices that the FDA expects in a biopharma plant.  My boss at the time had a found a candidate.  The candidate was a senior engineer at one of our competitors.  But more importantly she was a black woman from Africa.  He was in heaven.  She was a threefer; a woman, black and a foreigner.  He sang her praises and told me how much she would bring to the process engineering group through her pluperfect quantities of diversity.  For a minute I was afraid he would jump up on his desk and start dancing or burst into tears.  I nodded my head and inwardly hoped for the best.

Well, she was utterly unqualified.  She was completely unfamiliar with even the simplest equipment and instrument components.  One of the first thing a chemical process engineer becomes familiar with at his first job in a processing plant is relief valves.  The senior engineers love to stick the newbies with the thankless task of sizing and specifying these devices.  There are a bunch of safety cases that have to be considered that have to do with things like a fire breaking out in the area or a runaway reaction occurring.  I was prepared to have to teach her how to do the sizing calculations.  What I wasn’t expecting was that she didn’t even know what a relief valve is.  I was kind of stunned.  What I realized then was that they had hired someone who wasn’t an engineer.  She wouldn’t be able to do any of the work that her spot on the team would get assigned.  Six people would have to do the work of seven.  Luckily for us this very personable woman spent most of the remainder of her time with us either on maternity leave or sick leave.  She ended up having two and a half children before she left for her next diversity engineering position with one of our competitors.

That’s the first category, the completely useless.  The second category is not as absurd but much more damaging and demoralizing.  This is the Supergirl category.  Here they select a straight out of college young woman, preferably an attractive blonde girl, and put her in charge of a large group of qualified technical people and by dint of power point slides and corporate blather elevate her to upper management.  She has a very high-ranking male boss as her mentor who makes sure that everyone on the team understands that failure is not an option.  So, if she decides to institute a continuous improvement program that requires everyone to work eighty-hour weeks to constantly update the systems in an almost random fashion on a bimonthly basis then that is what everyone will do if they want to remain on the “team.”

And that is what will be.  For the younger people they’ll accept this nonsense because they’re trying to build a career.  But it’s extremely discouraging for the qualified people working under this wunderkind.  And not just the men.  Plenty of the senior women are outraged that they’ve been leapfrogged over by goldilocks and they immediately assume she’s sleeping with the boss.  So, morale goes straight to hell and anyone who can leave, does.  Eventually the problems this causes are laid at the feet of her boss and she gets kicked upstairs to the executive suite where the whole thing probably happens again.

And in the last year since the George Floyd fiasco things have gotten even worse.  Now straight white men have been targeted as people who can be openly harassed as bad people.  This is accelerating the exodus of qualified professionals from these woke companies.  The people who remain are a combination of either those who desperately need their jobs or those who agree with the social justice narrative.  And there are even straight white men who fit the latter case.  Canadians seem especially well suited for this environment.

But that brings me to the point of this post.  In the old days even at the most dehumanizing corporate hellholes you would still find plenty of humans, people you wouldn’t mind sharing a beer or playing a game of cards with.  In fact, everyone could agree on just how bad the company stunk.  But in today’s woke corporations they are actively selecting both by positive and negative reinforcement for pod people.  Working in a place that has a dysfunctional selection process that creates a caste system that ignores merit will create an echo chamber that normal people will find intolerable and in the long run will make the company unprofitable.

A few companies (e.g., Basecamp) have decided to reverse this trend and select merit as the basis for hiring and advancement.  Hopefully this will grow into a trend.  But until it does the corporate environment will be a bleak vista for the normal Joe.

06JAN2022 Update

Chemist

I’ve seen many of these hires as well. One of our useless hires (Previous employer) made a major mistake that could have killed people. It was a safety violation and management had no choice but to fire her. But they couldn’t just fire her! No, the Gods demanded a sacrifice! So a senior technician (White male, so who cares?) was also fired for “Not catching her mistake”. Apparently, it was his job to keep an eye on her. Who knew?

I had a wunderkind as a boss shortly after grad school so I stayed to build my career. This woman could do no wrong. Like you said, when the problems became apparent, they fired her boss – and gave her his job. A year later she went on maternity leave for 3 months and came back to a VP position. Must be nice.

 

 

07JAN2022 Update

Jason

Unfortunately, I’ve seen the wunderkind crap too many times. I’ve even been passed over because I didn’t fit the apparent “demographic need” (ie, I wasn’t female and attractive). I had been at one very large company for 6 years (12 years of total experience in the workforce) and was deemed not the right fit for a manager role that they gave to a 23 year old. To be fair, she was gorgeous. I could see the draw. Beyond that though, she ticked several other boxes as well… she was personable, easy-going, and seemed to be a real “go-getter,” etc.

She just wasn’t real bright. And the M&A role she was promoted into needed a bright person. She actually skipped one “level” and was essentially promoted twice into this role. They did offer me a transfer into the group, but it would have been a lateral move and I would have been working for this girl. I passed on the move, much to my manager’s relief.

She is now employed with the same company and has been promoted a couple times beyond that manager role to a “director,” whatever that means.

The company was trying the “woke” thing, even back in 2011 when this particular story took place. They had a women’s development group, etc. We even had meetings where they told us that they were not trying to “promote” women just because they were women even though that’s exactly what they were doing. They apparently forgot that actions speak loudly, and we weren’t blind just because we were men.