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BudLight continues on death watch. Anyone whose compensation is based on commissions from sales of the beer is hurting, to say the least. The company that produces BudLight has lost billions in market value, as has the Target corporation.
Victor Davis Hanson suggested that a sleeping giant has now awakened. He argued that conservative consumers have figured out that they can influence corporate behavior by exercising their marketplace clout.
True enough, radical leftists are denouncing the consumer boycotts as some kind of right wing plot, but still, you and I have every right to shop or not to shop wherever we want, for whatever reasons tickles our fancy.
If you ask yourself how corporate America could have been so completely corrupted and how it allowed itself to shill for leftist causes, the answers are now appearing. It turns out that leftist politicians have leaned on investment firms, to the point of threatening to take their business elsewhere. They have forced these firms to buy on to the leftist environmentally friendly and sustainability agenda, lest the politicians seek alternative management for their massive pension funds.
In turn the funds accumulate massive amounts of stock in various companies and then have the power to tell the companies that they must support the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda.
The New York Post reports one side of the story:
During an appearance on Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Anson Frericks said behind-the-scenes politicking from firms like New York-based BlackRock and Pennsylvania-based Vanguard spur many of the controversial decisions sparking nationwide boycotts from longtime more conservative customers — such as the ill-fated Bud Light promotion with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney
He said BlackRock, Vanguard and another firm, State Street, manage about $20 trillion in capital and use their clout to promote agenda politics being pushed on them by progressive lawmakers overseeing government pension funds that the companies profit from.
One of the firms manages California’s pension fund — the largest in the country — and California politicians can have a big say in the corporate governance and politicking of the firms they invest so heavily in, he added.
It seems fairly obvious that this problem can be solved by having red state politicians pull their funds from these companies and invest with more neutral advisors. If red states fail to do so, they are simply cowards.
On top of all this, a group called the Human Rights Campaign has been handing out scores to companies that support the gay rights and trans rights agenda.
The Epoch Times reports this aspects of the story. It notes that after Anheuser Busch tried to distance itself from its Dylan Mulvaney fiasco, the HRC downgraded its score.
On May 9, a month after the initial Mulvaney backlash, Anheuser-Busch lost its perfect Corporate Equality Index (CEI) score, which is overseen by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBT advocacy group.
The CEI measures how well a company’s policies adhere to a set of criteria concerning “LGBTQ equality” in the workplace. Businesses with the highest possible 100 CEI points are given the title “Best Place To Work For LGBTQ Equality.” More than 800 American businesses met all the criteria to earn a percent rating and the designation last year, according to the Campaign’s latest report.
In response to the loss of a perfect CEI score—and in spite of the customer backlash, Anheuser-Busch pledged last week to donate $200,000 to support “LGBTQ+ business owners of color.”
As author James Lindsay says, this is purely and simply an extortion racket. It uses corporate advertising and marketing as a means to advance a radical agenda. The only choice that people have is to boycott the products that are promoting the agenda. It’s called democracy.
The last question is whether or not shareholders can sue companies whose stock collapsed as the result of a boycott.
In fact, conservative legal group America First Legal is preparing to sue Anheuser-Busch, as well as several other big-name brands, for allegedly tanking their shareholder value through their Pride Month promotions that triggered outrage and boycotts.
On Tuesday, America First Legal called on anyone whose shares in LGBT product-promoting companies lost value to reach out to them to join a class action lawsuit they are working to file against those companies.
He has also recommended Congressional hearings to expose the extortion. Aside from that, the solutions of boycotts and of firing the investment advisory firms seems clearly to be a good step.
It is not an accident that BlackRock is flooding the airways with a new ad campaign, to the effect that it manages pension funds for police officers and firefighters. How patriotic can you be?
Still, the issue is going to be whether politicizing investment decisions is the best for those whose money these funds are managing. If their obsession with politicking has cost their investors value, they might have a problem.
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2 comments:
No RICO lawsuits in the works?
The only way that we could have an effective boycott is if not only Red States, but ALL Conservative and Independents pulled their money from the Stock Market all at the same time. I'd be surprised if any of these Corporate Cartels or globalist banksters could survive 90 days if that happened: 30 would probably see most of them go under. That would bring both the Beltway and their bosses on Wall Street to their knees.
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