|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
One part of the ESG movement has been to treat wokeness as an investor benefit and deviations from leftist agendas an investment risk. For example, environmentalist movements have targeted energy companies, accusing them of fraud and violating the trust of investors, by failing to disclose that the planet will explode unless everyone drives Teslas.
Interestingly enough, Disney has disclosed its wokeness as a risk to the SEC.
“Generally, our revenues and profitability are adversely impacted when our entertainment offerings and products, as well as our methods to make our offerings and products available to consumers, do not achieve sufficient consumer acceptance. Further, consumers’ perceptions of our position on matters of public interest, including our efforts to achieve certain of our environmental and social goals, often differ widely and present risks to our reputation and brands.”
That is an admission that Disney’s efforts to “achieve certain of our environmental and social goals” are harming its profitability.
The question then is why should investors tolerate behavior by a company that is damaging its bottom line?
What if Bob Iger were just wasting $100 million in company money to make a movie about how great his left shoe is? Instead, hundreds of millions, when accounting for marketing costs, were wasted on Marvels. That adds to the burning woke dumpster fire of cash dumped on woke disasters like Strange World or the live-action Little Mermaid remake.
Disney shareholders are suffering because of the politics of its leadership. The company has admitted that. The question is will shareholders go on putting more money behind Disney’s money-losing woke politics?
And the added question is how long did Disney know that its woke politics were harming its profits without disclosing that?
Can its failure to disclose that be considered defrauding investors?
>The question is will shareholders go on putting more money behind Disney’s money-losing woke politics?
American shareholders might not, but Chinese and maybe even Arab investors will just to hurt America.
You’re putting the cart before the horse. Morality trumps politics. Or more precisely politics is derived from morality. Show me what a person or a society considers moral and I will show you their political convictions.
Making money, seeking profit, rests upon a particular moral code. A moral code that believes that man comes first. The self comes first. Self-preservation comes first. Individual, personal, happiness comes first. Laissez-Faire Capitalism rests upon the moral code of ethical egoism, of rational self-interest, of rational selfishness.
But what if a CEO, company, or society, comes to believe that selfishness is immoral and serving others is man’s highest virtue and duty? Well then, seeking profit and gain comes to be seen as immoral and sacrificing profit for wokeness, or Nazism, or Islam, or communism, comes to be seen as the right thing, the moral thing, to do.
What many people fail to understand is that the Nazi, Muslim, Marxist, and Woke truly believe that their political system is truly moral.
“Most German industrialists were not pro-Nazi prior to 1933; to them almost any kind of regime, including the Republic, was acceptable. Nor were business contributions to the Nazi cause a significant factor in Hitler’s success, which is an ideological, not a financial phenomenon. (Money makes it easy to disseminate propaganda; it cannot define the ideas to be propagated or determine the country’s receptivity to them.)” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom In America”
“In spite of all their irrationalities, inconsistencies, hypocrisies and evasions, the majority of men will not act, in major issues, without a sense of being morally right and will not oppose the morality they have accepted. They will break it, they will cheat on it, but they will not oppose it; and when they break it, they take the blame on themselves. The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers—and mankind’s tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.” – Ayn Rand
If religion is “faith without evidence,” then the most religious person posting at FMP is you, THX.
Your Rand quote admits the majority of men are irrational BUT have a sense of morality. So much for your definition that reason = man’s mind. IF reason is man’s mind and the majority of men are unreasonable, THEN only a minority of men have a mind at all. This logical justifies Rand’s frequent referral to men as “no better animals.” You would be ruled by such a woman?
Further, IF this morality is something that causes men to “blame themselves,” and yet is the “greatest of all intellectual powers,” THEN Rand is conflating reason with morality as the supreme good. This is word twisting at its very best.
When you tangle with me, all you ever do, THX, is limp-wristed twisting of word meanings. “Grace” become “fact.” “Reason” become “man’s mind” (but the majority have unreasonable minds). Or “reason” becomes “morality.” You cannot see the utopian hell that emerges from your premises.
But, prove me wrong. Show all the thinking people you are right at refute this:
https://www.prageru.com/video/is-evil-rational
Or answer my post in today’s article about Derek Chauvin.
Pompously opinionated as of divinely right.
Walt’s granddaughter Abigail, a social engineering nut-job, has much in common with the deceased Sarah Winchester, the Winchester Repeating Arms heiress. In both cases it seems that money, and how that money came into their possession, caused a mental meltdown. Sarah built a house with doors and stairways to nowhere to keep the ghosts of those killed by the rifle amused and at bay. Abigail woke up one day and realized she was better off than 99% of the world and stated, “I haven’t slept well since”.
Sidebar: If you’re uber-wealthy, don’t leave the money to your kids. It only messes them up.
While Bob Iger, State Farm, Vanguard and Blackrock are considered majority shareholders in Disney, they only represent 20% at best combined…and just like Sarah spent an exorbitant amount of her inheritance perpetually building onto the mansion and wasting that money, so too will Abigail continue to burn Disney to the ground with wokeness because profits don’t matter.
I’d say it is an admission that they breached their fiduciary duty to shareholders (i.e., investors) to maximize profits. This duty is imposed by law. The law does not require, or even allow, a corporation’s officers and directors to use the investors’ money to pursue their own personal political goals with investor’s money especially when detrimental to the company’s profits. Given the poor performance of Disney’s stock, I would hope for, and expect, some shareholders’ lawsuits.
Disney has been producing movies lately that bombed big time, Wish was their most recent flop