by Peter Löcke //
What does every company want? It wants to sell its product or service successfully on the market. Part of a successful sales recipe is always intelligent marketing. Customers buy both the product and the image of the product. Everyone wants to identify with the brand they are buying. Marketing, in turn, also follows the spirit of the times. What is trendy at the moment or in the near future, what is hip and what is en vogue?
These are all truisms that don't require a degree in business studies. It is therefore not surprising that small companies and large corporations, banks, breweries and clothing companies are jumping on the rainbow bandwagon that has been sweeping the entire Western world for some time now. Everyone wants to be woke. You may criticize that or not. However, it seems to pay off. Painting product lines and logos in bright colors seems to be almost as effective at boosting sales as the omnipresent sustainability that every company claims for itself.
But that is not the case. It often doesn't pay off. The average man doesn't want to wear his wife's swimsuit or drink LGBTQ-plus-friendly beer. And parents certainly don't want to buy their toddler demonic lingerie. This is no longer intelligent marketing, but rather pervasive propaganda that puts customers off. This has consequences for companies that are reflected in hard cash. The US brewery Anheuser-Busch suffered massive losses after it tried to advertise its best-known beer Budweiser in a particularly woke way. The second largest American discounter Target is even said to have lost ten billion dollars within ten days. So the exciting question is:
Why do large companies harm themselves?
An excerpt. In Germany, the debate about diversity, gender, rainbows, wokeism and the like is generally ideological. A veritable culture war has broken out on a social, media and political level. The US channel Fox News took a different approach in a morning show published at the beginning of June. It followed the money.
Why are even billion-dollar fish like Target and Budweiser damaging themselves? It can't be political pressure alone. The answer is obvious. There are even bigger fish in every water. Fish like BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street.
You can watch the exciting five-minute Fox News video here in the original English. (An excerpt from the Fox morning show from June 2, 2023.) We have freely translated and transcribed it for you. The show is hosted by Jesse Waters. Anson Frericks, a former CEO of Budweiser, joins the program as an interview guest. In addition, there are frightening statements from Laurence Douglas Fink, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of BlackRock, the world's largest asset management company.
The program is packed with insight and has the self-explanatory title: "How Wall Street is forcing American companies to become woke."
How Wall Street is forcing America to become woke (Transcript)
Presenter Jesse Waters:
Not inclusive enough for a trans-Satanic clothing line for kids? Then clean out your locker, Target, because that's what everyone is doing right now. In 10 days, the company has lost 10 billion dollars. So why is corporate America setting itself on fire? This is about more than just money. The people who are forcing corporations to go Bud Light already have enough money themselves. They have so much money that they are looking for things to do. Who are these companies? Companies like Vanguard, BlackRock and others that own big stakes in Target or Disney. With all their influence as shareholders, they can force other companies to do what they want.
Laurence Douglas Fink, CEO of BlackRock, at a panel discussion of the NYT:
Behaviors must change. That's one thing we ask companies to do. They have to enforce behaviors and at BlackRock we enforce behaviors. What we do internally is that if they don't implement those changes, your compensation could be impacted. You have to enforce behaviors and if you don't enforce those behaviors, whether it's in terms of gender or race or whatever you want to call the makeup of your team, you will feel the consequences.
Jesse Waters:
So we've gone from "the customer is always right" to "screw you!". And it's all because rich white liberals on Wall Street feel guilty because they're billionaires. So they're forcing corporations to go woke to pay off the social justice gods. And that's brilliant class warfare too. The peasants won't storm the castle if they think the rich guy who owns the castle is nice and makes everything sparkle. Let's talk to Anson Frericks. He's a former Anheuser-Busch manager and co-founder of Strive Asset Management. How does it actually work, if these people are telling the truth?
Anson Frericks:
Thank you Jesse for having me here this morning. That's just how it works. It's pretty simple. You just have to follow the money when you look at BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard. They manage 20 trillion dollars of capital, but it's not their own money. It's the money of ordinary citizens, firefighters, police officers, doctors, who generally have their money either through 401k [ed. note: retirement plan model in the US] or through other large pension funds. Large pension funds like the state of California, which manages the largest fund in the US. Many of the politicians in these states, for example in California, have recently mandated these large pension funds to divest from things like fossil fuel oil and gas, and when Bill de Blasio was mayor of New York, they did the same thing. But they're also selling BlackRock and State Street. If they want to manage their money, they have to commit to things like diversity, equity and inclusion and make company-wide commitments that they then impose on all big corporations in America.
Jesse Waters:
So the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, says to a BlackRocker "We're not going to send you a 100 billion dollar government pension if you invest in Exxon Mobil. We're only going to send it to you if you invest it in woke companies." And that's what they do in those places. They invest it there and those companies make them winners and then everybody gets paid.
You left Anheuser-Busch because a few of these messes happened there.
Anson Frericks:
Oh, I left Anheuser-Busch not necessarily because of Anheuser-Busch, but because of a lot of other companies. For example, I lived in Atlanta in 2021, and the citizens of Georgia elected representatives to make sure we had voting laws. You have to have an ID to vote and with that ID you can vote. That seems like a pretty logical law. I was a little surprised that Georgia didn't have it, but what I thought was crazy was that BlackRock came in after the fact and said they're against this law. We think this is bad for democracy, this is bad for society, and basically they then got companies like Coca-Cola, Delta and even Major League Baseball to cancel an All-Star game. And when I saw all of that, it was bad for the capital markets because instead of these companies just supplying soft drinks or playing major league baseball, they're getting involved in these political issues. It's bad for these companies because they're alienating a lot of their customers, as we're seeing with companies like Anheuser-Busch right now. But frankly, it's also bad for democracy because citizens should be able to decide these things through free and fair elections. Not necessarily by a small group of asset managers and CEOs telling individuals how they should live.
Jesse Waters:
I remember when the left hated Wall Street and now they love it because Wall Street works the way they do. Thank you so much for joining us. And it's true, you just have to follow the money. This way follows the truth every time. We're glad you could join us.
Anson Frericks:
Thank you very much.
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5 Responses
That's the crux of the matter: "But frankly, it's also bad for democracy, because citizens should be able to decide these things through free and fair elections. Not necessarily by a small group of asset managers and CEOs telling individuals how they should live."
For me, the worst despisers of democracy are now those who constantly use the word "democracy" as an alibi for non-democratic intentions.
Can anyone please tell me which free and democratic elections can still decide that something changes in this system? I would be happy to receive nominations for the party that does not tell individuals how they should live and is not controlled or dependent on BlackRock, Vanguard, etc. As soon as I vote for a party and give it my vote, I surrender all my rights as a citizen to that party. It's similar to a living will. That's why we don't need to be surprised about the consequences of our vote.
Everyone should live as they wish, I will tolerate it but not accept it, nor will I go along with this gender nonsense.
be forced.
Thank you Mr. Löcke ... finally another article on this (Danisch? Has also recognized it).it is extremely important that the "woke work" as a stranglehold of Blackrock is dragged into the light ...
I'll keep it short: Merz ("it's only because of gendering") must go!
I will never listen to this unspeakable "rainbow nonsense" and "gender nonsense".
go off. I still think it is perfectly legitimate to say that there is only a man and a woman and that a family can only arise naturally from this. For me, there is also only one version of marriage: 1 woman & 1 man. Enough is enough!
(My freely allowed opinion according to paragraph
5 of the Basic Law of the FRG)
I have had a delta kite that I have flown every year since I was a child. Now I don't like it so much anymore because it's in the colors of the rainbow. On the other hand, you can hang all sorts of things on a kite like that. Maybe I'll get a Russian flag and tie it to the line. Let's see if anyone comes by...