WOKE WEDNESDAY: Ketchup on headlines, Southwest's board fail, award season hits, and CNBC's fun headline jiujitsu
LIVE from a prerecorded Damion free audio file, it’s our first WOKE WEDNESDAY EDITION OF BUSINESS PANTS in 2023.
Joined again today by no one, I’m the one true Matt Moscardi, Lord of Board Sabermetrics.
In today’s ketchup bag called January 4, 2023, ketchup, awards, and ketchup!!
Up top - a thanks to our sponsor ESGauge, your ESG data solutions provider
Also - we’ll be back doing regular shows next week when Damion returns, including our 2023 Predictiongasm show, so keep coming back
MATT1
SO WHAT DID WE MISS? Lemme see… with Damion STILL gone since apparently France doesn’t have internet, I’ll catch us up:
Comcast had a huge holiday season data breach
Tencent’s CEO Pony Ma told his employees they’re “lazy” and busy “chilling on the weekends, playing ball”
Not to be outdone, Home Depot’s founder said “nobody works anymore” because of “socialism” and “woke people [who] have taken over the world.
This won’t be a problem for McDonald’s who launched their first automated location
In more disappointing news, Charlie Munger might not get that windowless dorm after all since a five month review of the project concluded it had a “prison like design”, to which Munger said the report was “all horseshit”
Not that anyone could have gotten to the dorm this holiday season, or anywhere for that matter, since we had the massive Southwest Airlines meltdown
The CEO did say there wasn’t a way to apologize enough, then said he couldn’t apologize enough again, but apparently one group has figured out how not to apologize entirely: the board
WE’VE GOT YOU COVERED - who would you like to apologize to you more?
The most influential board member at 17% of influence, Gary Kelly, executive chair and former CEO of Southwest who didn’t pay to upgrade their systems?
Or maybe Bill Cunningham, second most influential on the board at 14%, who has a stellar 22 year tenure and chairs the nominating committee and sits on the audit committee? He failed on both money AND fellow board members!
Or maybe Doug Brooks, old white male who ranks as weak on TSR, return on assets, AND carbon, proving once and for all that you CAN suck at financial returns and spew carbon?
Or what about Thomas Gilligan and David Hess, who each individually have connections to ELEVEN OTHER BOARD MEMBERS? Compromised much?
Should we be upset that 70% of the board are current or ex-CEOs? Or that the average age of a board responsible for advanced technology for booking passengers is 71 years young?
Or should we be upset that the entire board has returned below the 25th percentile of stock return in the last five years?
Speaking of angry, everyone still thinks ESG sucks!
Republicans see little resistance from the business lobby
Viking virtues can help defeat woke enemies of America - Fox News
Inside the Great Anti-ESG Backlash - RealClearPolitics
Louisiana conservatives consider ban on liberal business agendas ... - Louisiana Weekly
Now that we’re caught up mostly, it’s time to go over some of the awards for awards season, including
First, a group called the New Tolerance Campaign announced it’s Worst of the Woke 2022 awards! FINALLY! The criteria was “institutions pushing phony tolerance under the banners of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ and ‘environmental, social, and governance’ initiatives. Winners include:
Disney
BlackRock
Apple
Twitter (for pre-Elon censorship)
American Express
Of those, New Tolerance should know that it turns out some of their companies have a lot more tolerance for white people than they thought?
On Newsweek’s Most Diverse companies using market research from Plant-A Insights, both Blackrock and American Express got top marks. Apparently ignoring that Blackrock’s active portfolio managers are 71% white and male. But Disney, Apple, and Twitter did not make the list. Don’t worry, though, Home Depot, the home of lazy woke socialist employees, DID make the list. Also making the list, bastions of diversity and liberalism such as Koch Industries, Lockheed Martin, Bank of America, and of course, Southwest Airlines.
In Yahoo’s less “data driven” 15 most hated companies, they… read some other articles of hated companies and sort of put them together? Noting that some of the companies have been hated a long time as a way to explain how AIG, 15 years after the financial crisis, is somehow still on there? The top five companies were:
Dish Network
Bank of America
Meta
Chrysler
United Airlines
Of those, only Bank of America somehow managed to make the top 200 most sustainable companies also, making it hated, diverse, and sustainable simultaneously. HP got the top spot though, with Clorox making the top five because if you bleach everything, it is more sustainable.
Proving once again - almost all your lists are stupid and worthless. If you’re going to buy a list, BUY OURS - IT’S BETTER. We have the most powerful board members using real live data, we have the Female Power Index, which highlights companies where female influence is greater than their body count… we have it all.
But let’s end on fun with headlines at CNBC:
From… The year of ESG was worse in politics than stock market performance - CNBC
…to The market’s most political stock picks had a bad year, but they’ll be back in 2023
