LTP News Sharing:
“The Coca-Cola corporation has adopted a plan to revert back to racial discrimination against non-whites after discriminating in favor of non-whites for at least the last half decade,” National Center General Counsel Scott Shepard reveals in a commentary published at RealClearMarkets.
Of course, Scott and the rest of our Free Enterprise Project team have tried to warn Coca-Cola for years “that the New Racism was no different – constitutionally, legally or morally – than the Old Racism, and that the company would suffer from their embrace of it.”
Interestingly, by now establishing discriminatory quotas to reduce non-white employment figures by over 30%, “the Coca-Cola Company in the end has done opponents of DEI, ESG and the rest a terrific favor. It has demonstrated for us what we’ve been telling it for years: there is no ‘positive’ discrimination, no ‘affirmative’ bigotry.”
Read Scott’s entire commentary below.
I’d like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love
grow apple trees and honeybees and snow-white turtle doves
I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony
I’d like to buy the world a coke and keep it company
Those were the lyrics to what was up ‘til then—and still may be— the world’s most famous (and frustratingly catchy) commercial. (See for yourself.) First aired in 1971— dripping with the saccharine faux-sincerity of a giant company playing at hippy, while full of truly sincere, genuine hippies slathered in grammar-school solutions to vast problems and perhaps a bit of knock-off, roadside patchouli —the commercial nevertheless tried to express nice thoughts nicely, and thus reasonably represented a then-great American company known throughout the world for the right reasons.
Coke, along with blue jeans and rock music, baseball and Hollywood, liberty and vast piles of wealth: that’s what the United States meant to most of the world. And it is what the U.S. meant in particular for that third of the globe “from Stettin to Trieste,” and eastward, trapped behind the “iron curtain” that “ha[d] descended across the continent” of Europe, and thence to Asia and beyond, to crush the hopes, rights and most basic human dignity of a billion and more suffering souls beneath the ever-poised jack boot of all-encompassing government power.
Scott Shepard
Closer to home, the Coca-Cola corporation was one of the engines that ginned up the motive power of growing Atlanta, “the city too busy to hate,” and that propelled the evils of racism beyond its perimeter long before the rise of its perimeter highway belt or even a single 20-story building. It rightly meant “liberty, wealth and joy” to the world because it was archetypically American: minding its business, making a living, getting ahead—and thereby making everyone else’s lives just a little bit better.
Half a century is a long, long time.
For Coca-Cola, the last half century has marked a fearsome and excruciating decline right back down into the depths of bigotry and racial obsession from which it helped lift its corner of the country before the onset of its malevolent senescence.
It’s hardly news that Coke was an early and aggressive adopter of the New Racism, &c., of the New ‘20s. It infamously demanded that its outside legal counsel institute race and other forbidden discrimination on behalf of the “diverse” in servicing the Coke contract. It subjected employees to racist training (e.g. “Try to be less white.”). It leapt to be “crystal clear” that Georgia’s voting-integrity law enacted “voter suppression” by asking voters to demonstrate their identity and for closing some of the widest avenues of voter fraud—fraud that it was treason even to think about in federal elections “won” by leftists, but absolutely the deciding factor in state elections won by people who dared not to be Stacy Abrams.
Despite this, though, it was still flabbergasting to learn on Wednesday that Coke’s commitment to racism is so deep and all-consuming that it was willing even to revive and recrudesce upon that older iteration of the evil, the one that Atlanta knew well back in the Old ‘20s. Consumers’ Research discovered, as CR’s Will Hild revealed on X Wednesday, that the Coca-Cola corporation has adopted a plan to revert back to racial discrimination against non-whites after discriminating in favor of non-whites for at least the last half decade.
That bears repeating.
The Coca-Cola corporation has adopted a plan to switch back to racial discrimination against non-whites.
Unbelievable. And absolutely predictable from this benighted corporation demonstrably run these days on principles grounded in equal parts on extremist ideology and unqualified imbecility.
Honest shareholder representatives (including the National Center, which employs me) have warned Coke’s directors and executives at annual shareholder meetings, in shareholder proposals and otherwise that the New Racism was no different – constitutionally, legally or morally – than the Old Racism, and that the company would suffer from their embrace of it.
For this we were excoriated, sneered at, libeled—the usual suite of responses from woke corporate “leaders” faced with basic facts and legitimate shareholder concerns. Companies that have embraced the New Racism (and the rest of the ESG basket of breaches) adopted these tactics –from Larry Fink on down the line—because they couldn’t respond in ways required by their fiduciary duty (openly, honestly, considering all relevant evidence objectively and neutrally) because they were fully aware that the underlying behavior also violated those fiduciary duties. And so corporate America became collectively one enormous fiduciary breach machine, until, by now, no choices are left but to daily dig the hole of constitutional, legal, fiduciary, and moral breach deeper—or to admit to years of planned, systemic, all-encompassing breach and take their appropriate shares of responsibility.
Coke, naturally, kept digging.
Its policy clings to the surface-characteristic obsessions of the woke/ESG/anti-racist/DEI/&c. movement, opening with a declaration that, still, Coke “believe[s] that our diversity should mirror the markets we serve.”
Needless to say, the company is talking about surface-characteristic diversity (race and ethnicity here, but also sex in other contexts) or private-behavior diversity (sexual orientation, likewise). It’s not concerned with the sort of diversity that makes specific people unique, nor the kind that composes the content of a person’s character.
Coke’s position arises from discriminatory and bigoted premises that wholly reject the long struggle to see every person as him- or herself, a unique human being who merits engagement without stereotype or presumption arising from accidental group participation. It assumes that only blacks can sell to blacks, whites to whites, gay people to gay people, &c. (Although once gay tipped over into the self-defined, unmoored “queer,” this bigoted, identitarian logic lost even the coherence of planned and ordered evildoing. Though still evil in construction, in practice “queer” identitarianism just dissolves into nonsense.)
Coca-Cola doubtless would have preferred to stick with the New Racism (and Discrimination) if it could, but Supreme Court decisions in the last two summers have made starkly unavoidable what has always been true. Everyone has the same civil rights. They forbid distinctions based on suspect classifications (e.g., race, sex, sexual orientation, creed, &c.). This includes all such workplace discrimination, even the kind that corporations have pretended were of no legal importance—though touted endlessly as vital in every other way. One example: race-, sex- and orientation-specific employee-resource groups (ERGs). Companies generally encouraged ERG formation by some races, one sex and varying iterations of the congeries of befuddlements that has arisen from young peoples’ efforts to qualify as “diverse” while still living what they think to be unique and authentic lives. A particular race, sex and orientation, on the other hand, were generally prohibited from forming ERGs, though members of those groups were often encouraged to participate as “allies” at the edges of the approved groups – which often meant “allying” to efforts to increase the race, sex and orientation against them, specifically.
This created a dilemma for Coke, where New Discrimination policies appear to have been endemic—systemic even. It seems, as my colleague Stefan Padfield noted on X, that Coke recognized that current staffing levels all by themselves might get plaintiffs whose civil rights Coke had violated past dismissal motions and deep into eye-popping discovery.
This, naturally, the Coca-Cola corporation preferred to avoid. Its response, though, can only make its dilemma far worse: it established discriminatory quotas to reduce non-white employment figures by, as Hild reported Wednesday, “over 30% by 2030.”
It must be hoped for the sake of Coke’s directors and executives that this was a decision gestated in panic. Even in panic mode, though, it is a decision that debars everyone involved in it from retention of fiduciary or leadership positions, at Coca-Cola or anywhere else. Not as a matter of cancelation but because it demonstrates comprehensively that those parties lack the ability to act according to the Constitution, plain law and even minimal fiduciary duty.
There is no doubt: what the company announced are hard quotas. As its own release states clearly, “[b]y 2030, our employee population across all job levels will align with U.S. census data by race/ethnicity.” The pretext of aspiration, of goals-but-somehow-not-quotas – one of a set of transparent dodges that a vast percentage of the biggest U.S. corporations have indulged in over the last five years – falls away pretty quickly and appears to foreclose wiggle room. This is race-discrimination policy, pure and simple, just as were the anti-white policies that led to these statistics. Statistics that Coke once touted and now must flee.
The only distinction to hand is that the company has wrapped itself so thoroughly around the axle of racist ideology and practice that it now finds itself shifting back to the bigotry and discrimination of George Wallace and Orval Faubus, after all these years enacting the bigotry and discrimination of Ibram Kendi and Richard Delgado.
This will not help the company at all. It is no redress of lawlessness and fiduciary breach to commit the same wrongs again against different potential-plaintiff pools. It compounds the wrongdoing in ways both trivial (It’s all the same lawlessness and breach.) and enormous (revealing the company leaders’ lodestar fidelity to discrimination now, discrimination tomorrow, discrimination forever.) As a very practical matter, Coke’s C-suite has by now rendered essentially every employee of Coca-Cola – and many, many applicants, suppliers, contractors, affiliates and other “stakeholders” – potential plaintiffs against the company.
Dumb work if you get it.
As astonishing as this new policy is (or, at least, the clarity with which it has been announced), it was also in a sense foreordained. As noted above, having “in [discrimination s]tepped in so far that should [it] wade no more, [r]eturning were as tedious as go o’er,” the Coca-Cola corporation had built itself a colossal disaster without good—or costless—exits. Two ugly (for the leaders personally) choices, only, remained. They could return, back through and out of the ichor of systemic racism they’d charged into; back toward lawfulness and common decency; taking responsibility for what they had wrought with full knowledge that with responsibility would undoubtedly come liability in various ways. Or they could – and did – go o’er, even deeper into discrimination, lawlessness and breach.
Thing is: For MacBeth, going o’er at least might have resulted in his taking the throne and raising himself above rightful retribution for his evil. For the men and women who led Coke into this festering bog and have chosen to move yet deeper rather than to come—and get—clean: what is their theory of escape? What do they think lies ahead to absolve them if they just keep accumulating more and more of the evils they’ve espoused?
I don’t see any safe exits or even temporary sheltered harbors in that direction at all. Rather, consider only the trouble packed into just one short prepositional phrase in its new policy: “across all job levels.”
That is, Coke’s new/old racist quotas will apply “across all job levels.” Now, business jargon being designed to occlude rather than to convey, this phrase is susceptible to contrary interpretations. It may mean that the company will do its bigotry fine-tuned at every level and classification of job, so that “representative demographics” will be achieved amongst Atlanta-based secretaries and Ontarian security guards and Hindustani bottlers. That is some crazy-systemic, all-encompassing law breaking and duty breaching, right there. Leave no employee unviolated. So that’s a terrible interpretation for the company.
Or the phrase might mean essentially the opposite: that the whole workforce, regardless of its “level,” will be treated as a single block for purposes of illegal discrimination practices. Under this interpretation, room will remain for a C-suite still “overrepresented” according to the Coke Calculus of Correct Color (Hmmm. Ks, perhaps?) and other impermissible metrics to stay serenely in their roles while yet more Joes the bottlers of the Canceled Color, &c., fall under the ax. The damage that the brand will suffer as interested parties pour over the numbers to see if bigotry-victimization-shifting is happening, and to what extent, and to what surface-characteristic group have gone the spoils and the slops, respectively, at every “job level” – a ponderous enormity.
With every decision made or avoided under either interpretation adding to the breach-and-lawlessness stats of the whole of the C-suite, each day will demonstrate anew that everyone at Coke who had been invested with even the scent of a fiduciary duty throughout this long, sordid collapse into one the basest – and dumbest — of moral corruptions must first go, and then pay.
The Coca-Cola Company in the end has done opponents of DEI, ESG and the rest a terrific favor. It has demonstrated for us what we’ve been telling it for years: there is no “positive” discrimination, no “affirmative” bigotry. People are unique human spirits to be evaluated as themselves alone and – yes – by the content of their own characters. That’s it. There is no “morally right” or, God help us, corporate “value-enhancing” identitarian bigotry that can be released on its own. There’s just respect for unique human dignity, or there’s … always Coca-Cola.
And so, to play us out, an update after 50 years for the New Coke. Infinite apologies to the New Seekers.
I must insist you share with me your race and sex and loves
For here at Coke you’re nothing more than what’s listed above.
I’m sure you have your hopes and dreams, your wins and losses too
Leave them at home where they belong; they’re just not your work-you.
(That’s the song we sing….)
Author: Scott Shepard
