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‘Woke’ Coke Pauses Diversity Plan After ‘Intense Backlash,’ Plan Author Suddenly Resigns Login/Join 
I Deal In Lead
Picture of Flash-LB
posted
Get woke, go broke.

So actions have consequences. Who woulda thunk it?

https://www.dailywire.com/news...hor-suddenly-resigns

‘Woke’ Coke Pauses Diversity Plan After ‘Intense Backlash,’ Plan Author Suddenly Resigns

Coca-Cola has pressed pause on a controversial “diversity plan” after what Fox News described as an “intense backlash,” and the company’s general counsel, Bradley Gayton, who authored the plan, has now abruptly resigned.

As The Daily Wire reported back in February, “Coca-Cola debuted a new policy this year implementing a diversity quota for the outside counsel it retains, saying it will only hire law firms that commit to providing 15 percent of billed time from black attorneys, higher than the percentage of African Americans in the U.S. population.” Law firms working with the soft drink giant, were also required, under the new policy, to “commit that at least 30% of each of billed associate and partner time will be from diverse attorneys, and of such amounts at least half will be from Black attorneys.”

The soft drink titan also passed the “diversity” on to its employees. In a series of slides leaked to media, a company working with Coca-Cola to provide corporate training encouraged Coke employees to “be less white” in an effort to create a more welcoming and racially diverse workplace.

Gayton reportedly authored the law firm diversity plan after viewing websites for firms providing Coca-Cola’s outside counsel and seeing mostly white headshots.

“I write you with a heavy heart,” Gayton said in a letter to outside counsel firms, according to The Daily Wire. “Gayton declared that Coca-Cola’s previous efforts to promote diversity ‘are not working’ as apparent from the ‘alarming number of new partner headshots’ with an ‘obvious lack of diversity.’”

‘The hard truth is that our profession is not treating the issue of diversity and inclusion as a business imperative,” Gayton wrote in his letter. “We have a crisis on our hands and we need to commit ourselves to specific actions that will accelerate the diversity of the legal profession.”

Legal experts, Fox Business noted, questioned “whether Gayton’s policies violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says employers can’t treat people differently based on their race.”

“Legal defense foundation Project on Fair Representation published an open letter to Coca-Cola last week warning that Coke’s outside counsel ‘racial quota requirements’ are ‘unlawful,'” the outlet added.
 
Posts: 10626 | Location: Gilbert Arizona | Registered: March 21, 2013Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Lost
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Couldn't they just rebrand "Classic Woke" and quietly retire "New Woke"?



ACCU-STRUT FOR MINI-14
"First, Eyes."
 
Posts: 16266 | Location: SF Bay Area | Registered: December 11, 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Frangas non Flectes
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quote:
Gayton reportedly authored the law firm diversity plan after viewing websites for firms providing Coca-Cola’s outside counsel and seeing mostly white headshots.


Well, that asshole is wearing a bow tie in every picture I can find of him. Hard to take a man who has a collection of bow ties seriously.


______________________________________________
Carthago delenda est
 
Posts: 17055 | Location: Sonoran Desert | Registered: February 10, 2011Reply With QuoteReport This Post
אַרְיֵה
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I long for the day when we are all color blind.



הרחפת שלי מלאה בצלופחים
 
Posts: 30544 | Location: Central Florida, Orlando area | Registered: January 03, 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Frangas non Flectes
Picture of P220 Smudge
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quote:
Originally posted by V-Tail:
I long for the day when we are all color blind.


Oh that's raciss!


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Carthago delenda est
 
Posts: 17055 | Location: Sonoran Desert | Registered: February 10, 2011Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Fighting the good fight
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quote:
Originally posted by Flash-LB:
‘The hard truth is that our profession is not treating the issue of diversity and inclusion as a business imperative,” Gayton wrote in his letter.


You know what your business imperative is? Providing legal counsel to a company so it can make money from selling soda without being sued or running afoul of the law. (Well, not any more, since he resigned...)

You know what your business imperative is not? Championing your personal pet cause on the company dime.

Stick to doing your job. Then go cheerlead for whatever cause you want as an individual during your personal free time.
 
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Partial dichotomy
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https://sigforum.com/eve/forums...935/m/1690068974/p/1




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To all of you who are serving or have served our country, Thank You
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Void Where Prohibited
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quote:
Originally posted by P220 Smudge:
quote:
Gayton reportedly authored the law firm diversity plan after viewing websites for firms providing Coca-Cola’s outside counsel and seeing mostly white headshots.


Well, that asshole is wearing a bow tie in every picture I can find of him. Hard to take a man who has a collection of bow ties seriously.

One of the Pathologists at the hospital I used to work at always said 'a bow tie is a sign of incompetence'.



"If Gun Control worked, Chicago would look like Mayberry, not Thunderdome" - Cam Edwards
 
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Political Cynic
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That explains George Will
 
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St. Vitus
Dance Instructor
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I was hoping to see a commercial "Get woke with Coke".
 
Posts: 5298 | Location: basement | Registered: April 06, 2007Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Drill Here, Drill Now
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quote:
Originally posted by Flash-LB:
Get woke, go broke
quote:
Buried all the way back on page 12 of 6guns' link was an excellent article posted by Stickman that is the exact opposite (i.e. they're going woke because they're going broke).
quote:
Originally posted by stickman428:
Daniel Greenfield provides a fascinating analysis of the origins of this “corporate wokeism trend”.

Link to article

“Get woke, go broke”, is a conservative meme about the cost of political correctness that has it the wrong way around. Brands don’t go broke because they get woke, they go woke because they’re going broke, and don’t know how to stop the slow but steady collapse of their business.


The big brands that go woke infuriate conservatives because, like Coke, Gillette, or Nike, they have a storied name that seems entwined with America and the success of capitalism. But it’s those old, familiar brands that go woke because their products and business models are dated. Virtue signaling is their way of adapting to a changing market without really innovating. Behind every big woke brand is a company slowly going broke and with no clue what to do about it.

The wokeness vocabulary joins the thesaurus of corporate buzzwords used by executives trying to hide from their investors that they don’t know what they’re doing. Making headlines for their wokeness changes the conversation from their business model to their politics. Touting a brand as socially responsible evades questions about its financial viability.

Take Coke, please.

Coca-Cola’s global sales fell 28% in the second quarter of 2020 from $10 billion to $7.15 billion. The corporate giant blamed the pandemic which had shuttered movie theaters and bars, and began cutting its small brands while concentrating on its big signature brands.

But Coke was struggling even long before the pandemic.

Despite all the international marketing, North America is still the biggest soda market. And the average American is down to drinking 40 gallons of soda from 50 gallons two decades ago. The shift was driven by the same demographic that tends to go woke, young white urban lefties, who became more likely to drink bottled water. Coke chased them by going into bottled water and vitamin drinks, but also by shifting away from a family brand once associated with Santa.

Santa and the polar bears reflected a Coke that was marketed to children. But fewer parents are comfortable with their children living off soda. That’s why one survey found that the number of children drinking over 3 cans of soda a day fell from 10% to 3.3%. The drop in soda consumption, once again, was heaviest among younger and wealthier urban white lefties.

The economic consequences of young white wealthy lefties dropping soda wasn’t just a sales issue. Wokes are a politically narcissistic demographic that legislates its tastes into law, pursuing the legalization of drugs, and bans on soda. Both drug legalization and soda bans were, as usual, done in the name of oppressed minorities, but had little impact on them.

Legal drugs are too expensive for minorities and the infamous soda taxes don’t work. But the soda industry remembers what happened to tobacco and other lifestyle habits that fell afoul of the cultural values of the new woke ruling class. That’s another reason why it went ‘woke’.

Banning soda from schools and taxing it in stores precedes the class action lawsuits and national legislative activities that would effectively eliminate sodas from the marketplace.

Coke isn’t just virtue signaling to prop up sales in a declining market: it’s also afraid.

And it should be. Bloomberg isn’t just fighting coal and guns, he’s also spending a fortune pushing his soda ban in cities and states around the country. The soda industry has ramped up spending to defend itself against everything from soda taxes to its links to slave labor. But it understands that the real threat is cultural as the new woke ruling class destroys the habits of the old America that it associates with conservative, working class, and flyover country.

That’s why cigarettes are a deadly menace, but pot is a civil rights crusade. The health issues are a pretext for a cultural revolution. And Coke went woke to convince the wealthy young urban lefties to incorporate its signature products into their lives by joining the cultural revolution.

The Left bet that if it could radicalize the children of the wealthy that Corporate America would bend the knee. And that’s exactly what happened. The radicals used their leverage over academia and the entertainment industry to create radical generations. But that radicalism was heavily concentrated among the Ivy League and the children of the elites who would become the corporate leaders and also be the consumers with the most disposable income.

Economics, like politics, proved to be downstream of the culture. Capturing the ecosystem at its base allowed the Left to take over the economy and turn some of the country’s biggest brands into megaphones for its propaganda. But these are corporate brands that have all the qualities of the ossified elites that have always been an easy target for the revolutions of the radicals.

Coke, like the average big woke brand, has a majority share of a declining market. It has limited growth potential within that market. Coca Cola’s fortunes are closely tied to movie theaters, which were in a catastrophic state of decline even before the pandemic, and to McDonald’s.

McDonald’s, like a lot of traditional fast food places, is experiencing its own slow decline. The clown joint, like Coke, tried to reinvent its brand as being about healthy food and leftist politics. Just like Coke, going ‘woke’ hasn’t stopped its decline, or the threat of the cultural Left regulating it out of business to protect minorities from the pernicious threat of its Happy Meals.

When McDonald’s brought in its new British CEO Steve Easterbrook, he promised to make it over as a “modern progressive burger company”. The company hired Robert Gibbs, Obama’s press secretary, to head communications. McDonald’s flipped its arches upside down to celebrate International Women’s Day. And then Easterbrook was forced out for allegedly having affairs with three female employees. Meanwhile the decline in foot traffic is still going on.

The Coca Cola Company meanwhile has a British CEO who pledged allegiance at Davos to a “new social contract” and an “economy that works for everyone”. He took over from the company’s previous Turkish CEO, and the Turkish CEO’s South African predecessor. The head of Coca Cola in North America is a Honduran who came out of its Latin American division.

The other thing about these iconic American brands is that they don’t have American leaders.

Coke won’t shut up about social justice and the evils of whiteness because that’s a better conversation than its failed portfolio of new brands, dumping its bottling operations, and its desperate efforts to refocus by launching a thousand different varieties of Coke aimed at the one lefty demographic that holds its future in the palms of its soft white manicured hands.

Otherwise its whole massive distribution network will be used for little more than moving orange juice, vitamin drinks, and milk around as soda and fast food go the way of cigarettes.

Coke is going woke because its future is broke. That’s true of most of the big woke brands. And the closer Coke gets to the cliff, the more hysterical its performative wokeness will become.

‘Wokening’ is a social disease of stale companies with stale brands whose products are overpriced and have fallen out of touch with the needs of many consumers. And the country’s consumer marketplace is dominated by these collapsing giants whose leaders are just marking time and cashing big checks while trying to co-opt the revolution threatening to destroy them.

European monarchs tried to co-opt leftist revolutions because they no longer had confidence in their own roles and had no idea what to do next. Coca Cola and the woke corporate giants share the same decadent sense of decline and their urban elites are selling out their rural base to appeal to the young radical generation to which their children and their social circle belong.

Wokeness is the consequence of a moral and economic brokenness among the nation’s elites. The Left conquered the corrupt infrastructure of a decaying political and economic system. Now it’s using that infrastructure to brainwash and suppress the country’s middle and working classes by lecturing them on their racism, and redefining them as domestic terrorists.

It’s not just Coke that went woke and broke: it’s the entire system that’s going broke.



Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity

DISCLAIMER: These are the author's own personal views and do not represent the views of the author's employer.
 
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Ha! Love it.




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Wile E. Coyote School of DIY Disaster
 
Posts: 8634 | Location: Nowhere the constitution is not honored | Registered: February 01, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Slayer of Agapanthus


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Name That Tune!

I'd like to dig the world a hole
And furnish it with bones
Throw Jesus freaks from highest peaks
Entomb them with the stones

I'd like to teach the world to sing
Of faux diversity
And smother whitey in my arms
With race sophistery

I'd like to see the world for once
Marching arm-in-arm
We'd all be reds or they'd be dead
On Pol Pot's peasant farms

Its the real thing
On the back of our minds
Kill all the souls we can find
So the world will decline
And Marx will be king


"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye". The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, pilot and author, lost on mission, July 1944, Med Theatre.
 
Posts: 5952 | Location: Central Texas | Registered: September 14, 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
An investment in knowledge
pays the best interest
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I wrote Coca-Cola Corp a scathing letter regarding their woke philosophy. That being said, the corporate wokeness has nothing to do with Coke going broke prior to that campaign… apparently there are some idiot pundits that can’t read corporate financials. No, in reality it’s just spineless leadership that is all too left-leaning these days.
 
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Woke Zero®


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“As part of the [separation] agreement, [Gayton] will receive a $4 million sign-on payment and a monthly consulting fee of $666,666, beginning this month and ending April 2022,”

That is 12 million severance package!!! These big execs, and the huge pay gap compared to regular persons, is incredible.


-c1steve
 
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Gracie Allen is my
personal savior!
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^^ Well, epic failures take talent, brilliance and a lot of hard work.
quote:
When McDonald’s brought in its new British CEO Steve Easterbrook, he promised to make it over as a “modern progressive burger company”...The Coca Cola Company meanwhile has a British CEO who pledged allegiance at Davos to a “new social contract” and an “economy that works for everyone”.

Hmm. I admit I'm thinking back to Smith and Wesson here, but are we sure the problem isn't as simple as "hiring British CEOs"?
 
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That rug really tied
the room together.
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quote:
Originally posted by Flash-LB:

‘The hard truth is that our profession is not treating the issue of diversity and inclusion as a business imperative,” Gayton wrote in his letter. “We have a crisis on our hands and we need to commit ourselves to specific actions that will accelerate the diversity of the legal profession.”


Wow. This guy believes that it is an absolute crisis that he is surrounded by a bunch of rich and successful white attorneys. A crisis. If there was any justice in this world this guy would ________________________ (fill in the blank)


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Often times a very small man can cast a very large shadow
 
Posts: 6660 | Location: Floriduh | Registered: October 16, 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Still happily boycotting Woke-a-Cola products as best I can. I picked up a pizza yesterday, and I wanted a non-alcoholic carbonated beverage to go with it. I’ve never liked Pepsi, but I purchased my first yesterday. That won’t be a habit, but it was my only choice at the time.

EVERYTHING going on these days are to one day drive us all into the ocean like the Muslims are trying to do with the Jews in Israel. This is an all-out war against us, just without the shooting. We need to be steadfast against all this, but as I have said before, not having a leader to unite us causes us to not be as effective as we need to be. Right now, our actions are just prolonging the time that push into the sea comes.


Retired Texas Lawman, now active reserve
 
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