Head over to Daily Timewaster 's blog; these things are popping up like toadstools on a wet lawn, and twice as poisonous.
Nike couldn't buy this kind of publicity and sheer toxic disgust of their company:
they're getting it all for free.
I smell a CEO position and an ad agency contract opening up, in 3, 2, ...
The former Nike CEO will probably end up as the new DNC ruler because Racism!
ReplyDeleteThe problem I see is that lost revenue is no longer considered to be the problem that it used to be for the leftists running these companies. Some major companies out there, I believe that Dick's or Field and Stream (yeah, I know it's the same company) had stated that they knew their position on guns would cost them some money, but their political convictions meant more to them. I'm sure there are plenty of other executives at other companies who could be in that boat.
ReplyDeleteSo here we have Nike, who's executives SURELY had to know that this decision for an ad would chap some asses and they may lose some money on it. And they apparently accepted that. Unless someone gets fired for this, no one at the top of Nike is going to have to make any significant lifestyle changes due to having a smaller bank account. To some of them, it's the difference between making $10 million a year, and making only $9 million, or $8 million. It's a big difference, 10% or 20% is, or whatever the percentage is that they're going to lose. But they've decided that it's an acceptable trade off in order to push their agenda, and none of them are going to the poor house over it.
Or maybe it's only acceptable in the short term, and they assume that people will eventually cool off and sometime in the future their stock will recover and they'll have still succeeded in making their statement.
Or maybe they didn't know this would happen, and they're all just that fucking stupid. I could be convinced of that possibility, too. I try not to believe that our political enemy is just a bunch of dunces, because you don't want to underestimate a bunch of people who could easily be convinced to support having you and your family and friends all killed and your way of life erased from history, but they do often give me reason to believe that their IQ scores only have two digits, and do not include a "9" anywhere in them.
Some of these companies are so damned big that a loss of 4 billion in stock value is a blip. Negative incentives that would crush a normal business are nothing to big companies so until they go, they'll threaten the well being of society,
ReplyDeleteNike has after all an annual income of 50 billion and can easily take the hit.
I suspect the stockholders will take a rather different view, and the line of lawyers who'll take that case for them on fee contingency would only stretch around a block the size of Texas.
ReplyDeleteIf the company was owned by, say, one Joe Nike, and he had a 100% stake in the firm, it'd be different, but when you're publicly held and live or die on other people's money, you have a fiduciary duty to investors not to be a financial jackhole, and that sort of thing is enforceable at trial.
Nike's corporate board is about to get spanked with a bishop's mace about the head and shoulders.
I really hope so, but has that happened to any other company who decided that their liberals mantras were worth more than their stock prices? I hope the answer is yes, but I haven't seen any. I believe the only moral responsibilities of a company are to make money for their investors and to try not to go out of their way to hurt people. The shareholders need to hold Nike accountable, or else no one else likely will, and it'll set an example for other leftist companies.
DeleteOn the flip side, do more conservative companies experience a boost when they announce their own positions? Like New Balance. Are they going to be rewarded for their non-left ideology? I hope so.
The marketing director at Nike is going to wonder why he was summoned to address the board, and then asked to wait in a room furnished with a desk, some vodka, a pistol, and one cartridge.
ReplyDeleteYou're trying to cheer me up, aren't you?
ReplyDelete