Tag: equity

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free trade & free markets judiciary

Musk’s Bête Noire

Elon Musk, judge, space

Should a judge decide how much Elon Musk can be paid?

Well, when the job that Musk is doing is not a government job and a company’s internal process of determining the compensation is voluntary and aboveboard … no.

But according to a Delaware judge, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormic, who last January rescinded Tesla’s compensation package then worth $56 billion, now worth more than $100 billion, Musk is not entitled to this compensation. And she has just affirmed her ruling.

Musk says that “shareholders should control company votes, not judges.”

Tesla says: “The ruling is wrong, and we’re going to appeal.”

The appeal could take a year or more.

There’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution authorizing judges to run private companies or decide how much their most valuable personnel may be paid. The judge has no constitutional warrant. And no moral warrant. 

Not her business.

Ignoring the enormous success of Tesla, McCormic is simply deciding that Musk’s pay is way too much with respect to some arbitrary personal criterion that is irrelevant to the decisions that companies must make to attract and keep their greatest entrepreneurial talents, the ones who do the most to make it all go.

Still, maybe we should give the judge a break — I mean, just a tad?

Remember, it was Chancellor McCormic who forced Musk to go through with his Twitter purchase — which turned out to be the most consequentially favorable free-​speech/​-​free-​press event of our time. 

Sure, then too she was grinding a personal or ideological animus against the magnate.

But credit where credit’s due!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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DEI Realities Unreported

DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion

The high tide of DEI policies — which reward racial affiliation, gender affiliation or gender wishing, group-​think, and group-​wackiness at the expense of sanity and individual merit — seems to be starting to recede. 

But we’re not on safe ground yet. One example of rearguard action by the proponents of these lunacies is the willingness of major publications to hide evidence of harm caused by DEI.

Colin Wright reports that both The New York Times and Bloomberg have “shelved coverage of a groundbreaking study that raises serious concerns about the psychological impacts of diversity, equity, and inclusion pedagogy.”

The Network Contagion Research Institute finds that DEI ideology incites hostility (between members of favored and disfavored groups, you see) and authoritarianism (by bullies eager for new weapons to intimidate and control others).

When presented with various scenarios, participants in the study who had first been exposed to DEI propaganda were much more likely than participants who hadn’t been thus exposed to impute racism to agents in the scenario — even when no evidence to justify the accusation was also presented in the scenario.

Wright suggests that at both the Times and Bloomberg, reports-​in-​progress about the research were killed outright by editors whose decisions to spike the story “align conspicuously with the ideological leanings” of those editors.

NCRI’s work confirms what we know about the dishonesty, injustice, and destructiveness of the DEI enterprise. 

As does the conduct of certain gatekeepers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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DEI Box Office Drubbing

Matt Walsh, racism, DEI

It “came out of nowhere,” declared The Hollywood Reporter, and as “one major Hollywood studio exec” put it off the record: “The picture has clearly hit a nerve.”

This is the second hit by the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh and director-​producer Justin Folk: they made the movie What Is a Woman? in 2022, and now Am I Racist? is at No. 4 on the movie charts having “gross[ed] $4.5 million in its nationwide box office debut,” THR reports, “a huge sum for a nonfiction feature.”

In the film, Matt Walsh sits down with “some of the biggest people in the anti-​racism movement,” including Saira Rao and Regina Jackson, founders of Race2Dinner, and Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.

For $5,000, Rao and Jackson will come over for dinner to make as many as eight white women confront their inherent racism. Who would know better? Rao and Jackson actually wrote the book, White Women.

“This country is not worth saving,” Rao declares at one dinner. “This country’s a piece of sh*t.”

It cost $15,000 to get the meeting to film DiAngelo for the documentary. Well, only $14,970 if you consider the $30 in reparations that DiAngelo was shamed into giving a black member of Walsh’s documentary crew.

“The mind-​blowing part,” explains Savannah Edwards of Savvy Film Reviews “is that he was able to get them to say what they said on camera.” She adds, “The fact of the matter is all Matt Walsh does in this movie is let these people talk.”

Go see the movie.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies tax policy

Kill the Stock Market!

Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, Marxism, socialism, equity, stock, capital gains tax

Taxing capital gains is a form of income taxation that Democrats love. 

And it’s not just a matter of increasing revenue. Remember that President Obama thought that increasing the capital gains rate was a good idea even if it decreased government revenue. Democrats are playing to a soak-​the-​rich sentiment among their base, even when the most important supporters are billionaires.

Take Mark Cuban. He’s a billionaire. And he supports Kamala Harris for president. 

Weeks ago, the Democrat standard-​bearer came out with a wild proposal to tax unrealized capital gains. And Cuban, for all his faults, is not an idiot; he knows just how incredibly corrosive that tax on capital would be.

“It would kill the stock market,” he points out. 

In a chat with Fox Business, Cuban explained how he told Democratic insiders that taxing unrealized capital gains (as when stocks you hold gain value, but you haven’t sold them so you have no income from them), would become “the ultimate employment plan for private equity, because companies are not going to go public because you can get whipsawed, right?” 

By this he means that a stock owner might have to borrow money to cover taxes, only to have the stocks go down later and enjoy neither rebate from the government nor any income from the investment to cover the debt.

Cuban insists that Democratic insiders are pragmatic and will not push this tax.

Yet, with both members (comrades?) of the presidential ticket spouting Marxist talking points, how do we know that they are stable (corrupt?) enough to save public capitalism from their malign agenda?

How can we be sure they’re just lying?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Since unrealized capital gains aren’t income, I don’t know how taxing them could be constitutional. Perhaps someone can explain this to me.

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general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

Sobering Up After DEI

DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, regulations

Some universities and companies have been retreating from their obnoxious DEI policies. We can now add Jack Daniel’s to the list.

One of the lamentable ideological fads of recent years, DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) programs are a vicious form of race-​based and sex-​based affirmative action.

All such policies subordinate merit to irrelevant but politically preferred physical characteristics.

So far as I know, old-​style affirmative action at least was not normally accompanied by mandatory indoctrination and mandatory testimony by applicants about how they would cherish and uphold the ideology of compensatory racial and sexual discrimination. But such indoctrination and litmus tests are standard features of many contemporary DEI regimes.

Which are now minus one, thankfully, as Jack Daniel’s announces that it will be ending DEI initiatives, such as a social credit system and “quantitative workforce and supplier diversity ambitions.”

The Dallas Express says that the whiskey distiller is decoupling from DEI because it is “facing backlash.” Specifically, thanks to the impending attention of Robby Starbuck, “an activist known for successfully putting a spotlight on companies like Harley-​Davidson and John Deere” for their DEI policies.

Starbuck said on Twitter that he had been “set to expose” Jack Daniel’s, which perhaps was tipped off by his visiting of employee LinkedIn pages. “We are winning and one by one we will bring sanity back to corporate America.”

He adds that if you want your own workplace’s DEI policies exposed, you can email “tips and evidence” to him at EliminateDEI@​protonmail.​com.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Vance Plan for DEI

DEI, J.D. Vance

Will certain items on Senator J. D. Vance’s legislative agenda be expedited by his new status as Donald Trump’s running mate?

For example, Congress could pass his kill-​DEI legislation immediately. But Biden would have to sign the bill, and it’s Biden’s administration which has been pushing the horrific DEI federal mandates.

An initialism for “mediocrity, inequity, and exclusion” — “diversity, equity and inclusion,” actually — DEI designates enforcement of race-​based, gender-​based, irrelevant-​characteristics-​based criteria for hiring and promotion. It’s a continuation of old-​style affirmative action quotas but nastier, and often attended by extra helpings of censorship and hectoring indoctrination.

On June 12, 2024, Senator Vance and Representative Michael Cloud introduced legislation that would, per their press release, “eliminate all DEI programs from the federal government.”

More specifically, the Dismantle DEI Act would “eliminate all federal DEI programs and funding for federal agencies, contractors which receive federal funding, organizations which receive federal grants, and educational accreditation agencies.” 

Seems to cover the waterfront.

Vance argues that our tax dollars should not be “co-​opted” to promote an agenda that “breeds hatred and racial division.”

One of the bill’s cosponsors, Senator Kevin Cramer, observes that DEI “doesn’t promote diversity of thought or merit-​based employment and promotion,” which is something of an understatement. DEI doesn’t merely neglect but actively opposes rewarding of merit whenever doing so would conflict with the DEI agenda.* An agenda that obtrudes continuously.

Of course, Vance’s attack upon DEI doesn’t require Vance to be Vice President, what is required is a Republican president to sign the legislation, should it pass through Congress.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* More than a few commentators have suggested that Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle was a DEI hire and that contributed to last weekend’s utterly botched Secret Service protection of Donald Trump, previously discussed.

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