Send this article to a friend:

May
11
2023

Growing Wave of Corporations Committing Suicide
Doug Casey

International Man: Recently, several large corporations have made self-destructive moves.

A prominent example is the Bud Light marketing fiasco which saw year-over-year sales plummet 17%. As a result, Bud Light’s parent company lost nearly $5 billion in market cap around the same time.

It should have been obvious that Bud Light’s marketing program featuring a trans activist wouldn’t go over well with its customers. Yet, they went ahead anyways.

What is your take on this?

Doug Casey: It’s shocking that a tiny percentage of the population has such an outsize influence in all areas of life. LGBTQ+ wield power not just in academia and the media but in business and corporations.

What’s amazing is not only the tiny number of people LGB-whatever represents but the fact that many or most of them are highly neurotic. Some of them appear to be psychotic. They have severe psychological problems, yet they’re being held up as models to influence other people. The fact that the suits who run major corporations go along with the ridiculous charade proves that not only do they have extremely bad judgment, but they’re despicable cowards.

The founders of great corporations wouldn’t have put up with this bizarre nonsense. They were entrepreneurs with ethics and courage. But corporate suits are just managers who don’t want to jeopardize their gigantic salaries and huge stock options by running counter to whatever seems to be the fashionable meme of the month. Way too many top managers are beneficiaries of the Peter Principle—or just competent self-promoters.

And it’s not just the corporations; the US military has fallen into this psychological pit as well, kowtowing to these insane activists. You have to love the US Navy’s campaign to recruit gay sailors. It’s as if they’ve chucked “Anchors Aweigh “for the Village People’s “In the Navy.”

It’s further proof that the country is dividing in many ways. And as I’ve referred to in the past, there’s some indication that an actual civil war is brewing in the United States.

International Man: Likewise, Fox News recently fired Tucker Carlson, its most-watched show.

Not surprisingly, Fox News’ ratings have tanked since Tucker left.

What do you make of this?

Doug Casey: I’ve been asking myself why they dropped him. Was it from antagonism to what he’s saying? Or was it just stupidity? Or could it have seemed like good business sense at the time since Tucker’s candor had lost all his major corporate sponsors?

Our friend David Stockman, in his recent editorial (link), points out that even though Tucker was the most watched show of its type on TV, all of his big corporate advertisers, a couple dozen of them, dropped him because he was politically incorrect.

Of course, a shortsighted corporate suit could argue that even though he had giant ratings, the show itself then wasn’t directly profitable.

But as it turned out, most of Fox’s viewership was hanging on Tucker’s coattails. Why else would someone listen to the simultaneously vapid and strident Sean Hannity or the well-intentioned but painfully low-IQ Jesse Watters? Fox betrayed its core audience, making itself the media version of Bud Light.

What’s the matter with these corporations that they throw away whole demographics? Even if the lack of advertising hurt the economics of Tucker’s show, they should have realized that what amounted to a yellow-livered betrayal could destroy their whole network by antagonizing their viewers, who now want to punish them.

Maybe Tucker can’t live on My Pillow ads alone, but it seems likely he’ll get a new show, taking all Fox’s viewers with him. Unfortunately, he’s the only one on television who’s saying the things he’s saying, which is really shameful because the things that he’s saying are simply common sense—which is to say AntiWoke.

International Man: In another example of the trend, Disney has seen its sales drop after promoting cultural themes in its movies that many find distasteful.

The company has also taken it upon itself to wade into divisive cultural issues.

Again, it should have been obvious that these moves would not help the business.

What is really going on here?

Doug Casey: It’s not just Disney.

Interestingly, blacks make up only 13% of the US population. But if you look at the ads on TV, all of them, almost without exception, feature black people and very often a black and white couple, which is very unusual in real life. There’s nothing wrong with interracial marriage, and it’s nobody’s business but the people involved. Promoting the concept seems like Woke propaganda.

Ads that you see everywhere present a false picture of reality. And movies conflict with reality and are becoming ahistorical. For example, casting a black woman to play Ann Boleyn in a recent TV series or a black woman to play Cleopatra—which Netflix did. Or the popular play about Alexander Hamilton, which makes a lot of people think he was black.

When you make a movie, a historical movie, you want it to be as historically accurate as possible. That means that if characters are Chinese, you want to use Chinese people. If they’re black, you want to use black people. If they’re white, you want to use white people. Instead, they’re promiscuously casting blacks in all kinds of roles where the person wasn’t black. Does that mean a white person could or should play Malcolm X or Shaka Zulu?

It’s part of an ideological agenda that’s acting to destroy the current culture and replace it with something else. I’m not sure what that something else actually is, but it has heavy elements of Marxism, racism, and collectivism. But destroying a culture—especially Western Civ, which is responsible for almost everything that’s valuable and constructive around us—is much more vicious than destroying a country’s financial markets or even its economy. That’s what they’re doing, intentionally or not. In the process, they seem to be trying to foment real antagonism between races, often disguised as trying to promote harmony.

International Man: Bud Light, Disney, and Fox News are prominent examples of this trend, but by no means the only ones.

Alleged profit-driven corporations are choosing to sabotage their earnings to make ideological statements.

What is causing this trend, and where is it headed?

Doug Casey: It’s said that corporations put profits above all. But people run corporations, and humans have a tendency to do things that they consider to be morally right.

Stalin, Mao, and Hitler all thought what they were doing was morally correct. Moral righteousness motivates people much more than money does.

Since the population has been corrupted by numerous mutually reinforcing negative trends over the last three generations, it’s going to be hard to turn this trend around. Certainly not unless you not only reform current intellectual notions but the current notions of morality and what’s right and wrong.

I’m not a church-going person, but previous ideas of what was morally right and wrong were handed down to Americans by their religion, Christianity. That’s changed now. The new religion is Greenism and Wokeism. Those things are now setting the moral tenor of society. This trend is in motion and still accelerating.

International Man: A speculator is simply someone who observes distortions in the markets and positions himself to profit.

Do you see any ways to speculate on this trend of corporations committing suicide?

Doug Casey: If you want to speculate on the stock market, everything else being equal, it can make more sense to speculate on a corporation failing than on a corporation succeeding. Because the fact is that most businesses fail. A major reason they fail is because their managements have bad moral character and, as a result of that, they do fraudulent or stupid things.

If you want to capitalize on this trend, try to find companies with Woke or morally deficient managers and short them. In this environment, it can be smarter than trying to pick good companies run by managements with good character, which most investors try to do. Warren Buffet correctly makes a big thing out of only investing in ethical managements.

But if you want to capitalize on the accelerating collapse of our culture, you might want to scope out companies like FTX, the $35 billion fraud run by Sam Bankman-Fried, and short them. What you want to do is find companies where the management has criminal inclinations or the wrong morality and short them, betting they’ll fail.

Especially in this environment, which is going to be very bad for stocks in general, badly managed companies with bad people are as close to a sure thing as you’ll find.

It’s a good reason not to buy ETFs but to spend the time picking individual stocks, zeroing in on bad philosophy and Woke managements.

Other than that, buy gold and silver coins. They’re real wealth, and they’re going a lot higher in an environment where Wokism and Greenism dominate the world.

 

As the impetus behind the International Man project, Doug Casey is an American-born free market economist, best-selling financial author, and international investor and entrepreneur. He is the founder and chairman of Casey Research, a provider of subscription financial analysis about specific market verticals that he has focused his investing career around, including natural resources/metals/mining, energy, commodities, and technology.

Since 1979, he has written, and later co-written, the monthly metals and mining focused investment newsletter, The International Speculator. He also contributes to other newsletters, including The Casey Report, a geopolitically oriented publication.

Doug Casey is a highly respected author, publisher and professional investor who graduated from Georgetown University in 1968.

Doug literally wrote the book on profiting from periods of economic turmoil: his book, Crisis Investing, spent multiple weeks as #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and became the best-selling financial book of 1980 with 438,640 copies sold; surpassing big-caliber names, like Free to Choose by Milton Friedman, The Real War by Richard Nixon, and Cosmos by Carl Sagan.

Then Doug broke the record with his next book, Strategic Investing, by receiving the largest advance ever paid for a financial book at the time. Interestingly enough, Doug’s book, The International Man, was the most sold book in the history of Rhodesia.

He has been a featured guest on hundreds of radio and TV shows, including David Letterman, Merv Griffin, Charlie Rose, Phil Donahue, Regis Philbin, Maury Povich, NBC News and CNN; and has been the topic of numerous features in periodicals such as Time, Forbes, People, and the Washington Post.

Doug, who divides his time between homes in Aspen, Colorado; Auckland, New Zealand; and Salta, Argentina, has written newsletters and alert services for sophisticated investors for over 28 years. Doug has lived in 10 countries and visited over 175.

In addition to having served as a trustee on the Board of Governors of Washington College and Northwoods University, Doug has been a director and advisor to nine different financial corporations.

Doug is widely respected as one of the preeminent authorities on “rational speculation,” especially in the high-potential natural resource sector.

www.internationalman.com