Last Call For Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

More performative nonsense here from Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis as he's suggesting he wants the state to sue Anheuser-Busch parent company InBev over shareholder stock losses for the state's pension fund due to the stupid controversy over Dylan Mulvaney's TikTok ad for Bud Light, but it's also an open threat against Fortune 100 companies that's working.

 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is hinting at legal action against Bud Light's parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, for the beer brand's promotion earlier this year with TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney.

Bud Light's March Madness promotion with Mulvaney, a transgender actress and activist, sparked an uproar among some conservatives, including singers Kid Rock and Travis Tritt, who called for a boycott of the popular beer. An ongoing sales slump for Bud Light has been attributed to backlash from both conservatives and the LGBTPQ community over the marketing campaign.

In an interview Thursday with Fox News, DeSantis said that Florida's pension fund contained over $50 million worth of Anheuser-Busch shares. Bud Light's decision to team with Mulvaney was followed by a sales slump, and as a result the state's pension fund has suffered collateral damage, according to the 2024 presidential candidate.

"When you start pursuing a political agenda at the expense of your shareholders, that's not just impacting very wealthy people, it impacts hardworking people who were firefighters, police officers and teachers," DeSantis told Fox News.

"And it could be something that leads to a derivative lawsuit filed on behalf of the shareholders of the Florida pension fund," he added. "Because, at the end of the day, there's got to be penalties for when you put business aside to focus on your social agenda at the expense of hardworking people."

In the letter, DeSantis said AB InBev has struggled recently because the company decided "to associate its Bud Light brand with radical social ideologies."

"It appears to me that AB InBev may have breached legal duties owed to its shareholders and that a shareholder action may be both appropriate and necessary," DeSantis wrote.

 

Steve M does the math on how much Florida taxpayers have been "harmed" by a trans woman drinking watery beer online:

Let's break that down.

The pension fund is $180 billion. Florida held $46 million in AB InBev stock, which means it constituted approximately .026% of the fund. The stock lost $8 a share; $8/share times 682,000 shares = a $5,456,000 loss. That's something like .0028% of the fund. You're going to sue over that? How much would it cost the state to try to recoup that tiny amount, which is a relatively normal stock loss?

Oh and let's look at that decline in context:

The company’s stock price has fallen since then from $66 a share to $58, though it’s still higher than its 52-week low of $44 from September 2022, which was well before the company’s recent controversies.

So the stock has gained 31% over the last eleven months.

This seems like an empty threat. But I think lawsuits of this kind are coming.

 

He's right. The real target isn't Mulvaney herself or even InBev, it's your employer's diversity, equality and inclusiveness initiatives.

Two years ago chief diversity officers were some of the hottest hires into executive ranks. Now, they increasingly feel left out in the cold.

Companies including Netflix, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have recently said that high-profile diversity, equity and inclusion executives will be leaving their jobs. Thousands of diversity-focused workers have been laid off since last year, and some companies are scaling back racial justice commitments.

Diversity, equity and inclusion—or DEI—jobs were put in the crosshairs after many companies started re-examining their executive ranks during the tech sector’s shake out last fall. Some chief diversity officers say their work is facing additional scrutiny since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions and companies brace for potential legal challenges. DEI work has also become a political target.

“There’s a combination of grief, being very tired, and being, in some cases, overwhelmed,” says Miriam Warren, chief diversity officer for Yelp, of the challenges facing executives in the field. Warren says the fear that company commitments are imperiled fuel her and others to feel “more committed to the work than ever.” Yelp’s DEI budget has grown for the past five years.

In interviews, current and former chief diversity officers said company executives at times didn’t want to change hiring or promotion processes, despite initially telling CDOs they were hired to improve the talent pipeline. The quick about-face shows company enthusiasm for diversity initiatives hasn’t always proved durable, leaving some diversity officers now questioning their career path.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in police custody in May 2020, companies scrambled to hire chief diversity officers, changing the face of the C-suite. In 2018, less than half the companies in the S&P 500 employed someone in the role, and by 2022 three out four companies had created a position, according to a study from Russell Reynolds, an executive search firm.

Once mostly tasked with HR matters, today’s diversity leaders are expected to weigh in on new product development, marketing efforts and current events that have an impact on how workers and consumers are feeling. Warren and other CDOs said the expanded remit is playing out in a politically divided environment where corporate diversity efforts are the subject of frequent social-media firestorms.

New analysis from employment data provider Live Data Technologies shows that chief diversity officers have been more vulnerable to layoffs than their human resources counterparts, experiencing 40% higher turnover. Their job searches are also taking longer.

“I got to 300 applications and then I stopped tracking,” says Stephanie Lubin, who was laid off from her role as diversity head at Drizly, an online alcohol marketplace, in May following the company’s acquisition by Uber. In one case, Lubin says she went through 16 rounds of interviews for a role she didn’t get, and says she is now planning to pivot out of DEI work.

 

The goal here, as I have said on numerous occasions, is the roll the country back to before the civil rights era.  It's to make America's largest employers limit their hiring of non-white, non-straight, non-male and non-Christian employees, lest they be attacked for discrimination and right-wing boycotts, which affect the stock price, which allows red states to sue as pension shareholders. which leaves the company open to attacks that they discriminate against white, straight Christian males and lowers the stock price, and so on.

The goal is to make the act of hiring someone who isn't a white straight Christian male subject to penalties, so that companies just stop doing it.  It's performative now, but it's having its intended effect. The right is celebrating this, and have every reason to push harder on this, and imply to white voters that they will directly benefit from total Republican rule.

Believe me, multi-billion and multi-trillion dollar corporations will abandon every pretense of diversity, equality and inclusiveness if red states make it prohibitively unprofitable to do so in order to operate in their states. It's already happening.

It'll carry the penalty of law soon, and that's when the employment picture changes dramatically across the country, rolling back decades of improvements, out of fear of shareholder lawsuits and civil action.

More of this is absolutely coming.

Trump Cards, Con't

Trump gets the federal documents trial delay he was looking for, from the judge he appointed.

 

 

A federal judge ordered Friday that the trial in the classified documents case that special counsel Jack Smith brought against former President Donald Trump begin in May 2024.

US District Judge Aileen Cannon said that the trial could begin as early as May 20. A pretrial hearing in the case will be held on May 14.

If that timeline holds, then the trial would fall deep in the 2024 race for the White House, coming amid multiple GOP presidential primaries. It would be a rebuke to Trump and his legal team, who wanted to postpone the trial until after the general election takes place in November 2024.

However, Cannon’s order also means that the case will unfold at a far slower speed than what Smith’s team was proposing, when it recommended a fast-paced timeline that would start the trial in mid-December of this year. Such a schedule would have a trial wrap up before primary voting gets underway in the 2024 election, where Trump is the leading GOP candidate.

The vast majority of state primaries will be finished by mid-May, although Nebraska, Maryland and West Virginia are set to hold their primary elections on May 14. Oregon votes the following week and a handful of states, including New Jersey, are now scheduled to vote on June 4. During his first presidential run, Trump effectively clinched the nomination at the end of May 2016 – before formally becoming the party’s nominee in July at the GOP convention in Cleveland.

While it’s likely the nominating process will be essentially decided by May, recent history has plenty examples of the race remaining a delegate fight until early summer.

 

It's within Judge Cannon's purview to delay the trial until next May, but the issue is she's personally responsible for delaying the proceedings for several months before we even got to this. 

Otherwise, she literally split the difference. How Solomonic. Marcy Wheeler explains it all:

Her order is not, on its face, unreasonable. It sets a CIPA trial for 49 weeks after it was charged, which is solidly within the scope of what it normally takes to bring these cases to trial. She has made this a complex case which is similarly not unreasonable.

The most unreasonable part of her order, thus far, is that she set the trial to be held in her tiny courtroom in Fort Pierce, making it utterly unworkable for the press.

The second most unreasonable part of her order is that she has treated the classified protective order as a month-long fully briefed affair, effectively absolving Trump and his co-defendant of conferring like grown-ups, such that classified discovery might not begin until after August 25, two months of delay she is adding to this timeline on top of the three months of delay she created last year.

Finally, she deferred on the question of whether the election will make jury selection next May impossible.

Again, this is not unreasonable, at least thus far. But she is letting Trump and Walt Nauta stall by obstructing from the outset.

 

Cannon has learned the difference between putting a thumb on the scale of justice instead of 318 metric tons of concrete.  Progress!

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Hugo Lowell has been covering the Trump crime beat for The Guardian for years now, and his reporting has been indispensable as much as it has been accurate, so when he reports that Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis is preparing RICO indictments for Trump as myself and others have predicted, I believe it.

The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia has developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month, according to two people briefed on the matter.

The racketeering statute in Georgia requires prosecutors to show the existence of an “enterprise” – and a pattern of racketeering activity that is predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes.

In the Trump investigation, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has evidence to pursue a racketeering indictment predicated on statutes related to influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the people said.

Willis had previously said she was weighing racketeering charges in her criminal investigation, but the new details about the direction and scope of the case come as prosecutors are expected to seek indictments starting in the first two weeks of August.

The racketeering statute in Georgia is more expansive than its federal counterpart, notably because any attempts to solicit or coerce the qualifying crimes can be included as predicate acts of racketeering activity, even when those crimes cannot be indicted separately.

The specific evidence was not clear, though the charge regarding influencing witnesses could include Trump’s conversations with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which he asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, the people said – and thereby implicate Trump.

For the computer trespass charge, where prosecutors would have to show that defendants used a computer or network without authority to interfere with a program or data, that would include the breach of voting machines in Coffee county, the two people said.

The breach of voting machines involved a group of Trump operatives – paid by the then Trump lawyer Sidney Powell – accessing the voting machines at the county’s election office and copying sensitive voting system data.

The copied data from the Dominion Voting Systems machines, which are used statewide in Georgia, was then uploaded to a password-protected site from where election deniers could download the materials as part of a misguided effort to prove the 2020 election had been rigged.

Though Coffee county is outside the usual jurisdiction of the Fulton county district attorney’s office, the racketeering statute would allow prosecutors to also charge what the Trump operatives did there by showing it was all aimed towards the goal of corruptly keeping Trump in office.

A spokesperson for Willis did not respond to requests for comment. 

 

The outline of a broad racketeering trial is here, and it's something that Lowell's sources say is coming in the next couple of weeks. We'll see if he's right, but the evidence at hand is strongly pointing in more indictments in the next 2-3 weeks.

Hopefully these racketeering charges will apply to multiple Georgia GOP officials as well. And let's not forget, Jack Smith is taking a look at these false electors too at the federal level, and that includes Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp.

It's going to be a hot summer for the GOP.