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This is basically the equivalent of Starbucks putting Andrew Tate's photo on their pumpkin spice lattes. Worse because Bud Light has been losing market share and isn't well respected by beer drinkers.
Blue collar people see this as "I've been loyal to your mediocre product and you make an effort to insult me".
I see Mulvaney as someone who's addicted to attention, not some multilayered performance artist.
Kid Rock is just having some fun and showing loyalty to his fans.
Conservative commentators are jumping on this because Bud Light is a fun target to mock, and most of the jokes have already been written.
Anheuser-Busch can't back down because it will hurt their ESG rating. There's a specific LBGTQ rating that may be separate from ESG, I'm not sure how it works.
Mainstream ESG scores as used by people like Blackrock don't give very many points for this kind of thing.
The way I think of it in my professional life is that the "S" is a bit of a joke (apart from a few special cases like African mining where you can get dinged for paying off warlords), the "G" is a pass/fail checklist, and that most of the variation in scores is driven by the "E". In the large bank I work in, 75% of the ESG discourse is about carbon emissions.
Are there any ESG funds that shorted the shit out of Norfolk Southern immediately after the train derailment? IMO, any that didn't are confusing the thing with the symbolic representation of the thing. It would have been obviously value-aligned and profitable.
Are they, or are you?
Making money by incentivizing corporations to not ruin small Ohio towns seems very much like "the thing" to me.
There's your problem.
ESG is a tool for the establishment to get the private sector in line, not to actually do something for the environment.
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