Brian J. Smith

Brian J. Smith is a traitor.

Brian J. Smith is a traitor to our Nation byway of using his position as president and chief operating officer of The Coca-Cola Company. In this role, he is responsible for leading the company’s global field operations into an unconstitutional new world of diversity, inclusion and equity, the acronym DIE aptly applies. In other words, thanks to Brian J. Smith, the Coca-Cola Company has now been forced to adopt this socialist form of left-wing ideology.

Consequently, Coca-Cola has sent out notices to law firms demanding that the company will “require diversity among law firms who bill it for work in the United States and reduce payments if they do not comply.”

Because of pressure from the Marxist, anti-American Black Lives Matter, many Fortune 500 companies have pledged to address alleged racial inequality more aggressively.

In fact, there is almost a competition among firms to see who gets the highest score of diversity and inclusion.  How is this accomplished?

To determine the Best Workplaces for Diversity, Fortune partnered with Great Place to Work® to analyze anonymous survey feedback representing more than 4.8 million US employees.

The Best Workplaces for Diversity list focuses on the experiences of women, people of color, LGBTQ people, employees who are Boomers or older, and people who have disabilities. The ranking is based on what these employees themselves report in a 60-question Trust Index© survey about the trust, pride and camaraderie they experience in their workplace, and how those experiences compare to their colleagues’ reports of the same workplaces. Great Place to Work also consider[s] employees’ daily experiences of innovation, the company’s values, and the effectiveness of their leaders, to ensure they’re consistently experienced, as well.

The remaining 15 percent of the rank is based on the diversity of the company’s overall workforce and its management, senior leadership and board, taking into account industry trends.

Lori George Billingsley.is a traitor.

Coca Cola Company’s Chief Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Officer, Lori George Billingsley, explains how Coca-Cola is creating a culture of diversity and inclusion.

The company that once touted “Red, White, and You,” has come a long way to now being a leading proponent of the racism that is the underbelly of diversity.

Thus, Coca-Cola’s general counsel is urging law firms to “effect real systemic change” by adhering to new requirements that [mandate that] outside counsel allocate a portion of work to diverse attorneys — specifically Black lawyers — or risk losing money or even future legal business.”

Dare I call this blackmail?  Dare I call it racist?

In essence, “Coke said it will require quarterly reporting about the makeup of legal teams that do work for it and self identify as American Indian, Alaska Native, Asian, Black, women, Hispanic/Latinx, LGBTQ, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander or persons with disabilities. For those working on new matters for Coke, ‘at least 30 percent of each of billed associate and partner time will be from diverse attorneys, and of such amounts at least half will be from Black attorneys.'”

It said the percentages, which are roughly equal to those of the U.S. population overall, will be adjusted over time to eventually hit at least 50 percent of billed time coming from diverse attorneys, with half from Black attorneys.

Firms that fail to meet the targets will be docked 30 percent of their fees, and those who continue to come up short may no longer be considered for Coke work.

Apparently like everything that is radically left-wing, merit does not matter. This is identity politics on steroids.

The fact that there are fewer Black lawyers must be, according to Leftist group think, because of racism. It could never be because fewer Black people choose to enter the legal profession or that because of another brainchild of left-wing philosophy, affirmative action, fewer Blacks succeed in the field.

America already has many protections against discrimination, i.e., the EEOC, and yet the legal profession is now being told it must break the law so that Coca Cola can have the final say in its virtue signaling and its adherence to Black Lives Matter demands.

Of course, the natural result of this is many more people will suddenly self-identify as American Indian, Alaska Native, Asian, Black, Hispanic, LGBTQ+, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander or a person with disabilities.”

Heck, I should now claim Hispanic heritage because probably an ancestor of mine was one of the Spanish conversos who were exiled or murdered during the Spanish Inquisition!

Another result will be the deep resentment among different groups because one group is being promoted not based on merit but because of identity politics.

This is just another embodiment of Marxist class warfare now redefined.

This, of course, is always the aim of the Left.  They will mouth diversity, inclusion, and equity.  But anyone who sees through this will note that “equity is not equality. It is a substitute for equal rights. Equity requires the authorities to determine who gets what according to the race, the ethnicity or other status of the beneficiaries. It is updated Marxist claptrap  in which race replaces class.”

This is because the purveyors of this racist ideology couched in alleged empathy and compassion believe that a “lower than population percentage of blacks in any desirable category must be the result of systemic racism.”

What Coca Cola is touting is Critical Race Theory, which is now rampant in schools and businesses in America. Trump banned the use of Critical Race Theory but Biden reinstated it on the first day he issued his slew of executive orders.

We are now in the throes of a hideous left-wing takeover of this country. The term ‘diversity’ now excludes white straight males. Thus, to achieve equity, you first have to take away equality for individuals who were born in the wrong identity group. Merit has no bearing on anything any longer in this country. Consider that 85% of Biden’s new political appointees to the Office of Personnel Management identify as people of color, women or LGBTQ.

It is ironic that businesses, the mainstay of our economic engine, have now taken on the face of tyranny.

I would hope that Americans decide that Coca-Cola is no longer their choice of drink. I would request that these now-designated groups perceive that they are being held to the soft bigotry of low expectations. That to gain a foothold because of something they had no control over such as their race is an abiding insult that lowers self-esteem and pride and worth.

I pray that the legal minds push back hard on Coca-Cola and their dictatorial edicts . I would appeal to the lawyers to stand up and proclaim that such demands are completely contrary to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and are merely more tools in the leftist arsenal to weaken, eviscerate and eventually destroy America.


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Maybe Coke Should Be Cancelled for Its Nazi Past. . .

Woke Coke seems less concerned with selling sugar water these days than selling Americans on the idea that whites are not worthy of respect or equal protection under the law. A few weeks ago, a whistleblower revealed Coca-Cola’s discriminatory employee training program equating racism with “whiteness.” In a series of online work assignments, Coke goes so far as to instruct its white employees to, “try to be less white.” How does one “be less white”? Coke answers that explicitly: by being less “oppressive,” “arrogant,” “certain,” “defensive,” and “ignorant,” and being more “humble” and “break[ing] with white solidarity.” For Coke, judging people based on the color of their skin is not only tolerated but also company policy.

If the company’s “de-whitening” efforts weren’t sufficient proof that Coca-Cola prioritizes a person’s skin color over a person’s talents and individual character, it drove the point home with a letter sent to its outside legal counsel demanding that law firms assign attorneys representing the Coca-Cola Company based, not upon the quality of lawyers’ work, but rather upon lawyers’ racial classification. Going forward, Coke will penalize and reduce its fees to law firms unable to hit certain racial quotas.

Now Coca-Cola’s CEO is joining other race hucksters to claim that sensible voter ID laws meant to curb fraud in Georgia’s elections should be seen as nothing short of white Americans’ attempt to disenfranchise black voters — a loaded accusation not based in reason or analysis of the law’s merits but rather in raw emotionalism intended to pit one group of Americans against another.

Surely a company that regurgitates nasty racial stereotypes against whites so effortlessly while seeking to eliminate them from its workforce doesn’t really believe white people can ever scrub all that icky whiteness away for good, no matter how many rounds of re-education they are forced to endure. As Coca-Cola’s training materials suggest, racism is just part of whites’ DNA. Perhaps the company could have saved future employees a lot of trouble by simply hanging a sign on its front door reading, “No Uppity Whites Allowed.”

Racial stereotypes, racial classifications and quotas, explicitly racist indoctrination — why is Coca-Cola so obsessed with discriminating against people based on the color of their skin rather than evaluating all of the individual characteristics that make each person a unique member of the human race? Perhaps racism is in the company’s own DNA, not at all different from the way the beverage company judges white Americans as racists for historical injustices in which they claimed no part.

Did you know that Nazi Germany was one of Coca-Cola’s biggest markets? Have you ever seen an official Coca-Cola advertisement promoting the company’s partnership with the Nazis during the 1936 Olympics under a jingoistic tagline — “One people, one country, one drink, Coke is it” — that must of made Adolf Hitler proud?

Does Coca-Cola not highlight its financial history with Nazi Germany when crowing about its racial purity tests today? Or the fact that Germany’s inconvenient declaration of war against the United States made it sufficiently difficult for Coca-Cola to maintain its prominent reputation within the Reich that the company’s German representatives repurposed the operations of hundreds of bottling plants toward the production of a new drink called Fanta to serve thirsty German soldiers throughout the war? Does the Coca-Cola Company not brag about Fanta’s wartime genesis as a Nazi beverage? How strange.

One would think that a company so dedicated to rooting out “white supremacy” that it forces its white employees into racial re-education training seminars would first want to take a hard look at its own rather awkward historical relationship with actual white supremacists intent on building a world-dominating “master race.” That’s what “racial justice” requires, right — the punishment of one generation of Americans for the sins of generations past? So why should Coca-Cola’s questionable corporate history be off-limits when it goes out of its way to demonize white Americans for no other reason than the color of their skin?

On the other hand, everything about Coca-Cola’s racial indoctrination program today sounds as if it could be ripped right from the pages of Nazi Germany’s own race laws, with Jews and other “undesirables” being crossed out and “whites” scribbled in their place. All the racial animosity that nearly destroyed humanity last century is back in “woke” form, and some of the same companies that underestimated the Nazi threat then are underestimating the evil intent of the new racialist agendas that are taking over the corporate world today. Isn’t that, after all, why Critical Race Theory exists — so that pretend intellectuals can repackage discredited race-based theories from the past into academic language that can be used once again to justify outright racism? If so, 2021 Coke and 1936 Coke still have much in common. The only thing really differentiating the symbolism of a Nazi swastika and a Black Lives Matter clenched fist, after all, is which racial group is being targeted and which racial group is doing the targeting.

There is nothing new under the sun. Perhaps if Coca-Cola were capable of seeing the similarity between the racial grievances of its old Nazi partners and those of its new “woke” ones, it wouldn’t be so enthusiastic to repeat history all over. And maybe if Coke remains so intent on “cancelling” white Americans for the problems it sees in America’s history, then Americans should cancel Coke for the problems it overlooked in Nazi Germany’s.


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What Was More American than Coke and Baseball?

Until very recently, it would have been hard to imagine anything more iconic of American life than Coca-Cola and baseball. Today both remind me of Benito Mussolini’s corporatist – aka, fascist — game of merging of state and corporate power. The CEOs of these operations should hang their heads in shame and fire their public-relations teams. So should the CEOs of Delta and American Airlines, Black Rock, Cisco, American Express, and American Airlines, who have promoted President Biden’s false assertions that tightening election procedures to bring them back into line — and in accord with those of civilized Western governments elsewhere — is racist voter suppression. I’m fed up with this never-ending sham: partisan power grabs to weaken the most important features of American life being cloaked in virtuous anti-racism.

The immediate target of these corporate actions was efforts by Georgia and Texas to revise their election laws, laws which in many states have resulted in widespread disbelief that the 2020 elections were conducted on the up and up. When people believe election procedures are untrustworthy, it shatters voluntary acceptance of the election results. Under pressure from racist propagandists of the left and using COVID as an excuse, jurisdictions in several states so loosened the election rules that widespread fraud was made easier. One state in particular was Georgia, where asleep at the switch (or corrupt — your choice) officials permitted the sloppy, untrustworthy, opaque, and disputed election procedures.

In an effort to prevent a repeat, Georgia enacted a new election law. (In pdf form it’s 104 pages, and that makes it unlikely to me that any of the corporate bleating about it was made with knowledge of its contents.) Their response was certainly occasioned by a weak-kneed response to a small but loud group‘s pressure. In Tom Wolfe’s words, they successfully mau-maued the companies’ flak catchers.

Almost immediately upon its passage, President Biden attacked it as “Jim Crow in the 21st Century” and “a blatant attack on the Constitution.”

“Instead of celebrating the rights of all Georgians to vote or winning campaigns on the merits of their ideas, Republicans in the state instead rushed through an un-American law to deny people the right to vote.”

He added: “This law, like so many others being pursued by Republicans in statehouses across the country, is a blatant attack on the Constitution and good conscience.”

One of the key provisions of the new law ensures ID requirements for requesting mail-in ballots. Seems to me this is a rather basic rule if votes from only eligible voters are to be counted. Race baiters love loose election procedures which make fraud almost certain and regularly (contra the evidence) target ID requirements, arguing absurdly that this suppresses the black vote. It’s a preposterous argument which ignores the fact that obtaining an ID is easy everywhere and a necessity for things like COVID vaccinations, drivers’ licenses, gun purchases, welfare benefits, medical treatments, air travel, and more.

Rasmussen Reports asked, “Should voters be required to show photo identification such as a driver’s license before being allowed to vote”? The answer should put paid to the claim that its unduly burdensome:

    1000 National Likely Voters – Yes

    White – 74%

    Black – 69%

    Other Non-White – 82%

    All Voters – 75%

Georgia is not the only state shocked into writing more transparent, enforceable, and sensible laws to limit election fraud. Iowa has done so and per the BBC:

“There are currently 253 similar bills in 43 states, according to the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice think tank.”

James Quincey Chairman and CEO of The Coca-Cola Company is a traitor.

Following Biden’s lead, the CEO of Coca Cola (a company already in the spotlight for its advice to its workers to “be less white”) James Quincey chimed in with this pablum:

Voting is a foundational right in America, and we have long championed efforts to make it easier to vote.

We want to be crystal clear and state unambiguously that we are disappointed in the outcome of the Georgia voting legislation. Throughout Georgia’s legislative session we provided feedback to members of both legislative chambers and political parties, opposing measures in the bills that would diminish or deter access to voting.

Our approach has always been to work with stakeholders to advocate for positive change, and we will continue to engage with legislators, advocacy groups, business leaders and others to work towards ensuring broad access to voting is available to every eligible voter in our home state.

Additionally, our focus is now on supporting federal legislation that protects voting access and addresses voter suppression across the country. We all have a duty to protect everyone’s right to vote, and we will continue to stand up for what is right in Georgia and across the U.S.

As an aside, I abhor the corporate use of the term “stakeholders” to cover the reality of partisan pressure. Corporate officials are by law required to consider the interests of shareholders and it seems to me they are not doing so in this case.

He was not alone. Ed Bastian, the CEO of Delta Airlines, like Coke, headquartered in Atlanta, joined in covering their weakness in an unsubstantiated moral claim about a law he probably had not read:

    Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said in a memo to employees Wednesday that the law was “unacceptable” and “based on a lie” of widespread fraud in last November’s election.

Governor Brian Kemp was having none to it:

    Georgia’s Kemp shot back on Wednesday.

    “At no point did Delta share any opposition to expanding early voting, strengthening voter ID measures, increasing the use of secure drop boxes statewide, and making it easier for local election officials to administer elections — which is exactly what this bill does.

    “The last time I flew Delta, I had to present my photo ID,” Kemp said in a statement. “Today’s statement by Delta CEO Ed Bastian stands in stark contrast to our conversations with the company, ignores the content of the new law, and unfortunately continues to spread the same false attacks being repeated by partisan activists.”

Delta declined to comment further or specify which parts of the bill it tried to change. Maybe, instead of just running with these statements, reporters should demand that Quincey and Bastian specify their complaints. (Who am I kidding?)

The shuffling parade of weak corporate leaders continued.

There was American Express CEO Steve Squeri, who announced his company stands “against any efforts to suppress voting.” Black Rock’s Larry Fink, expressed concern about efforts that could limit access to the ballot.” And Cisco’s CEO Chuck Robbins: “Governments should be working to make it easier to vote, not harder.” None of these corporate wizards points to anything in the law that suppresses voting or makes it harder to vote. Indeed, they couldn’t because it doesn’t. What the law does try to do is strengthen accountability to make certain only eligible voters can vote and that their votes are securely kept and honestly counted.

This reminds me so much of the self-congratulatory, meaningless, signs that appeared on lawn signs in my wealthy neighborhood last year, announcing. “Hate has no home here.” As if it does in the rest of the neighborhood, which lack such signaling. As if the signs don’t express contempt for and claim moral superiority over those of us who don’t dot our lawn with vapid signs like this.

The corporate kneeling to BLM and Stacey Abrams, who never accepted her election defeat, continued with Major League Baseball, which announced it’ll move the All-star Game and draft out of Atlanta because it opposed the election law. I don’t know where they plan to hold it, but it certainly must not be in New York, which provides for fewer days of permissible early voting than Georgia. Nor can it be in Delaware (Biden’s home state) which doesn’t permit no-excuse absentee ballots like Georgia’s does.

The corporatist ninnies at American Airlines also are attacking Texas’s new election law, and they should know not to mess with Texas.

    Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick slammed American Airlines on Thursday evening after the airline called out the state’s new security measures to protect elections [snip] “Earlier this morning, the Texas State Senate passed legislation with provisions that limit voting access,” American Airlines said in a statement that echoed remarks made by leftists who have attacked recent measures to secure elections across the country. “To make American’s stance clear: We are strongly opposed to this bill and others like it.” [snip] As Lt. Governor of Texas, I am stunned that American Airlines would put out a statement saying ‘we are strongly opposed to this bill’ [Senate Bill 7] just minutes after their government relations representative called my office and admitted that neither he nor the American Airlines CEO had actually read the legislation,” Patrick said. “We heard these same outcries claiming voter suppression in 2011 when Texas passed the photo voter ID bill. In fact, just the opposite occurred. Voter turnout in Texas soared from 7,993,851 in 2012 to 11,144,040 in 2020, a 39 percent increase. Gubernatorial election voter turnout has increased by 76 percent since photo voter ID was passed.”

Brian Kemp was just as dismissive of Major League Baseball’s decision to move its all-star game and draft out of Atlanta.

    As MLB caves to themes of the woke left, the public should know how Georgia’s voting laws stack up against New York’s — where Major League Baseball is headquartered. In New York there are only 10 days of early voting under the Election Integrity Act. Georgia now has 17 days of mandatory early voting, with the option of two additional Sundays. New York requires an excuse for absentee voting. Georgia does not. And while New York just enacted automatic voter registration in December, Georgia has had it in place for years. Let’s be clear: MLB’s decision is not about access to voting. It’s about a lack of courage to stand up to the lies of a radical mob hellbent on distorting the truth for political gain. If MLB is worried about access to the ballot box, they should check their own backyard. They may be afraid of Jos Biden and Stacey Abrams, but I’m not.

Punch back twice as hard, like Kemp and Patrick, against efforts to undercut stronger election integrity. I’d skip the MLB’s All-Star game, switch to another beverage, and check my stock portfolio to be sure the CEOs of the companies I invest in were smarter, stronger, and more honest than these guys are.