TYB
A woke mouse trap: Activist targets Disney
August 20, 2022
“I really like Dan Loeb,” a CEO of a major US company told me as we discussed Loeb’s latest activist move, the purchase of a $1 billion stake in Disney with calls to cut costs, shed assets and improve management. “But the last thing I want is Dan snooping around my company. The fox in the henhouse never plays nice.”
Of course, activist investors like Loeb aren’t in the business of playing nice. And Loeb is particularly adept at his job — just see the havoc he caused at Yahoo a few years back on the way to a big payday. With his Disney move, he again wants to force change and enhance shareholder value, which has been noticeably missing from the company recently. The stock is down more than 23% year-to-date and more than 30% in the past 52 weeks.
Cable cord cutting is eating into Disney’s linear businesses, including its still-profitable sports cable network ESPN. The Disney+ streaming service is growing, but still losing money. ESPN along with decent theme-park attendance is why the company posted strong third-quarter results. Disney is betting big on streaming but it may not be the magic bullet many industry pros hoped for, or Netflix wouldn’t be missing performance targets.
Then there are the unstated reasons Disney is in trouble, the one that industry executives, investors and rivals will tell you when they’re not being quoted by name: Woke don’t sell, particularly when it comes to a company trying to sell kid-oriented programming and theme-park experiences to Middle America.
In his letter to Disney CEO Bob Chapek, Loeb didn’t say any of this. (He also declined to comment for this column.) His letter stated explicitly he wants an outright sale of ESPN to pay down debt and allow ESPN to make up for the cord cutting and fully flourish in the sports gambling business, which doesn’t fit with Disney’s family-forward image. He’d like to totally suspend the dividend and buy from rival Comcast the remaining 33% stake of the Hulu streaming service it doesn’t own.
A growth albatross
But Loeb, in my opinion, also more than hinted at wokeness being a growth albatross for the “House of Mouse.” He wants more experienced board members to fill “gaps in talent and experience” that he described as “strengths in technology, advertising and consumer engagement, as well as proven track records of leading large, complex organizations and creating shareholder value.”
So I did a little digging through the company’s 2022 proxy statement — a type of annual report that investors, including presumably Loeb, pore through to understand management’s priorities, strategic direction, shareholder votes and what it looks for in its board members — the men and women whom management must report to.
You would be amazed how Disney — a company known for, among other things, Mickey Mouse and making movies that are supposed to appeal to the so-called silent majority — is openly bragging to investors about its embrace of every woke fad imaginable.
The terms “diversity” and “ESG,” the acronym for Environmental, Social and Governance, appear on nearly every page. Management diversity is a worthy goal, but real academic research on diversity and shareholder value shows no correlation.
The proxy says management has created various initiatives to increase the diversity (aka wokeness) of Disney’s programming. Where’s the research that those programs sell? I couldn’t find any.
Now let’s turn to the company’s board members — the people Loeb wants to oust because he thinks they’re not cutting it. In the proxy, Disney has a checklist of what it considers key attributes for board members.
Members are graded on executive management, marketing, brand enhancement and risk but also diversity and “ESG experience,” neither of which are on Loeb’s list. You will be happy to note that Chapek received strong marks on most of these, though he received only a passable grade for ESG (maybe he uses his gas-guzzling corporate jet too often) and he flunked “diversity” because, you guessed it, he’s a white dude.
That’s apparently negative in the “Woke House of Mouse.”
Sauce/more: https://nypost.com/2022/08/20/disneys-wokeness-only-allows-for-activist-investors-to-take-control/
Go woke, go broke..
REVEALED: Donald Trump left Joe Biden GRACIOUS good luck note in White House as catalog of blunders that led to FBI Mar-a-Lago espionage raid is revealed
The final days of the Trump administration were reportedly chaotic and led to blunders in document handling that resulted in the Mar-a-Lago raid
Despite the chaos and unfounded claims that the election was stolen, Trump still left behind a traditional presidential letter for Joe Biden
Biden read over Trump's handwritten letter, commenting to an aide that he was surprised by the graciousness of it, although its contents haven't been revealed
Officials said they were aware that Trump retaining the documents in his Florida residence was a problem, but little appeared to be done about it
Among the key items officials wanted to retrieve were letters to Trump from Kim Jong-un and the letter Barack Obama left behind for his successor
August 20, 2022
Donald Trump left a 'gracious' letter behind for Joe Biden after leaving the White House, it has been revealed, as aides shared the catalog of chaos that culminated in last week's Mar-a-Lago raid.
Sources and notes detailing the last four days of the Trump presidency revealed that upon entering the Oval Office, newly elected president Joe Biden found a letter waiting for him from his predecessor, The New York Times reported.
The letter was reportedly handwritten by Trump himself on two large pages, with Biden remarking to an aide that the former president 'had been more gracious in the letter than he had anticipated.'
Its contents have not been revealed, but the letter will be among the first records Biden will have to turn over to the National Archives when he leaves the White House.
Aides say it was the very same process that landed Trump in trouble with the FBI, after attempts by the National Archive to retrieve the note Barack Obama had left for Trump, as well as correspondence with Kim Jong un, sparked a wider probe into the removal of classified documents.
It's a process that has landed Trump in the midst of a FBI investigation, following a series of blunders that resulted in a failure to turn over two dozen boxes of documents, leading to a raid on his Mar-a-Lago home.
Trump has denied allegations of wrongdoing, and says he plans to sue.
Those who spoke to the Times suggested the incident had stemmed from poor organization among Trump's staff, rather than because of any malign attempt to misuse secret information.
Sources told the Times that in the hurry to leave the White House, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows assured aides that he would ensure the administration complied with the regulations to leave the documents for the National Archive.
They noted, however, that Trump seemed more focused on 'pushing through last-minute pardons' as he ignored the transition of power while repeating unfounded claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
Although the White House Counsel's Office said it warned Meadows that the two dozen boxes needed to be turned in, which included document's marked 'highly classified' and letters from Korean leader Kim Jong-un, they ended up in Mar-a-Lago instead.
Under the Presidential Records Act, which governs the handling of records created in the Oval Office, every document generated essentially belongs to taxpayers and must be submitted to the National Archives.
Donald McGahn, Trump's first White House Counsel, had instituted a protocol for the handling of materials and had given presentations on the law to staff members, former officials told the Times.
They added that several conversations were had about following the 2020 loss about sending someone to collect the documents that had been building up in Trump's estate.
During the final days of the administration, White House Counsel Pat Cippollone and his deputy, Patrick Philbin, 'were keenly aware that [Trump's] handling of documents was a potential problem,' the Times reported.
Despite the worries, it was unclear how much sway Cippollone had with Trump, as former officials allege the ex-president often berated the attorney for his objections to the election fraud claims.
Along with the reported breakdown between Cippollone and Trump, White House Staff Secretary Derek Lyons, who managed the paperwork in the Oval Office, stepped down on December 18, 2020, just a month before the big exit.
This left Meadows with no executive to help ease the transfer of power that Trump wanted no part of.
Sauce: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11130567/Donald-Trump-left-Joe-Biden-GRACIOUS-letter-leaving-White-House.html
IMHO: They want that soccer ball…and Obama's birth records? Something has them spooked..
con't
>con't POTUS left Potato gracious good luck note
Despite Meadow's efforts to have everything set by the time Trump left office in January 2021, officials with the National Archives realized early on that significant materials were missing.
The archivists were particularly keen on getting back letters sent to the president from Kim Jong-Un and a letter Barack Obama left behind for Trump at the start of his presidency, both of which are considered to have significant historical value.
Although National Archive officials pushed Trump's lawyers to get the records back, they didn't get what they wanted until they went directly to Mar-a-Lago to retrieve 15 boxes of materials in January 2022.
The archivists who collected the documents also told Trump's team that they did not preserve social media records or records of official business conducted on electronic messaging accounts while in the White House, the Times reported.
The officials referred the matter to the Justice Department, who questioned Cippollone and Philbin, along with Trump lawyer Scott Gast.
While Trump's team fumbled in prepping for the smooth transition of power, former Vice President Mike Pence had the exact opposite experience.
His chief of staff Marc Short and counsel Greg Jacobs oversaw a complete indexing and boxing up of all of Pence's government documents, three former officials with knowledge of their work told the Times.
Their quick and efficient work had only one goal, sources said: 'ensuring that Mr. Pence left office without a single paper that did not belong to him.'
Pence, asked directly if he had retained any classified information upon leaving office, told The Associated Press in an interview on Friday, 'No, not to my knowledge.'
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