Amerika

Diversity Airlines is now a meme. Never mind the door coming off the plane, just get that ESG score up where Blackrock and Vanguard demand it. Fink runs Alaska Airlines. This is true whether he admits it or not.

People probably don’t care what elected officials think of their corporate policies. They do care what private equity thinks. Joe Biden is years of court cases away from shutting down an airline; Larry Fink is about six months of stock trading and “investment research “ away from taking every plane in inventory straight on over to the bankruptcy auction.

So how did we get to Diversity Airlines? Why does Klaus Schwab exercise a de facto veto over the hiring and firing practices of major US firms? Because Klaus Schwab can.

How did he manage this? Networking and capital accumulation. Publicly traded companies do not have a negative Freedom of Association right when it comes to who owns issued shares of common stock traded after the IPO. Schwab and several of his buddies can call up any brokerage firm on the Internet and their currency will be good.

Once Klaus owns the lion’s ahare of outstanding shares, he also owns the next shareholder meeting. The CEO is the technical boss, but only with the sufferance of the Dark Organization holding a plethora of that company’s voting shares.

Yet old fashioned neoclassical economics would refute this entire premise. If the doors fall off the planes over at Diversity Airlines, nobody flies The Death Jet to The Big Adios. Diversity Airlines (DIVA, NASDAQ) winds up bankrupt.

This is where ideological investment by massive private equity firms lays neoclassical economics to nines. With a large enough capital pool, just about every airline becomes like DIVA. They are all converged when their stock is held by about six or so huge private equity firms with an ideological allegiance to DIE. The doors are equally likely to fall off any major airliner you might be dumb enough to board.

I’m reminded of former NFL Super Bowl Champion and Announcer John Madden. You could not get that man to fly on a plane. He famously drove a ridiculously tricked-out bus to the games he was assigned to call. This was in the 1980-2000 era, so everyone thought he had loose screws the way the doors do now over at DIVA.

If Madden was still around calling games and pimping video games from his bus, people might even regard him as prudent as opposed to phobic. Maybe Greyhound is the next transport stock a savvy investor could take for a ride. With the doors falling off over at Alaska Airlines (aka DIVA), it looks like crazy, old Madden had a point.

Tags: airlines, DIE, diversity, john madden