Pepsi is reportedly walking back its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. Conservative news accounts paint it as a significant move. But is it? The multi-national soda behemoth is fully plugged into a dense, complex, and tightly constructed global effort to enact social change that won’t go away anytime soon.
Social media activist Robby Starbuck has successfully pressured several big-name companies into winding down a DEI craze that suddenly seems woefully outdated. Pepsi is his latest scalp. “PepsiCo will no longer have a DEI officer,” Starbuck wrote in a Feb. 20 X post. “PepsiCo will no longer have a DEI team. PepsiCo will end DEI representation goals.”
It sounds good, but is this anything more than a savvy corporation ditching a brand that tapped into a fad that turned stale? DEI may be in retreat, but the spider web that brought it into workplaces nationwide remains omnipresent at Pepsi.
CEO Ramon Laguarta, who penned the letter to employees announcing the DEI rollback cited by Starbuck, was an outspoken zealot in the corporate crusade against “structural racism” in 2020. “As people around the world demand justice for George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and far too many others, we have been thinking hard about how PepsiCo can help dismantle the systemic racial barriers that for generations have blocked social and economic progress for Black people in this country,” Laguarta wrote in an article for Fortune.
“We know that the first step toward change is to speak up, so I want to be very clear: Black Lives Matter, to our company and to me,” he stressed. It wasn’t just talk. The company lavished $400 million on a five-year investment to “address issues of inequality.”
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“Racism is a challenge that calls for big, structural changes, and we’re committed to being agents of progress across our business,” the company declared.
That was then, this is now?
At this moment, Darren Walker, the racially obsessed president of the Ford Foundation – a hard-left, big-money “philanthropy” organization – sits on the Pepsi Board of Directors. He’s been there since 2016.
In January, Walker’s organization published a “Theory of Change” document highlighting its desire to utilize corporations to transform culture. “Disrupting inequality” cannot happen without big business, the treatise asserts. “[M]ost social change work is more incremental, done within the bounds of existing systems, and requiring external forms of pressure as well as alliances with those in power who can help make change for good,” Ford states. The “private sector, faith communities, and other non-state actors” are specifically cited as targets for this operation.
Cesar Conde, Chairman of NBCUniversal News Group, serves alongside Walker on Pepsi’s board. Conde “is also a Trustee of the Aspen Institute and a Board Member at the Council on Foreign Relations,” his PepsiCo bio reads.
In June 2020, Conde rolled out one of the most ambitious corporate DEI programs in the US. “We aspire to achieve two concrete goals: that 50% of our news organization employees be women and 50% of our total workforce be people of color,” he exclaimed in launching NBC’s Fifty Percent Challenge Initiative.
Levi Strauss CEO Michelle Gass is also on the Pepsi board. She has been one of the most vocal defenders of corporate DEI in recent weeks. “We’ve been committed to diversity and inclusion for literally decades, and it’s the core to who we are. So our commitment remains unchanged,” Gass told Women’s Wear Daily in early February. “We will do what’s right for our people, for our business. And at the end of the day, building a diverse and inclusive workplace helps us deliver stronger results.”
There are so many other dots to connect. Pepsi is a “strategic partner” of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum (WEF), and CEO Laguarta “currently serves as the Co-Chair of the [Forum’s] Board of Stewards for the Food Systems Initiative,” his WEF bio notes. Laguarta was a featured speaker at the WEF’s annual meeting at Davos in January.
Pepsi’s Vice President of Government Affairs and Corporate Citizenship Lupe De La Cruz III is on the Advisory Board of The Dream.US, an organization that provides financial aid to illegal alien “Dreamers” so they can attend college.
Mei-Yen Ireland, Deputy Director of the [Bill] Gates Foundation, and Georgia Levenson Keohane, CEO of the [George] Soros Economic Development Fund, are fellow Advisory Board members. The Gates Foundation is a major donor.
We could go on. Pepsi has helped fund a nakedly partisan progressive establishment legal advocacy group, the Brennan Center for Justice, and has conducted multiple partnerships with leading pro-migration NGO CARE. PepsiCo is a featured member of the “CARE Corporate Council.”
“CARE believes that the private sector can play a critical role in accelerating progress toward equality. The CARE Corporate Council convenes ambitious companies across sectors to do just that,” the powerhouse NGO states. The PepsiCo Foundation has donated $18.2 million to a CARE campaign called “She Feeds the World” that aims to “expand agriculture gender equity.” Bet you didn’t realize that was a problem.
Add it all up, and we are dealing with trillions of dollars fueling a vast and elaborate network. The global apparatus that Pepsi is wholeheartedly a part of openly boasts that its goal is to enact fundamental societal change. With that in mind, is the dropping of a tired DEI label that no longer helps advance the mission really worth getting excited about?