There was once a show called Better Off Ted. It was one of those overly cerebral, biting social commentary comedies mocking corporate America. It was too smart for its own good and got cancelled after one season. In episode 4, “Racial Insensitivity”, the company decides to mitigate its environmental impact and save energy by installing motion sensors in all its offices. Lights only turn on when someone enters a room. Water fountains only work when someone is in close proximity. Doors open on motion sensors, and so forth. The problem is, the motion sensors work by recognizing light reflected off the skin, and so they do not see black people. A corporate oversight, surely.
The problem now is that that the company cannot simply scrap the entire system, because it is committed to environmental health and saving energy. So instead, the company hires white people to follow its black employees so that doors can open for them and lights can turn on. But this creates another major problem. The company now has an overrepresentation of whites in its work force, due to all of the additional white people hired to follow the black people. And so, their solution, in order to achieve a higher corporate social responsibility score, is to hire still more black people to follow the white people who follow the black people, after which they have to hire still more white people to follow the black people that are following the white people who follow the black people.
By the end of the episode, the company concludes:
“If the company keeps hiring white people to follow black people to follow white people to follow black people, then by Thursday, June 27th 2013, every person on Earth will be working for us. And we don’t have the parking for that.”
So in the end, the company scraps the new motion sensor system entirely, and everything returns to normal.
On that note, I’d like to wish a hearty congratulations to Caesars for being the only gambling company in the world to make it to Newsweek’s (yeah, it still exists apparently) internationally renowned, prestigious, intensely coveted, ancient, 2nd annual America’s Most Responsible Companies list for 2021. (Please note the following easily overlooked yet critical virtue signal: In crafting the previous sentence, I initially looked up synonyms for “exclusive”. “Segregated” and “discriminatory” came up, so out of concern for my social responsibility score, I declined to use the word at all.)
How does one achieve a good rank on this exalted list? Well, the list measures, among other things, the “number of pages” (See page 9) in a company’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report. Investigations conducted by socially responsible fact-checkers indicate that Caesars’ CSR report is very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very…
(Hold on I need a coffee refill. Being socially responsible is hard work.)
… very very very very very very very very very long. Also considered is whether the CSR report has a “special section on [a company’s] website” even though the extra data hosted would increase its carbon footprint.
The good news is that, after ripping off bond holders for $18 billion in 2017 by vacuuming all the firm’s value out of any corporate vehicle that creditors actually had any lien on and stuffing all exposed shell entities full of toxic junk assets, Caesars now has begun to dedicate more resources to environmental protection and climate change. Additionally, since being acquired by Eldorado, Caesars is now under a new business model that puts greater emphasis on community efforts, which is amazing considering that the communities it operates in have been under various degrees of lockdown for pretty much all of 2020.
Also, its carbon footprint has been drastically reduced since 2019, when people actually went to casinos, so there’s that. And according to reports, 50% of its global workforce was comprised of “females”, a biological classification that has not, as of yet, been cancelled for promoting primitive binary mythologies. It is unclear how many of these “females” in its workforce actually identify as women though, so the proportion of women to non women in Caesars’ global workforce is entirely unknown. Notably, Caesars failed dismally in addressing this issue, which may be why it was only ranked 104 out of 400. Tisk tisk.
In order to score even higher next year on this critical metric though, Caesars is rumored to be considering voluntarily locking down its casinos even harder in 2021 as part of a community effort to encourage extreme public health consciousness. Also, to make sure it gets into the top 10 next year on America’s Most Important Newsweek List, it is even debating cutting all casinos still open off of their local coal-fired power grids and running them on all on a single turbine powered by a stationary multi-seat tricycle ridden by morbidly obese cats that hang out in the back alleys of Wall Street, in order to achieve an even better carbon footprint. And to make up for its irresponsible oversight on the gender identities of the females in its workforce, Caesars may be committed to right any imbalance by hiring males of color who identify as white women for every white female identifying as a colored man in excess of the 50% balance that is necessary to achieve the highest possible score on every racial and gender rubric conceived over the last 5 years.
But will Caesars commit this time to hand over any and all of its assets to creditors this time instead of stiffing them in the event that the firm goes bankrupt again, because, you know, lockdowns and whatever? I couldn’t find anything about this on the Methodology powerpoint for determining America’s Most Responsible Companies of 2021. So probably not.
Thank you for reading this very very very very very very very very important piece on corporate responsibility. And again, my heartfelt congratulations to Caesars on their achievement, and of course to Newsweek for somehow still managing to exist, even though most of us forgot they even did.
