perfidy

Chapter 11 proceedings seem to focus the corporate mind. Not always on anything that matters to business, however. Witness, below, excerpted from an email message I got from Delta Airlines today:

In a partnership with The Conservation Fund, we are the first U.S. airline to implement a voluntary carbon offset program — and we'd love to have you "onboard."

It's simple. Beginning June 1, 2007, you will be able to add a small donation to fund the planting of trees in sustainable managed forests around the globe when you book your ticket at delta.com. These trees will help off-set carbon emissions by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converting it to oxygen as part of their natural processes.

We'll disburse 100 percent of your donation to "The Conservation Fund program" to plant trees and to support the organization's education and outreach efforts. Additionally, we'll make a donation to The Conservation Fund for every customer flying on a Delta mainline jet worldwide on Earth Day (April 22).

It's just part of our Force for Global Good initiative that strives to benefit the world we fly everyday. So go ahead and take a flight, and join us in uniting our customers and employees in support of environmental stewardship.

Note: this, from the company with the well-meaning customer service people who called to reschedule a flight I've got on tap for next week because their operations staff had changed things, leaving me a massive 7 minute connection time in Atlanta. Whoops. But at least they called.

Anyhow, a couple things occur to me right off the bat.

If they'd paid as much attention to their stockholders as they pretend to pay to the environment, their (former) stockholders wouldn't need to be such heavy users of Preparation H. Sure, the stock's at $0.16/share as I write this, but it's likely overvalued. Bankruptcy has a way of doing that.

Secondly, as I read that kind offer of theirs to join the "Force for Global Good", it sure looks like they're trying hard to do it with my money, and that it's not really them (other than on Earth Day™!) that will be doing the giving. If they want to give their own corporate money to a fool's boondoggle like carbon offsets, I'm fine with that. I'm not one of their stockholders, and am, in fact, a relatively steady customer of theirs. They've already proven, over the years, a callous disregard for the interests of their owners, and those owners are probably beyond surprise at this point. The customers, like me, being a bit more flexible in our ability to avoid having donations milched on our behalf, will see this as the useless public relations gum flapping that it is.

[wik] What good is corporate gum flapping without a press release?