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October 10, 2022

In 2019, 266 members of the influential Business Roundtable, including the world’s largest fund managers, bankers, communications carriers, even fossil-fuel companies at the risk of their own survival, signed off on a one-page statement reimagining the American corporation. It described a new paradigm of corporate social responsibility to its stakeholders, a perspective that elevates employees, contractors, and suppliers over the interests of profit-seeking shareholders whose investments underwrite a company’s financial health.  It presented a woke capitalist view of the new-age company as beholden to environmental and social whims of the political elite. 

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The concept of stakeholder capitalism is a half-century old, dating back to the Davos manifesto in 1971. To CEOs of a progressive bent, this better kind of capitalism changes the calculus for business leaders by embracing a corporate conscience that devalues short-term shareholder profits in favor of investments aimed at resolving environmental and social issues. 

Under the thumb of the United Nations and World Economic Forum, the Biden administration and corporate boardrooms across America have thrown their lot behind the practice of stakeholder capitalism.  In so doing, they have put American economic and energy power in the hands of potentates and dictators and brought a sense of reality to decades-old fears of a New World Order, Bilderberg conspiracies, and global kingmakers steering nation-state economies.

Highlighting the European origins of this crusade is a manipulated Swedish teenager named Greta Thunberg, whose well-coached militancy inclines her to apocalyptic outbursts characteristic of an anxiety disorder. Trafficked as a doomsday climate purveyor to world leaders, Thunberg recently showboated her net-zero emission convictions by boarding a sailboat from France to the United States.  Pulling off this transatlantic stunt forced several crewmembers to take mega-carbon airline flights to various ports of call.

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The movement to align worldwide production and labor is woven into a vision to eliminate carbon emissions from the planet.  It is a Trojan Horse for an economic fascism that benefits few but the international corporate and political elites who toast their influence and fortune at Davos cocktail parties.

There’s a lot of backslapping going on in the corporate world over Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) business strategies.  ESG provides the leverage used by governments to force-feed a progressive value system on corporations.  It is shareholder extortion, a corporate money pit pushed by the climate commissars at the UN and WEF that assures the erosion of shareholder investments.

Climate activism is a billy club swung wildly by the Biden administration and Beltway Democrats to rule over the domestic means of production by threatening a dystopian view of the future.  It pervades every department of the administration, including the military. Social media and the academies have fallen in lockstep, censoring or shouting down any denial of climate change narratives.  In Alinsky style, last week Biden preached to a distressed audience in Fort Myers that Hurricane Ian ended the debate about the effects of global warming, sinking to a new low in the presence of human misery and destruction with a callous claim discredited days before by his own chief hurricane officer at NOAA.

Carbon shaming, much like the extortionate financial pressures of the Black Lives Matter Global movement, has cowered corporate boardrooms through the creation of report cards that grade a company’s level of reparations for climate concerns and social issues. As Critical Race Theory seeks to alter the perspective and attitudes of young minds, ESG seeks the same for corporations through the publication of blacklists. These scoreboards focus investors and fiduciaries on companies that adhere to a set of ESG-sanctioned practices and encourages divestiture in the fossil-fuel industry.  ESG scores are kompromat for a progressive political goal to starve the oil and gas industry of its shareholders and to back Americans into the corner of renewable energy alternatives.

Sustainable ESG investing is blood in the water to Wall Street sharks. In 2020, ESG assets surpassed thirty-five trillion and are predicted to rise to fifty trillion by 2025.  For perspective, that’s one-third of all global assets under management.  Stock Exchange giants such as Morgan Stanley, flying under the ESG banner, MSCI, and Standard and Poor’s subsidiary effort, S&P Global ESG Index, have cooked-up a corporate guilt complex that has pushed the Fortune 500 placeholders in the direction of climate activism.

The expanding ESG universe has spawned a cottage industry of funding managers and consultants eager to move companies along on their net zero-emission journeys, all the while courting prospective shareholders with a wink and a nod that investing in industries that are ESG-compliant will yield long-term benefits for the planet and pocketbook. Diverting company assets and profits away from shareholders in furtherance of the effort to delay calamitous climate assumptions can be an expensive proposition.  Green fund managers are now tapping into larger currency pools to bankroll the effort and the White House has been eager to help.