Posted on 09/30/2021 7:38:09 PM PDT by UMCRevMom@aol.com
Everywhere you look, leftist members of big investment companies like BlackRock Inc. and “woke” CEOs at companies like Delta Air Lines Inc. prattle on about “ESG,” which stands for environmental, social, and governance responsibility.
Environmental, social, and governance responsibility advocates force companies to take positions in the political arena on issues that may have nothing to do with the company’s actual business activities.
Typical targets include use of fossil fuels, Second Amendment rights, and welfare policy. In their self-righteous elitism, environmental, social, and governance responsibility advocates have no qualms about the use of shareholders’ assets—other people’s money—to promote their various political causes.
Companies like Delta Air Lines provide air transportation to customers. Because people choose to buy their services, airline stewardesses, mechanics, and pilots, among others, have jobs. The employees of corporations can choose to donate a portion of their paychecks to woke causes if they choose. There is nothing wrong with that.
People who own shares of corporations can also choose to invest in so-called social justice causes. Environmental, social, and governance responsibility advocates want to take that choice away by pressuring management to toe the woke line with their shareholders’ money.
Much of environmental, social, and governance responsibility is virtue signaling done to elevate the reputations of senior executives. In reality, what they are signaling is their dereliction of their fiduciary duty to those who have invested in their companies.
Milton Friedman, writing in 1970, may have put it best when he said:
When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the ‘social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system,’ I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life. The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned ‘merely’ with profit but also with promoting desirable ‘social’ ends; that business has a ‘social conscience’ and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers.
In fact they are—or would be if they or any one else took them seriously—preaching pure and unadulterated socialism.
Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades …
The whole justification for permitting the corporate executive to be selected by the stockholders is that the executive is an agent serving the interests of his principal. This justification disappears when the corporate executive imposes taxes and spends the proceeds for ‘social’ purposes. He becomes in effect a public employee, a civil servant, even though he remains in name an employee of private enterprise. On grounds of political principle, it is intolerable that such civil servants—insofar as their actions in the name of social responsibility are real and not just window-dressing—should be selected as they are now.
If they are to be civil servants, then they must be selected through a political process. If they are to impose taxes and make expenditures to foster ‘social’ objectives, then political machinery must be set up to guide the assessment of taxes and to determine through a political process the objectives to be served.
Environmental, social, and governance responsibility—like efforts to politicize the judiciary—is an example of the left overstepping its bounds and expanding the political realm into the farthest reaches of society while simultaneously demonizing and mischaracterizing people who disagree with its bossy, woke explanations of how things are.
The left’s insatiable appetite for all things political should be met with a clear response by economic freedom-loving people everywhere not to feed it, lest the monster grows larger.
This piece originally appeared in The Daily Signal More on This Issue
1-ESG advocates force companies to take positions in the political arena on issues that may have nothing to do with the company’s actual business activities.
2-In reality, what they are signaling is their dereliction of their fiduciary duty to those who have invested in their companies.
3-The left’s insatiable appetite for all things political should be met with a clear response by economic freedom-loving people everywhere not to feed it.
28 Sept: BBC: Green investing: How your savings can fight climate change
By Lucy Hooker
Another piece of recent research by French business school, Edhec, found “greenwashing” by funds claiming to be climate-friendly disguised the limited impact their investments were having.
It said money wasn’t flowing to companies that were improving their environmental record, while many that were deteriorating were still being funded.
One leading fund manager, BlackRock’s chief investment officer for sustainable investing, Tariq Fancy, left his job in frustration. He has denounced ESG investing as “sustain-a-babble” arguing it does more harm than good because people think they’re tackling climate change when they’re not.
Ultimately, though, these problems will have to be resolved, says Ben Caldecott, the Lombard Odier associate professor of sustainable finance at the University of Oxford, because shifting financial flows is an essential part of the decarbonisation process.
“There is no solution that doesn’t involve the financial sector changing rapidly. There is no transition without it,” he says...
In fact, how to mobilise private finance is high on the agenda at the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, taking place in November...
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58544966
TOO MANY TAXES
TOO MANY LAWS
It’s not just companies. People will have ESG Scores which affect you in the same ways as your credit score. It’s basically a social credit score like china has.
Welcome to the Great Reset part of the New World Order
All they are doing is changing from one discrimination to another discrimination.
In 2012 the Democrats held their convention in Charlotte, NC to nominate Batak Obama for a second term. The DNC pressed local corporations to extend it “loans” to cover up front expenses. The loans were to be repaid with revenue generated by the DNC during the convention. The labeling of this money as loans allowed the company and DNC to avoid campaign finance laws restricting large gifts from corporations.
Duke Energy, the major NC electric provider, extended the DNC a $10 million dollar loan. There was considerable criticism from stockholders and customers at the time who thought it to be highly inappropriate for a regulated utility to be loaning money to a political party. The liberal and pro Obama CEO of Duke assured the press the customers of Duke were not at risk since the funds were coming from stockholder, not ratepayer money. The liberal press then dropped the matter as an issue. It was rumored at the time the CEO was on the short list to be Obama’s Secretary of Energy in the second term.
After the convention the DNC failed to pay back the loan. Duke Energy wrote it off as a bad debt. The CEO did not get the job he coveted in the administration and soon retired. The DNC essentially received an illegal campaign contribution. The national press had no interest in the story and as usual the RINOs controlling the state GOP did not make a fuss, nor did Romney and the RNC. No one was investigated or prosecuted.
its like they are forcing them to behave a certain way without actually changing the law(pesky democracy)
ESG is a farce. The more you pay, the better rating. Also, if you are in anyway publicly associated with Republicans, libertarians, or anything other than the democrap party - you get low ratings. Tesla, WHICH MAKES EFFING ELECTRIC CARS has a low rating due to Elon Musk’s perception that he is libertarian, or at least not a slave to the DNC.
As a Certified Internal Auditor I have to maintain my certification by obtaining 40 hours of Continuous Professional Education credits every year.
I spent two of them learning about this absolute garbage.
Example: Woke Bank has ESG goals and mission statement.
You want to borrow money from Woke Bank; Woke bank will lend you the money, if you agree to cut your green house gas emissions by 10% in some documented way.
Should you fail to achieve your ESG required reductions, you pay a much elevated interest rate on the loan you signed up for and that you have fully repaid, until now...
Pretty slick eh!
bmp
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