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Editor’s Note: This essay has been edited from the new book “You will own nothing” Written by Carol Ross, available July 18th.
Social credit systems, whether formal or informal, are used to keep individuals in line with the elite age narrative. If you stray from common sense, your social status, job, and assets may be targeted as a means of attacking your freedom, including the opportunity to build wealth.
If you’re a business person and don’t follow common sense or follow elite desires, you’re under attack using ESG, the social credit system for start-ups. This trolling of capital allocation is so powerful that it can happen to people of considerable wealth and power, like Elon Musk, the richest man in the universe.
ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance and is a concept sometimes called terms like “stakeholder capitalism” and “sustainable investing” and includes various non-financial criteria for companies and their investors. . ESG is based on some elites’ own decisions about morality and “what’s good for society.” (It always ends well, right?)
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Calls ‘the Poster Child of ESG’, Critics ‘A Phenomenon to Oppose’
It is somewhat difficult to explain what ESG is. This is because ESG shifts and changes around a loose moral code dictated by a relatively small number of people. This change is intentional, so ESG can respond to the whims of the elite as their ideas and priorities shift.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been targeted by ESG for his support for free speech as part of the Twitter acquisition. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
Like many bad and dangerous ideas, ESG makes sense on the surface. Most people would agree that we want to be good environmental stewards. On the social and governance side, it makes sense to value our employees and embrace diversity in many ways. Where ESG goes sideways is in its actions.
Basic free-market economic principles nearly solve many social, governance, and even environmental problems. People don’t want to do business with companies that don’t treat their employees well. As a company, our employees are the custodians of our brand. Unhappy employees make unhappy brand managers and often provoke negative customer reactions. Self-tuning and reaching equilibrium are all built into the model.
Diversity is no different. People who seek out diverse perspectives and experiences and bring them in in authentic ways often do better business.
Therefore, the concept of ESG generally makes sense. However, once recruited by the elite for their own purposes, they become crude and guided by central planning outcomes. As we have learned throughout history and paid the price in recent years, this benefits no one but central planners and their cronies.
A bunch of qualified elites and villains sit around a conference table and say, “Give companies a social credit score to make them do what we want them to do, not the interests of their shareholders, their customers, or their shareholders.” What should I do about it?” What is your business model? ” That’s what ESG is all about.
What began perhaps with good intentions has now become a hybrid scam and money diversion vehicle.
Enter Musk. Could the richest man in the universe and someone as well-connected as Musk escape the fate of ESG? Not much.
In mid-May 2022, after the billionaire serial entrepreneur announced an offer to buy Twitter to solve a widely perceived censorship problem, Musk said his business was affected by another. I noticed that Tesla, the world’s leading electric car maker, has been dropped from the S&P ESG 500 index.
Carol Ross’ new book You Will Own Nothing, out July 18, explores how the Left abuses ESG and other strategies to gain power.
Maggie Dawn, Head of North American ESG Indices at S&P Dow Jones Indices, who decides which companies are included or removed from the index, wrote in a post about Tesla’s exclusion: It was a drop in benchmark-level scores related to Tesla’s low-carbon strategy (lack of it) and its Code of Business Conduct. ”
The “Code of Business Conduct” part sounds awful, denying Elon’s recent stance and affirming the notion that ESG is a company’s social credit score.
Musk tweeted, “Exxon ranks among the top 10 global environmental, social and governance (ESG) categories on the S&P 500, but Tesla is not on the list! ESG is a scam. Weaponized by false social justice. It is done,” he countered. Warriors! He also said the rating agencies had lost their integrity and warned that political attacks against him would intensify in the coming months.
Leveraging ESG in this way not only directly attacks Mr. Musk, but also Tesla’s shareholders, who lose the benefits of being part of the index.
If Musk’s willingness to defend free speech could hurt a company’s social credibility, what chance do other companies and their management have?
We found that the ESG directive was draining capital from the fossil fuel industry, leaving the entire fossil fuel industry undercapitalized. This maneuver has not only led to higher prices for direct and derivative products alike over the past few years, but it has also created a massive funding shortfall. The sector that bears the future.
So if you see a CEO or other company executive making a decision that you believe is against the interests of the company, its customers or even shareholders, it could be an ESG-driven bullying or hostage situation. Please know that there is
Management sacrifices what is best for real shareholders and those who have personal or other investments in the company in the short term so that strong ESG providers do not target them in the long term. may decide to
Therefore, the concept of ESG generally makes sense. However, once recruited by the elite for their own purposes, they become crude and guided by central planning outcomes. As we have learned throughout history and paid the price in recent years, this benefits no one but central planners and their cronies.
ESG has been anchored across the business ecosystem by players such as the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and wealth management giant BlackRock, and is a powerful tool leveraged by equally powerful individuals, companies and institutions.
In addition, a huge amount of money is obtained there. Former Treasury Department Senior Advisor Dan Katz wrote for Newsweek that ESG has attracted more than $40 trillion in assets. This is a serious and thorny issue as you have to make money and use your power.
Under President Joe Biden, the Department of Labor’s Office of Employee Benefits Administration introduced a rule that effectively stipulated that benefit plan managers no longer had to invest in the best financial interests of their employees. . You can now favor ESG and Economic Targeted Investments (ETI). This codifies the business’s social credibility at your expense.
In choosing investments that maximize shareholder value, this means throwing out the long-standing fiduciary standards that employee benefit plans must follow, and, whatever those in power might see it, is what you might imagine. As such, non-financial criteria such as ESG will be allowed. Prioritize that day.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink reportedly claimed that the term ESG is “misused by the far left and far right.” (Reuters/Brendan McDiarmid)
You lose twice because your wealth is used by powerful corporations and their management teams to prevent you from running your business in a way that maximizes your value as a shareholder.
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BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has been very vocal about these strategies. In a 2020 letter to CEOs, BlackRock said, “If a company does not make sufficient progress on sustainability-related disclosures and the underlying business practices and plans, we will oppose management and boards. They will be more and more inclined to vote,” he said. The message is clear. There is no success without working with the elite. It’s not capitalism. It is the corporate version of fascism.
With more and more people screaming ESG, those shepherds are now stepping back, but in name only. BlackRock’s Larry Fink said at the Aspen Ideas Festival that ESG has become politicized and he will no longer use it as a term. (Yes, thanks to him and his entourage.)
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He was quoted as saying, “I will not use the term ESG because it is misused by the extreme left and extreme right.” In fact, ESG is a misuse of itself and no one cares about the term. The problem is the actions taking place under that banner.
Elon Musk called ESG “devil”, which seems to be quite accurate. A few people are holding the economy hostage. We need an exorcism to remove this demon from our lives and businesses. Individual wealth creation opportunities, freedom, and the global economy are in balance.
Click here to read more about Carol Ross
