E, S, G: The Leftist War Against The Economy

“You dirty double-crossing limey fink! Those damn diamonds are phonies!” – Diamonds are Forever

Copernicus wondered where the Sun went at night.  Then it dawned on him.

Let’s go on a thought experiment:

Pretend that, having conquered the colleges, having infiltrated the leadership of the military and being 95% of the members of most government agencies, and jetting from place to place on private planes, the Left wasn’t done.  No, there was still one goal remaining, and it wasn’t finally getting a date or being able to benchpress more than the bar.  Nope.  The remaining group which they hadn’t managed to completely own was all of corporate America.

But how would they do that?  I mean, the Left has a lot of money for taking over Portland, Oregon again and again, but that’s hardly a challenge nowadays.  What if the Left decided that they wanted to only invest in companies that shared their political leanings, and create some sort of bogus reason to make other people do it, too.

Enter ESG.

What does ESG stand for, Entitled, Stupid, and Gutless?  No, that’s Antifa®, silly.  ESG stands for the three criteria that the Left wants to use to decide if a country or business is sufficiently Leftist:  Environmental, Social, and Governance.  That seems, at first blush, to be relatively safe.  I mean, who wants a bad work environment?  And social, well, maybe that means good customer service.  And governance?  Maybe that’s how efficiently the company is run?

Nah.

I got into Harvard®.  You’d think they would have better security.

Not even close.  So, ESG, does it really mean?  I’ll quote from the fine folks at Harvard®:

• The “E” captures energy efficiencies, carbon footprints, greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, biodiversity, climate change and pollution mitigation, waste management and water usage.
• The “S” covers labor standards, wages and benefits, workplace and board diversity, racial justice, pay equity, human rights, talent management, community relations, privacy and data protection, health and safety, supply-chain management and other human capital and social justice issues.
• The “G” covers the governing of the “E” and the “S” categories—corporate board composition and structure, strategic sustainability, oversight and compliance, executive compensation, political contributions and lobbying, and bribery and corruption.

Certainly, there is some Mom and Apple Pie-level stuff in there.  There has to be otherwise they couldn’t sell it.  It’s not like people look at a company and say, “Gosh, I wish Google® was even more corrupt with their search results” or “I wish Facebook™ had done more to dishonestly influence the election by censoring even more news unfavorable to the Left”.

In his spare time, Mark Zuckerberg likes to do normal human things, like drink water, consume calories, update circuitry.

Most of the ESG metric, however, is right out of the Left’s playbook.  The parts in bold above are things that, mostly, don’t have anything at all to do with actual profitability or performance of a company.  How can I tell this isn’t serious?  The Left isn’t going after the NFL®.  Even though I haven’t watched a game in years, they keep playing the games.  So let’s pretend the NFL© wanted to maximize its ESG score:

For instance, to improve its ESG, the NFL could focus on climate change by eliminating stadiums and all the wasteful use of gasoline to get to the games.  There’s more:

• They could reduce their carbon footprint by using all natural, sustainable cotton fibers instead of wasteful nylon in their uniforms.
• They could have opposing teams take electric cars to the games.
• They could replace the plastic in their helmets with sustainably harvested weaved plant fiber.
• They could replace the uniform types of grass on the field by using native plant species. Think of it – in Arizona you could have cactus and sand instead of lush lawns (that use far too much water!).

That takes care of the E!  What about the S?

• Workforce diversity? The players on the team could easily be selected so that they strictly follow the demographics of the United States, including half of them being women, and some being senior citizens.  The handicapped would need to be represented as well, and not just as placekickers like they usually do.
• Pay equity could be easily taken care of by having no member of the team or of the management staff make a time more than 20 times what the guy selling sodas in the stands makes each season, which would mean the CEO pay would be capped around $80,000. And if the starting QB got money from promotions, he’d have to split it equally with everyone in the organization.  Equity, after all.

Maybe he can put that on a slogan for the endzone?

That takes part of most of the S, especially after the owner is forced to give up 90% of his team ownership to random citizens of the world, so a Sri Lankan goat farmer can understand the joy of owning an NFL™ franchise.

What about governance?  Well, we could appoint people from every country in the world to the board of each NFL® team.  And no more cozying up to local, state, and federal officials for more tax bux.

So why don’t people talk about applying the ESG metric to the NFL™?  It’s simple.

People take football seriously.

All of the nonsense the Left loves to spout falls apart when it comes to one, simple business that everyone can understand and easily see the idiocy of the ESG metric.

Sri Lanka couldn’t believe it was riot season already!  They still had their “I support Ukraine” banners up.

In real life, Sri Lanka was ranked by ESG score.  They scored a 99 in Environmental, an 88 in Social, and a 47 in governance.  Sri Lanka is facing its “worst economic collapse in its modern history” according to some economist somewhere that you can Google® search for if you’re bored.  But its ESG was so good, right?  They only used natural fertilizer, and lowered their carbon footprint!  They also were starving and had to import lots of extra food.

It’s that same environmental rating that countries like the Netherlands and Canada are chasing when they are preparing to mandate that their farmers have fewer cows and use less fertilizer.  Both of those things, you see, hurt the carbon footprint and thus make the environmental score of the country go down.  If it causes people to go bankrupt to buy Cheetos® or starve, I guess ESG is a way to make sure that everyone in the world has the same chance to be hungry, poor, or exposed to social unrest as the least developed nation.  It could happen here.  Oops.  Forgot about Chicago.

It is happening here, at least with the ‘S’ part of ESG.  Looks like we’ll have Equity soon with countries that riot over it being (rolls dice) Tuesday soon enough.

When he fires an employee, he fires an employee.

Because of this fantastic success at the national level, Wall Street™ is pushing ESG at the corporate level.  The aptly-named Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock™ which currently controls over eight trillion dollars in investments is a big fan.  Eight trillion dollars?  That’s almost enough to buy two full tanks of gas in Biden’s America.  Think a man who controls eight trillion worth of cash has some pull?

The aptly-named Larry Fink certainly does.  Individual shareholders don’t vote, so the aptly-named Larry Fink’s eight trillion in stock probably controls two or three times that level of shareholder votes.  Alone.  The actual ESG rating process is so murky and subject to manipulation that the ESG for a company can be as fraudulent as Joe Biden’s hair plugs.

So, yeah, the Left has constantly used corporate America for funding, and now they’ve figured out a way to make business support whatever crazy policy that the Left wants to use to turn the United States into the next version of Sri Lanka.

Thankfully, he planted a tree to offset his carbon emissions.

The aptly-named Larry Fink has a private jet, and houses everywhere, and burns more carbon in a week than most people will burn in a lifetime.  Won’t you please reduce your carbon footprint so he can continue to do this?  I mean, it would up your personal ESG score . . . .