ESG Makes YOU an Unwitting Political Donor

The headline to a recent New York Post opinion piece, promises to answer the question of "How corporations surrendered to hard-left wokeness," and explains in relevant part:

[S]ince when were many shareholders, looking to invest for retirement, so concerned about whether they were holding stock in a company that supports eliminating greenhouse emissions or canceling Columbus Day?

Answer: When those shareholders became progressive activists, who learned how to influence money managers to tout politics instead of profits.

Proxy advisory firms are hired by big money managers to provide guidance on various corporate-governance issues and shareholder votes. That makes the advisory firms very powerful since most Americans invest through mutual funds and other managed accounts. [links omitted]

And, a bit later:

[T]he power of the left is hard to ignore. [The proxy advisory firms] find common ground with public pension funds run by liberal politicians who also want to sway corporate behavior leftward.

...

[M]ost shareholder votes now involve progressive edicts under the guise of so-called Environmental Social Governance investing. ESG, as it is known on Wall Street, is a way to measure everything from a firm's compliance with green-energy initiatives to its embrace of causes such as Black Lives Matter.

The average retail investors in mutual funds have no say or vote in this vast transformation even as their money is being used for political purposes. The fund is responding to the vocal minority that figured out how the game is played. [bold added, links omitted]

The piece correctly notes that "corporate America's lurch to the left won't end anytime soon," but the good news is that identifying a problem is the first step in correcting it.

Far-left "woke" culture is repellent to normal Americans, and nobody likes being swindled. In the vein of helping put an end to this fraudulent and intrusive nonsense a little sooner, I recommend two additional resources to anyone with an interest in (a) helping more people understand the nature of this problem better, and (b) helping to put an end to it. These are, respectively, (a) "The ESG Myth," by Don Watkins, who explores the origins, implementation, and impact of ESG; and (b) A recent interview by energy advocate Alex Epstein of financial expert Yaron Brook that focuses on the fact that ESG threatens to cripple America's energy sector. I recommend the whole thing, but especially for the concrete proposal Brook moots starting about 39:15 below. (Here is a direct link to the start of that segment.)

Like many other acronyms emanating from the left, ESG helps a Very Bad Idea fly under the radar. And, as the pieces I refer to indicate, it points to terms that offer it moral camouflage.

ESG is fraud, pure and simple, and investors would be extremely angry if what was being done with their money became widely known. In the name of ESG, our money is being "borrowed" without our consent to fund causes we do not know about and which will harm the value of many of the companies our returns depend upon. Even if I agreed with every single thing this movement supported, I would be incensed about the dishonest and high-handed way the money I have set aside to grow for the future is being used in any way for other things than what I put it aside for.

-- CAV