A Complete Fraud

There used to be a pretty simple remit for company directors. Run the company in the best interest of shareholders. That was measured by financial returns and economics.

Woke capitalism has changed all that.

They’ve ditched the obligation to company owners in favour of pushing political and social agendas.

Companies now serve as a platform for the whims of a CEO to ingratiate themselves into the woke world.

These multi-millionaire CEO activists don’t even use their own money to campaign.

Oh no! That might actually have an impact on their own wealth!

Instead they throw company money into their chosen cause, often without the usual governance or justification that it is in the best interests of shareholders.

The acronym ESG is all the justification that’s needed.

Those letters stand for Environmental & Social Governance. It’s the new buzzword in investing and claims to be all about doing good while making money.

It helps to explain why a bunch of companies tossed millions into BLM – so it could buy multi-million dollar homes for the founders.

I should correct myself. The money wasn’t actually donated for that purpose, that’s just what it was used for.

But the resting place of the donations isn’t actually important. Nor is the cause.

What matters now is that the cause is a morally virtuous one according to the godless left and that the company is seen as a willing participant in that cause.

Why would they do this?

Sometimes it’s because of activist investor pressure behind the scenes.

Large shareholders, like Industry Super Funds, can threaten to sell out, destroying a company share price and then attracting the ire of other shareholders.

More importantly (for the executive team that is), if that happens their lucrative options package would likely expire worthless and they’d forgo millions in financial rewards.

That’s why so many companies have now adopted the ESG mantra.

It’s all about compliance with the demands of the trillion dollar investment houses who use the term to attract more money on which they can charge fees.

There are no bigger players in this space than Blackrock.

Blackrock are the world’s largest money manager with AUD $13 trillion in assets. They run a suite of funds covering almost every aspect of society.

Blackrock is a top shareholder in many of the household corporate names you will be familiar with – Apple, Microsoft, banks and so forth. It owns tens of thousands of rental properties.

In fact it pretty much has a finger in every pie available!

It’s also a key contributor to the World Economic Forum. That’s the shadowy group we often talk about on this show that wants a Great Reset, reinvest capitalism and introduce global government.

They also want you to own nothing claiming it will make you happy.

The Blackrock Founder and CEO, Larry Fink, is an acolyte of the WEF.

In 2020 he wrote to CEOs claiming that climate change had become a defining factor in companies long-term prospects.

That’s code for you better go green or we won’t invest in you.

That action might trigger the failure of the executives lucrative options package I mentioned before.

You see how it works in the real world?

Blackrock backed a green activist hedge fund (known as Engine No 1) to achieve three board position at ExxonMobil. That this tiny fund had no experience in running a oil and gas company, but has signed up to the green agenda, and that was all the skill they required.

Again, the poor investor backing oil and gas is trumped by an activist green WEF endorsing trillionaire money manager.

It’s no surprise that Blackrock people like Brian Deese, formerly the firms global head of sustainable investing, is now President Biden’s chief economic advisor.

Little wonder the ESG agenda is catching on.

It’s being pushed from within governments who direct funds to managers like Blackrock who in turn ‘encourage’ companies into compliance.

A circle of climate crony capitalism.

Again, ESG is fully backed by the WEF who want ‘stakeholder capitalism’ rather than shareholder capitalism.

Here’s a graphic from the WEF website about one of their partner firms.

Note their ESG plan includes all the buzzwords…diversity & inclusion, gender equality, wellness globally, access to comfort, carbon neutrality and absolute energy reduction.

They are straight out of the woke textbook.

The WEF website has a letter, signed by 60 CEOs supporting the European Green Deal.

That’s not surprising given what’s in it for them?

Social Capital founder Chamath Palihapitiya has claimed companies do this to get free money.

“If you paint yourself as ESG in Europe, you can essentially borrow money from the ECB at negative rates.

It doesn’t have to work, they don’t need to do anything, they are now getting free money from Europe for basically being able to say this

He’s also labelled ESG investing a ‘complete fraud’, a ‘joke’ and ‘so ridiculous’.

Others claim that ESG is so riddled with scammers and fraud that it is a bubble just waiting to burst.

According to the Japanese ministry of the environment, the ESG market is worth more than 35 trillion US dollars.

Little wonder the opaque world of ESG investing has attracted greenwashing…the practice of creating a false impression about how environmentally friendly a company is.

A good rule of thumb to follow whenever you are presented with a grand new scheme or some far-fetched idea that promise to save you from imminent catastrophe,  is to follow the money.

The motivation behind such crusading concepts is to enrich or empower oneself.

In the case of ESG, it seems to be about both.

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it."
Benjamin Franklin