Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita told Newsmax on Wednesday that BlackRock CEO Larry Fink lacks the courage to properly confront woke culture.
Rokita, a Republican, was responding after Fink announced that he is no longer using the term "ESG" (environment, social and governance), because it is being politically "weaponized" by the far left and the far right and that he's "ashamed" to be part of the debate on the issue.
Rokita told Newsmax's "Wake Up America" that "captains of industry, such as Fink — who earn so much money to make the big decisions — lack the courage and are just cowards."
Rokita said such executives "are afraid they are going to go to brunch on Sunday and get a stink eye from one of their friends at the golf club. And those are the last kind of people that we need in position of power like this."
Instead, Rokita said, "you've got to be strong and speak truth to power, and we have got to be very forceful when we hear something that's wrong."
Rokita added: "What is wrong is when you are making investment decisions not based on a financial return but based on an ideological return. And that is all that ESG is, whatever [Fink] wants to call it. And he got sucked into it. Now he is embarrassed and now he's got a chance to redeem himself, but it looks like he is not going to do it, [instead he will] just call it by a different name."
Rokita added that "what this means at the end of the day for all of us [regular people] is higher prices for everything ... you are not making a financial return, so you've got to make up for it other ways."
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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