When President Biden vetoed bipartisan legislation that would have prohibited money managers from considering politically-driven environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria for investments in March, he failed to end the groundswell of pushback to this monstrous assault on American workers and their communities.
Instead, opposition has shifted to the state level. Today, hardly a week goes by in which state treasurers, attorneys general, and even governors are not taking action to extricate their states’ pension and retirement funds from the onerous grip of ESG investments.
An international cabal of giant asset management firms led by BlackRock are using the trillions of dollars under their control as a means of coercing companies to adopt ESG investment strategies.
At its essence, ESG is a radical political agenda that flies in the face of American workers’ interests and has been imposed upon the economy in a way that both circumvents the democratic process and violates fundamental free-market principles.
In his official message to Congress, Biden claimed that his veto "protects the hard‑earned life savings and pensions of tens of millions of workers and retirees across the country," and that to do otherwise would "[jeopardize] the life savings of working families and retirees."
But nothing could be farther from the truth. State financial officials are divesting from ESG funds and associated companies precisely because they violate the fiduciary responsibility to prioritize workers’ pensions above ideological considerations.
"ESG funds certainly perform poorly in financial terms," according to Harvard Business Review, which added that "no study has proven that ESG causes higher returns."
It's difficult to imagine that any American worker would be pleased to see that the money for which they worked so hard to save is being risked in underperforming funds that help achieve far-left political objectives rather than generate the highest returns and thereby help secure their retirement future.
Much of ESG’s agenda is aimed at financially strangling American oil and gas producers as a means of encouraging the growth of "green"energy production.
Companies that facilitate oil or gas producers in securing project funding risk getting a low ESG score, for example, and thus jeopardize future business opportunities.
In part due to ESG dictates, which intentionally diverts capital away from American oil companies, the industry is being blocked from producing anywhere near capacity.
In fact, it’s producing 600,000 fewer barrels of oil each day than pre-pandemic, when oil output was at its highest levels.
Oil demand has continued to increase and, as a result, American workers are feeling the pain at the gas pump. Rising fuel prices impacts just about every area of the economy and has been contributing to inflation.
The slowdown in energy exploration, production, refining and distribution is taking a toll on high-paying oil and gas jobs in many areas of the country, including my home commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Producers starved of capital, thanks to ESG, are faced with laying off workers or getting by with fewer workers than they planned to hire.
ESG also means that energy workers face wage decreases or freezes.
Ongoing high inflation and slower economic growth only serves to compound the suffering that workers are experiencing in nearly all sectors.
On top of that, slower economic growth poses a severe threat to future job creation.
Reports that 14 million workers’ jobs will be lost globally, partially attributable to ESG, apparently means very little to an indifferent Biden administration.
During recent Senate testimony, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland blithely defended her decision to shut down a Minnesota critical mineral mine that would have created more than 1,000 blue-collar jobs, suggesting that the United States already has too many jobs.
In their zeal to divert capital away from oil and gas producers and toward "green" energy projects, ESG’s corporate activists, are pushing American jobs and investment dollars to China, undermining energy and national security.
BlackRock, for example, has poured billions of investor dollars into China, one of the world’s largest polluters whose human rights abuses includes slave labor.
But apparently that’s an ESG virtue.
After all, stated BlackRock’s Larry Fink, "markets like actually totalitarian governments" as they bring stability and Democracy is messy.
American workers deserve more respect for their investments and livelihoods and fewer ESG lies from a White House that cares less about them and more about investments in China.
Those who are pushing back against ESG must continue their efforts because too much depends upon it.
(A related story may be found here.)
Rick Santorum is a former U.S. senator, who represented Pennsylvania's 18th District, from 1995 to 2007. He is also an author, attorney, and political commentator.
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