Listen: Vivek Ramaswamy gives best explanation of ESG: ‘The defining scam of our time’ – ‘Agendas that would make the blood of those retirees boil if they knew’

By Marc Morano

March 23, 2022
4:59 pm

March 7, 2022

The Vince Coglianese Show

Vivek Ramaswamy Interview

https://www.wmal.com/the-vince-coglianese-show/

https://omny.fm/shows/the-vince-coglianese-show/vivek-ramaswamy-interview-1

Vivek Ramaswamy, the author of the 2021 book, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam

WMAL radio host Vince Coglianese speaks with Vivek Ramaswamy, entrepreneur, political commentator, and best selling author.

Ramaswamy excerpts:

On ESG, Environmental, Social and Governance:

“What it means is they are using the private sector to effectuate a left-wing social agenda that they could not directly effectuate through Congress, and they tend to come in three-letter acronyms. ESG DEI, Diversity, Equity Inclusion. CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility. There are three-letter acronyms that word salad that are designed to hide the essence of what is going on, which is using corporate power to get done through the backdoor, what could not get done through the front door in our political process.

And there’s this scam underlying, I think it is the defining scam of our time — where you have actually the three largest asset managers in this country, State Street, Vanguard and the king of them all BlackRock, who together manage today over $20 trillion. That’s more than the GDP of the United States by the way. [These three asset management companies] are aggregating the money of everyday pensioners and retirees, etc. But using that, to then throw their weight around in corporate America saying, ‘You need these racial quota systems on your board. Yeah, you need to cut oil production. You need to reduce your carbon emissions.” Agendas that would make the blood of those retirees boil if they knew what was exactly going on, using somebody else’s money to advance a political agenda that they disagree with.

And here’s the kicker…they apply that to the US companies, but they don’t apply it to the Chinese companies. So in the United States, they preach ESG. In China, they supplicate to the CCP, as I say this is sort of the motto of companies like Blackrock around the world.

Question: I see this weekend in the Wall Street Journal, the Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich says, Guys, this is an antitrust violation. This is an explicit violation of the Constitution. Of all of this corporate power for one agenda. Do you think that’s a good way to view this, Vivek?

Ramaswamy: “I read that article. It is the plainest legal argument hiding in plain sight. I was frankly embarrassed that of all legal arguments I made in Woke, INC., I actually missed this one. But this is staring us in the face where you have and congratulations to Mark Brnovich. He’s the Attorney General of Arizona for spotting it.

You have a coordinated effort between the most powerful financial institutions and money managers to decide to lend or invest in certain projects but not others. In ways that are raising prices for consumer goods of Americans. That is not the free market in action. It’s even worse than a monopoly or an ideological cartel. They’re working hand in glove with the party in power to be able to do their bidding through the private sector. If you couldn’t get the Green New Deal through Congress, guess what? John Kerry is doing? He’s getting every major banking CEO to sign the so-called Climate Pledge, which by the way, is not only an interest violation, though, I think it’s that too, but it is also a form of crony capitalism because I will tell you, you know, as well as I, banks are not charitable institutions.

The question is what are they getting in return for signing that climate pledge. This is the crony capitalism of our moment, and I just think the way in which the critical race theory issue was in mobilizing issue for Republicans in 2021. I think this issue relating to ESG and the abuse of their money to effectuate a political agenda back against them should be probably a defining issue of 2022 and 2023.

Don’t mess with my kids came first. Don’t mess with my money, I think comes second. And I don’t think the conservative base in this country has quite woken up to that yet. But you know, I think that those of us here who have spotted these issues, as actually where the rubber meets the road in terms of what affects our culture need to be speaking up.

Vivik Ramaswamy:

Climate change concerns are also being used in other ways to manipulate the financial system. Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, the author of the book, “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” explained how BlackRock founder and CEO Larry Fink is the “King of the Woke Industrial Complex” and acts as “the puppet master behind the scenes of Corporate America.”

“He is CEO of the world’s largest asset manager and what they do is they cause companies to bend the knee to woke orthodoxy, because BlackRock says that we won’t invest in your company, unless you abide by these progressive standards, or we will dock the pay of a CEO or fire a CEO who refuses to bend the knee,” Ramaswamy explained.

BlackRock uses other people’s money to force this ideology on companies, according to Ramaswamy. “It is not their money. That $10 trillion doesn’t belong to BlackRock. Say what you will about George Soros, at least it’s his money. In this case, It is money that belongs to you, to everyday Americans in this country whose blood would boil if they actually knew the way their own money was being used to force a progressive social orthodoxy back onto them,” Ramaswamy said.

“That is the defining scam of our time,” he concluded.

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/tucker-this-is-the-single-most-successful-human-rights-protest-in-a-generation

Blackrock CEO Larry Fink has publicly admitted that he believes coercion is necessary to achieve his agenda. “Behaviors are going to have to change and this is one thing we are asking companies. You have to force behaviors and at Blackrock, we are forcing behaviors,” Fink explained in 2017 at a New York Times forum. “You have to force behaviors and if you don’t force behaviors whether it’s gender or race or just anyway you want to say the composition of your team, you’re gonna be impacted,” Fink said. He added, “We’re gonna have to force change.”
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cCs9Kh2Q08
New York Times Events
Nov 9, 2017
DealBook 2017: The Economy, Consumers and Redefining the Long Term
Backup sources:
https://twitter.com/backtolife_2022/status/1506726529799176203
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=655568562168673

Watch: Glenn Beck on new climate financial rules: ‘This is the end of capitalism’ – Rips ESG or Environmental, Social, & Governance

Beck: “I want to invest in this company, it’s a gun company oh they’ve got an ESG score of two. Well I don’t care because I believe that’s going to go up. But it doesn’t matter. You’re not doing it for that anymore you’re not doing it to make money, you’re doing it for the overall good of society this is the end of capitalism.” … “It doesn’t matter that these companies might be worth more we think the investment should go to these companies because they’re socially woke. When that happens, the stock market means nothing, nothing because it is basically at the barrel of a gun the government and the big businesses have decided who’s going to get the money.”

Also see: Benjamin Zycher on ESG (Environmental, Social, & Governance Responsibility): ‘A blatant effort to use private-sector resources for ideological purposes’

‘Genocidal…Preposterous’: Alex Epstein on ESG (Environmental Social Governance): A ‘financially ruinous, & deeply immoral movement that perpetuates poverty…threatens the security of the free world’

Alex Epstein: “ESG was a movement cooked up at the UN–not exactly a leading expert in profitable investment–to impose moral and political agendas, largely left-wing ones, on institutions that would not adopt them if left to their own devices.” – “The number one practical meaning of ESG today is: divest from fossil fuels in every way possible, and associate yourself with “renewable” solar and wind in every way possible.”

The preposterous financial pretense of “ESG investing” is that the promoters of it have so accurately identified universal norms of long-term value creation–Environmental norms, Social norms, and Governance norms–that imposing those norms on every company is justified.Divesting from fossil fuels is immoral because:

1. The world needs much more energy.
2. Fossil fuels are the only way to provide most of that energy for the foreseeable future.
3. Any problems associated with CO2 pale in comparison to problems of energy deprivation.ESG defunding fossil fuel projects in the poorest parts of the world will mean: more babies die for lack of incubators and other medical equipment, more deaths from lack of water treatment plants and modern sanitation, more deaths from lack of heating and air-conditioning.

Every leading ESG institution should be called out for their genocidal policies toward the poorest parts of the world. They should be shamed for placing their own virtue-signaling above billions of actual human lives.

Great Reset has arrived: ‘Net-zero totalitarianism’ – ‘A technocratic dictatorship justified by climate alarmism’ – Society ‘ruled by savants…Carbon Councils’

Climate activists want Federal Reserve to target oil & gas companies to ‘save the planet’ – But it has no authority to do that

Woke Capital Won’t Save the Planet – But It Will Crash the Economy

‘ESG’ = Extreme Shortages Guaranteed!

Climate alarmists and the Fed make strange bedfellows

Many in Congress, want President Biden to declare a “climate emergency.” Why? So he can impose all matter of climate policies including but hardly limited to, forcing higher prices on oil and gas, mandating hugely expensive “renewable” energy sources, restricting driving, increasing meat prices, and so on. The sky is the limit because there is an emergency. No vote of Congress; no matter. We’ve seen this act with health “emergencies” that forced schools, many businesses, and houses of worship to shut down, absent genuine science and data. While the worst of the lockdowns have passed, the coronavirus variants rage, workforce participation is down, and consumer price inflation is at its highest in 40 years.

Climate activists in and out of the Biden administration are unleashing their biggest weapon yet to force-feed impractical, unnecessary, and colossally expensive climate policies on the country by using the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. Why the Fed? For the same reason the infamous Willie Sutton robbed banks: “that’s where the money is.” The Fed also has enormous regulatory power of the U.S. financial system and, to a lesser degree, the global financial system.

BlackRock CEO Laurence Fink: ‘Climate Change’ is a ‘defining factor’ in how BlackRock assesses companies – Touts ESG – Environmental, social & corporate governance

Laurence D. Fink, the founder and chief executive of the investment giant BlackRock, has become one of the most influential voices in business over the past decade in pushing corporate leaders to think beyond profits, to their social purpose…Within weeks of his telling leaders in 2020 that climate change would become a “defining factor” in how BlackRock assessed their companies, many blue-chip businesses announced plans to become carbon-neutral or carbon-negative. …

He suggested that E.S.G. was not a fad but a permanent feature of the corporate world. Business leaders who do not adapt to the new reality, he suggested, risk being overtaken by younger and more innovative rivals in step with the times. “Capital markets have allowed companies and countries to flourish. But access to capital is not a right,” he wrote. “It is a privilege. And the duty to attract that capital in a responsible and sustainable way lies with you.”

We’re saved! ‘Large U.S. banks would have to integrate climate financial risk assessments into every aspect of their work’

U.S. News & World Report: “Large U.S. banks would have to integrate climate financial risk assessments into every aspect of their work under sweeping new draft supervisory guidance proposed by a top U.S. banking regulator on Thursday.” The magazine elaborated, “The principles touch on everything from how climate change affects board room governance, liquidity, credit and operational risk, to the way banks project hypothetical future losses on their books and their ability to service poorer communities.”

Will the Energy Crisis Be ESG’s Great Reset? Climate policy could ‘politically unpopular’ very quickly

RICHARD MORRISON: “If the climate-policy decisions being promoted by the global ESG movement start causing rolling blackouts, lines at the gas pump, and higher consumer prices, the speed with which they will become politically unpopular will cause whiplash among sustainable-finance analysts and activists alike. That interruption of the momentum — along with the prevailing inevitability narrative among businesses — will cause many more people to question whether ESG as a concept is really the “unstoppable train” that many consultants and advocates have made it out to be. Which will give advocates of true corporate purpose — consumer welfare, innovation, and wealth creation — a valuable opportunity to reset the debate.”

Update April 2022: Disney’s largest investors are behind the company’s woke stance: ‘Woke Inc.’ author – Vivek Ramaswamy, highlighting how Disney’s three largest shareholders, who own a combined 15.3% of the company, are BlackRock, Vanguard Group and State Street. Ramaswamy pointed out that Disney’s three largest shareholders are unlike an individual investor (for example, Elon Musk, who just bought a massive stake in Twitter), but are composed of everyday people who entrust institutions, such as BlackRock, Vanguard Group, and State Street, to manage their money. He went on to say that the money managers are “betraying their true clients” by pushing Disney and other companies to wade into the realm of politics and stakeholder prioritization. Stakeholder capitalism discards the understanding that the singular purpose of a corporation is to serve its shareholders and instead emphasizes providing value to customers, employees, suppliers, and communities. Recent years have seen a shift on Wall Street toward embracing stakeholder capitalism in addition to a focus on environmental, social, and governance standards.

Russell Brand nails ESG: ‘It seems to me that what the ESGs are is the electricity that lights the lamps of virtual signaling’

The Great Reset: It Begins – Klaus Schwab and the WEF tout their work in saving the world using environmental metrics called ESGs. But if companies that have good scores are actually the worst environmental violators, could it be that what the WEF are really working towards is a social credit scoring system?

Elon Musk: ‘ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors’

Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO: “Markets don’t like uncertainty. Markets like totalitarian governments.”

https://twitter.com/backtolife_2023/status/1598565696195158016