Whoa! R.I.P. for ESG?

If the horse you are taking is the wrong one and goes the wrong way, maybe it’s the right time to say “Whoa!” – and reverse course or dump that horse. It looks like ESG may be R.I.P.

Ask the average investor or retiree suffering losses from Democrat energy policies, high inflation, and interest rates: Would you like your remaining money used on “wokeness” – “ESG” or “Environmental, Social, Governance” policies, such as paid travel for employee abortions, transgender promotion, ending gas cars, stoves, and water heaters – or to make money, things with “economic merit”? The odds are on “make money, forget ESG.” The message is being heard.

As with much in life, an absence of leadership produces drift, poor decisions, backsliding, and often chaos, a royal mess – followed by sudden course correction, redirection, and finger-pointing.

That is beginning to happen on leftist policies promoted by Biden’s off-course team and politically leftist corporate leaders. From Zuckerburg to Blackrock, the backdraft is hot.

The public has had their fill of transgender beer, intimidation, and fear. They are tired of the government misguiding young boys and girls, and deriding the family. They are tired of rising drug abuse and overdoses, the open border, anti-police, anti-tradition, anti-faith focus of leaders.

The public is done with top-down mandates – fanned to absurdity during COVID, attempts to “transform” them with righteous riots, degrading history, condemning life habits – from how and what people can say, eat, cook, travel, worship, and protect themselves, to how they talk.

They are done with twisting language, culture, and history to a point where “pronouns” are now required, or you get fired, that is, if I think I am “he, she, it, or they” and you say “hey,” or I think I am a cat, rat, or zebra and you call me a camel, you are toast. They are done with that. 

They are done with government and a corporate sector promoting CRT – or Critical Race Theory, essentially teaching reverse racism, or that you cannot escape your skin color, so the American Dream is dead – in schools, or disenfranchising girls in sports, privacy, safety, and life, then telling unhappy parents to sit down and shut up, or be investigated as terrorists.

They are done with government overreach, the insidious connection – call it collusion – between leftist politicians and corporate sympathizers, quick to use your money to promote a neo-socialist, assumptive or dictatorial, at least tone-deaf agenda. 

Finally, they are sick of ESG – another nifty three-letter acronym, pushed like it was your favorite Chevy or motherhood, only it opposes both – one more example of power concentration masquerading as something new.

Truth is, people are tired of having their freedom taken by chips and chunks – prerogatives they value, all-American rights, like raising their children and speaking their mind, worshiping, working and buying what they like, having promises and value of their dollar kept.

As pressure mounts on corporate heads, boards, and leaders – as people stop buying what they cannot tolerate, resist top-down political pressure, and start suing board members – the tide is shifting. You can feel it.

Moreover, the data is beginning to show it. Leading media are featuring articles about the vulnerability of board members – including personally – for violating their fiduciary duty, specifically for pushing ESG politics.

At the same time, lawsuits are being filed by retirement groups to force the reversal – end personal political agendas, including ESG, with public dollars. Some suits, including one filed in June, promise to be pathbreaking, even as leftists try the Sun-Tzu, suing to get more ESG.

So serious is this anti-ESG upheaval, predicted by AMAC and other conservative voices, that Harvard Law School just penned a major article on the topic, “The Developing Litigation Risks from the ESG backlash in the United States.”

If public reporting is true – always a big “if” – internal thinking by corporate boards and investment funds is radically shifting.  Even Blackrock, “the world’s largest asset manager,” apparently “voted against the vast majority of shareholder proposals related to climate change and social issues” last year, dumping 742 of 813 proposals, or “93 percent” of their ESG agenda, for lack of “economic merit.” Imagine that!

The battle is not yet won, the horse is not yet stabled, but you can hear “Whoa!” With continued public pressure, left-leaning corporate boards may pull hard on the reins, giving us R.I.P. for ESG.

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.