Over the last few years, wokeness has gone mainstream so to speak. Big corporations, driven by Silicon Valley’s technology industry, have fully embraced the left’s big government anti-parent/family social agenda which has now resulted in a profitable stream of business. In that same light, Wall Street financial firms and the companies they represent have taken the wokeness inside the office in the race to be the most “open, tolerant and welcoming” place to work. For example, a new phenomenon is the creation of a ‘Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,’ or DEI, which has become a popular trend for companies to prove their wokeness to their clients and the media. The spooky spirit of wokeness that has gone from Wall Street to main street and spread throughout corporate America is now coming to make your money and life savings woke, too. But Americans are wising up, and some states are leading the charge to defend their citizens and their hard earned money from a corporate and global economic takeover. How are conservative states fighting back against Woke Wall Street?
There is another new acronym you’ve probably begun to hear lately on CNBC called ‘ESG,’ which stands for ‘Environment, Social, and Governance’, defined by Investopedia as “a set of standards for a company’s behavior used by socially conscious investors to screen potential investments.”
“Environmental criteria consider how a company safeguards the environment, including corporate policies addressing climate change, for example. Social criteria examine how it manages relationships with employees, suppliers, customers, and the communities where it operates. Governance deals with a company’s leadership, executive pay, audits, internal controls, and shareholder rights.”
By using computer algorithms and other so-called ‘environment, social and governance’ metrics, woke Wall Street firms are now “screening” out profitable investments from your mutual fund if they consider those investments “bad.” This of course flies in the face of the fiduciary duty that those same Wall Street money managers have to their clients.
This summer, state attorney generals from Florida, West Virginia, and Texas sent letters addressed to Wall Street firms such as Blackrock, Vanguard, Institutional Shareholder Services, and State Street questioning their ESG practices and requesting “all documents and communications relating to the actual or potential effects of ESG integration practices on the financial outlook, risk/return profile, performance, or profitability of any of your funds, portfolio companies, or institutional accounts of ESG integration practices,” the Hill reported.
Some state legislatures are also looking at how their state pension funds are being managed as well as the banking institutions themselves. For example, the Texas legislature sent their own letter to Wall Street firms regarding their ESG practices. Over one third of the state’s economy is made up by the oil and gas industry. “The people of Texas are finding out that a handful of Wall Street firms are using other people’s money to push a narrow agenda and we’re pushing back,” Texas State Affairs Committee Chairman Bryan Hughes (R) said.
In West Virginia, big banks Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Blackrock, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo were added to the state’s list of restricted financial institutions by the state treasurer based on those banks “boycott” of West Virginia energy companies.
Governors and state legislatures in Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Tennessee are likewise taking action to push back on Wall Street and Big Banks who are pushing a globalist, social experiment with American taxpayer dollars.
Last week, 19 state attorney generals launched a formal investigation into six major U.S. banks citing legal concerns about ‘ESG investing’ and possible collusion with a United Nations alliance that seeks to curb CO2 emissions. According to a recent report in the Epoch Times, “Numerous AGs sounded the alarm about the U.N.’s involvement in targeting key American industries as banks cede policymaking influence to the global organization. The top law-enforcement officers for the group of mostly Republican-controlled states said they have reason to believe the banks being investigated agreed to align their investing and loan portfolio with U.N. emissions goals,” such as the Paris Climate Agreement that intensely targets American companies while giving countries such as China decades to continue their current practices.
It’s clear that Wall Street and the Big Banks have gone woke, and they are trying to make your money go woke too, while you go broke in the process. These unelected fatcats think they can run global experiments using Americans’ hard earned money. Thankfully, there are some clear eyed leaders out there in our state capitals who have the common sense to take a step back and look at what is really happening around them, the impact it’s having in our communities and in our country. Conservative state leaders are pushing back and millions of Americans in those states should be happy to know that.
Bob Carlstrom is President of AMAC Action