ESG has never been anything but World Economic Forum (WEF) strategies to allow “the right sort” to take control of world affairs without the ugliness of earning it. The exact fit of ESG’s main goals to Biden Administrations chief priorities was a win for the WEFfers who have coopted the 21st Century Democrats – or had so far. Illegal combinations of government power abuse and gross misuse of money entrusted to glorified managers came far horrifically near wrapping up the Long March through the Institutions successfully for the Mao-modeled bad guys.
That’s a terrifying near miss, and just-about-pulling-it-off will not generate much real surrender. Victory for law, liberty, unistandard systems, and the like will be hard won in no near time; the Long Marchers act under powerful influence – that other root of all evil – the yearning to run other adults’ lives. “They ain’t no ways tahh’rd,” to quote one of the great control-seekers in the Republic’s history.
So no, ESG goals and supporters have merely suffered as yet a temporary reverse. But this retreat has left uncovered replete proof of the corruption of the whole ESG grift (or, perhaps better, the real insurrection attempt of the 2020s).
ESG pushers and forcers throughout the c-suite archipelago based their claims that ESG offered the surest route to profit on a series of premises that none of those pushers (no, not none. There’s always a Moynihanian tail of any distribution.) could possibly have believed in non-trivial numbers.
Consider one for which the empirical proof is definitively in. The Claimants of Certain ESG Moneyspinning regularly asserted that remain competitive required taking positions exactly coincident with leftwing policy intentions, however ludicrous, because, gosh golly, the Millennials demanded these things. Indeed, the ESGers had some surveys of whatever validity to whip out to support that, at time of polling, Millennials did show those preferences.
Of course – as they well knew – for the claim and evidence to support ESG it needed the assistance of a long series of additional premises to link passing preferences with permanent commitments. Just one of the problems: unless Millennials – unique among the generations of man, running all the way back to Plato, stinking up a mercifully outdoor classroom while complaining about the kids these days – kept the preferences and the public policy positions of 22 right through ‘til 82 (or at least 52, when the ad folks consider people to die), the claim of the ESGers dissolved into nonsense. And dissolve it has, as the very next election returns revealed that dumb times make wiser generations. When you’ve lost the zillennials – nothing, unless you’ve ludicrously assumed historically unique final fixity of the fads of late 20-somethings.
The pusher execs knew this in part because some friends and I told them: a little band at the National Legal and Policy Center, my team then of the Free Enterprise Project, and including Steve Milloy – who may well have first brought this tool to the (sometimes) forces of good.
What we earned for our Cassandrianism? Contempt, of course -- any epithet to protect the indefensible and absurd. The left-lackies of the Conference Board – so partisan it dared not risk allowing even one diverse (!) take on ESG at its big ESG pep rally pretending at adult analysis – labeled questioners of ESG dogma “gadflies.” Only yes- men undertaking no thought were acceptable commentators.
Nothing shows confidence – or fidelity to objective duties – like abandoning all standards to eliminate legitimate inquiry. That’ll never turn ‘round on anyone.
No one, of course, much cares about the Conference Board. But their water-carrier’s put-down frames ways keep the skir on ‘em – to keep the ESGBSers advancing in retrograde. The first route leads right to Conference Board-style ESG-enablement organizations: outlets that sold any virtues to gin out a mess of pottage (of a sort). Where old claims of integrity and quality continue past their truth expiry, liabilities have accrued.
Another heads straight at the forcers and adopters. They universally ignored, condemned or even tried to engineer tortious harm to the shareholder representatives who are turning out to have been right about essentially everything, while supporting the yea-sayers with piles of yes-man treats. Are those executives still eligible to hold their positions, having so comprehensively dismissed every probing critique of their misinformation-laden claims? Can they possibly still claim objectivity, good judgment, insight?
The answer is no, but they won’t volunteer that answer – and to date, no corporate boards seem to include any truth seekers worthy of those positions.
Push hard enough, and retreat will dissolve into route, allowing the captured to be collected and some chiefs granted places in the history and textbooks.
