OPINION:
In China, the Communist Party has devised a scheme to compel compliance. They score every person and business to determine whether they are sufficiently in line with the Party’s standards. In America, this type of fascistic overreach is known as “ESG.” ESG fuses big government, big tech, and big business, and this tyranny is coming for you.
In the Chinese version of this attempt to control people, the government, big business, and big tech are married to each other in what is referred to as a “social credit system.” It began with studying shopping habits but has morphed into a system to score a person’s social acceptance by their behavior. And like a financial credit score, it fluctuates.
Post about fake news or bad personal habits, and your score goes down. You can be punished by having your travel restricted. If you find yourself on the “blacklist,” people who call you will hear a siren and a message warning the caller that you are in arrears on your debt.
And in the U.S. and Europe the cartel of big business, big tech, and big government, have landed on a tool known as “ESG.” It stands for environment, social, and governance. ESG is being used to promote woke, leftist policies through authoritarian means.
A feature of ESG is the cozy relationship between radically left big government and the radical leftists in big business. The interlocking relationships between government, business, and big tech form the D.C. cartel.
The nub is to rank individuals and businesses, similar to what goes on in China, on whether that person or business is woke enough on environmental issues, radical social issues like transgender affirmation, and whether your business hires the right kind of people.
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An investment banker might reject your request for capital investment because the Cartel says you’re in the wrong industry, maybe gun manufacturing or oil and gas production. You obviously fail on the E or the S or the G components. Your ESG score is too low. It won’t matter whether you can repay a loan or provide a return on investment.
ESG then becomes a way to control the population. Freedom out, tyranny in.
While there isn’t evidence that Pfizer was implementing an ESG score in its hiring matrix, it is accused of not hiring Whites and Asians. Restrictions like this would be consistent with attempting to get a higher ESG score because a component of the score is that one should only hire the “right” people, the ones who fit into the “social” component of the ESG matrix. Discrimination in the name of equity and social credit.
Mammoth investment firm, BlackRock, is all in on the ESG scam. The firm runs ESG-based investment funds and charges huge fees to make sure that companies in which it invests have sufficiently appropriate ESG compliance.
While some investors embrace the radical left agenda encapsulated in the ESG movement, some state and local pension administrators have divested from BlackRock and other ESG funds.
Arizona Treasurer Kimberly Yee said when she began divesting from BlackRock: “Part of the review by [the Investment Risk Management Committee] involved reading the annual letters by CEO Larry Fink, which in recent years, began dictating to businesses in the United States to follow his personal political beliefs. In short, BlackRock moved from a traditional asset manager to a political action committee. Our internal investment team believed this moved the firm away from its fiduciary duty in general as an asset manager.”
Now consider the proud admission at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by FBI Director Wray, that the FBI is working collaboratively with big tech, ostensibly to spy on Americans. We know of the FBI’s promulgation of anti-Trump propaganda, and the Director wants an even closer working relationship with the big tech censors?
ESG is a dangerous homage to the long history of attacks on the people by their own government.
Add to this creepy ESG conglomeration the weaponization of our federal police apparatus and you have the making of a totalistic society where Americans are under the thumb of the corrupt, controlling D.C. cartel.
• Andy Biggs is a United States Representative from Arizona’s Fifth Congressional District. He is a member of the House Judiciary and Oversight and Accountability Committees, and serves as chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, co-chair of the Border Security Caucus, co-chair of the War Powers Caucus, and Vice chair of the Western Caucus. Prior to the U.S. House, he served in the Arizona Legislature for 14 years the last four as the Arizona Senate President.
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