“Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender, and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.” – Thomas Sowell
Over the past few years, I have often wondered how corporations have spurned their customer base in the pursuit of activism and how they have remained in business? How did corporations get so detached from profits that they can shun a good percentage of their consumer base and still keep their share prices stable or growing? I found the answer in Conscious Capitalism and ESG investing.
I first heard of Conscious Capitalism a decade ago in a speech by Whole Foods founder, John Mackey. Conscious Capitalism is the brainchild of Mackey, and it’s his assertion that capitalism can have a philanthropic motive and not just a profit motive. However, in Mackey’s view, philanthropy pre-empts the profit motive and profit is just a byproduct of doing good business.
Conscious Capitalism is a feel-good story until one considers that when philanthropy subverts the profit motive and the business is no longer responding to the demands of the marketplace, the business no longer serves a purpose at all. There is no shortage of charities that don’t require empty patronage for participation. Merely meeting the demand of the public while employing thousands of people in local communities is in itself a public good.
ESG stands for Environmental Social Governance, and in ESG investing a qualitative score is applied to businesses based on how well they conform to leftist social movements. Often, these individual businesses are then bundled into funds with other high-scoring businesses. One comparison of this system that has been made is to China’s social credit system, whereby your position in society is based on how well you comply with the dictates of the government.
In 2015, ESG assets stood at $2.8 billion . By 2020 those assets had hit $40 trillion and are estimated to hit $53 trillion by 2025 . The onslaught of leftist activism over the past few years has coincided with exorbitant growth in these ESG funds. As leftist businesses, municipalities, and investors look to virtue signal their ESG bonafides, they have diversified their holdings like pensions into these ESG funds, which explains the exorbitant fund growth.
Historically, when a company has produced a game-changing product like an iPhone or a Tesla electric vehicle, the stock price has soared based on the objective value that the company has brought to the world. Now with ESG funds, a company like Nike can continue to manufacture their shoes in a foreign sweatshop, so long as they speak out against white privilege and achieve the coveted ESG label, or get bundled into larger ESG funds. A company can afford to lose a percentage of its consumer base if it can still grow by users investing in its activism.
Much like labeling food as organic, receiving a high ESG score is not without controversy . It has been viewed as a marketing ploy, in much the same way many food products receive the certified organic label, despite less than natural processes in production. Nike used above is an excellent example. Despite being listed as a company that does not treat its employees well or promote diversity and inclusion internally, Nike received a high ESG score from the investment blog, the Motley Fool . No consideration for how or where the company’s products are produced is given. This demonstrates that merely running social justice campaigns is enough to stand out in a crowded investment field.
In the case of Conscious Capitalism and ESG investing, the funding that companies garner is not based on the quality of their product, the demand for their product, or innovation that enriched the lives of their customer base. These are merely ways to virtue signal the personal politics of corporate executives and investors while turning off half of their customer base. They
are empty shell games and can be likened to multilevel marketing schemes because the product offered takes a backseat to something else. Often, the demand for the product is mutually exclusive to the demand for the philosophy. Eventually, you run out of customers who wish to buy both your product and your activism.
Photo by visuals on Unsplash
Brian Parsons is a paleoconservative columnist in Idaho, a proud husband and father, and saved by Grace. You can follow him at WithdrawConsent.org or find his weekly opinion column in the Idaho State Journal . Gab , MeWe , email .
BLACKROCK IS JOE BIDEN'S BIGGEST BRIBESTER.
‘Red-Handed’: Blackstone Founder Pumped $100M into Marxist Education for American and Other Students Studying in China Nicolas Asfouri/Getty Images; BNN Edit 4:11
Wall Street titan Steve Schwarzman launched a $100 million plan to create a global education scholarship program in China to rival the Rhodes Scholarships offered at Oxford University, Peter Schweizer writes in his bestseller Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win
Schwarzman has been called the “supreme leader” of Blackstone, a Wall Street firm with $684 billion of investments. The firm went public in June 2007, but Schwarzman reportedly still holds an iron grip over it, despite only owning around 20 percent of the company he founded in 1985 with Peter Peterson.
Schwarzman has also been called the “China whisperer” for his close connections to the Chinese government and China’s business leaders. Schweizer’s book describes Schwarzman as jokingly claiming he served both as the “unofficial U.S. ambassador to China” as well as the “unofficial Chinese ambassador to the U.S.”
The Schwarzman Scholars program is based in Tsinghau University, which Schweizer describes as “a training ground for Chinese Community Party and government elite.” Chinese dictator Xi Jinping appears to be an alumnus of the school, which has an “Institute for Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” established with the cooperation of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.
“Students from around the world—but especially the United States—would come and be exposed to the Chinese communist system. Schwarzman explains that his goal in setting up the program is that ‘recipients would return to their countries able to interpret the massive change in China in a way that calmed fears and misunderstanding about the country,'” Schweizer writes.
Red-Handed documents the cozy financial and political connections between the Chinese government and some of the most powerful people in the United States, including powerful U.S. financial institutions like Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock.
In 2007, the Chinese government and Communist Party bought a 9.9 percent stake in Blackstone for $3 billion.
“The Chinese government transaction with Blackstone yielded Schwarzman some powerful allies. Lou Jiwei, head of CIC when it made that initial investment, later became Beijing’s finance minister,” Schweizer writes.
While officials from both the Obama and Trump administrations have characterized China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a challenge to America’s global position, Schwarzman has actually praised it as a wonderful program, according to Red-Handed.
Christine Schwarzmann and Stephen Allen Schwarzman attend the 2021 Met Gala on September 13, 2021 in New York City. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)
Chinese officials are quite pleased with the Schwarzman Scholars program.
When it was started, the admissions process was set up by a panel that included officials from the Chinese Communist Party Youth League, the Central Party School (which imposes ideological discipline), and the United Front Work Department, which runs political influence operations. The program’s founding dean, David Daokui Li, was viewed by the government’s propaganda arm “as an especially reliable ally,” Schweizer writes.
Red-Handed describes the curriculum:
Schwarzman Scholars studying at Tsinghua are also required to take a course titled “Theory and Practice of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” which is taught by He Jianyu, associate professor in the School of Marxism at Tsinghua University. The curriculum notes: “There will also be group discussions based on the course literature, a mid-term paper aimed at teaching how to read and analyze the official text of CCP documents and files, and a final paper aimed at providing an opportunity to communicate with a policy maker who is engaged in the decision-making process or an ordinary Chinese citizen who is experiencing the change of China.”
“So what does this all mean,” writes Schweitzer. “A Wall Street financier worth billions, courtesy of the free market system, is funding courses in Marxism-Leninism and a program that preaches the superiority of Chinese communism over American capitalism.”
I Can't Breathe David Horowitz delivers a new masterpiece on the racial hoax that is killing America.
Thu Oct 21, 2021
Mark Tapson
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[Order David Horowitz's new book -- I Can't Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America : HERE .]
Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
After a few years of the widespread tearing-down of statues honoring American heroes such as the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln , Founding Father George Washington , and anti-slavery giant Frederick Douglass , recently a few new statues went up for a change. Massive golden busts of the late, far-left Congressman John Lewis and Black Lives Matter icons George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were erected in Manhattan's Union Square .
Lewis arguably achieved something in his life – albeit in the service of communism . Floyd and Taylor, however, are being venerated not because of any extraordinary accomplishments, but because their deaths in police-involved incidents were successfully exploited by the Marxist revolutionaries of Black Lives Matter to inflame racial rage and demonize police officers all across the country as genocidal bigots, even though there is zero evidence that racism was a factor in either death. Floyd, now an international symbol of racist police brutality, was an inveterate criminal and drug addict who died of a fentanyl overdose while being restrained by police for resisting arrest. Breonna Taylor died when police who were entering her darkened apartment with a search warrant returned fire after her drug-dealing boyfriend began shooting at them.
This is where America is in 2021: monuments honoring Frederick Douglass, a black man who rose from slavery to become a statesman, orator, writer, and noted abolitionist, are now destroyed by the woke mob, but blacks whose unintended deaths can be weaponized against America are lionized in the public square as martyrs.
Floyd and Taylor are only two of the police victims elevated to household names by the powerful Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization. The self-proclaimed trained Marxists who founded that subversive movement exploited, and continue to exploit, those victims in order to incite a civil war in America by hyping a false narrative of the systematic targeting of blacks by law enforcement. That is the subject of I Can’t Breathe: How a Racial Hoax is Killing America , the newest book by Freedom Center founder, conservative warrior, and bestselling author David Horowitz.
Horowitz’s aim with the book is to puncture BLM’s grotesque narrative, which is supported by the Democrat Party and amplified by its media enablers. He begins the book with a summary of our current racial divide, which was exacerbated by deadly, nationwide BLM rioting – “a summer of insurrections” – in 2020 that constituted “the costliest sustained acts of civil disorder in American history.” The siege of Portland by violent leftist activists, the Democrat movement to defund police departments and the subsequent crime waves that swept the nation, the anti-American messaging, the 2016 massacre of five white cops in Dallas at the hands of a BLM-inspired black extremist – Horowitz weaves all these ugly threads and more to create a dark tapestry of the devastation that Black Lives Matter’s myth-making has wrought:
The casualties of the scorched-earth war unleashed by Black Lives Matter dwarf the total casualties of all the alleged racial injustices the organization has protested. The atrocities instigated and inspired by BLM encompass scores of innocent wounded and dead, both black and white… Surveying these disasters, one could reasonably conclude that, thanks to Black Lives Matter campaigns to abolish police departments, advances in both race relations and protections for urban black communities have been set back fifty years.
Horowitz compiles the names of 26 black victims BLM claims were murdered or maimed by the police since the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 sparked the launch of the movement. They include the aforementioned Martin, Floyd and Taylor, as well as Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Race, and Freddie Gray, to name some of the most well-known. Then – in chapters on how the BLM movement began, grew, and went national and then international – Horowitz goes on to dissect all 26 incidents according to the facts, backed up by over 70 pages of endnotes. He demonstrates how BLM has lied about every single one in its quest to aggravate racial tensions and rip America apart at the seams.
His examinations show “that while some of the Black Lives Matter cases reveal tragic errors of judgment, almost all involve resistance by known and armed criminals to warranted arrests. In the vast majority of cases, Horowitz concludes, “the deceased would still be alive if they had simply obeyed police commands, and the Black Lives Matter charges are reckless inventions unsupported by the facts.”
But of course, inconvenient facts and statistics are irrelevant to the racist power-mongers of BLM, “whose motives and goals have nothing to do with black lives mattering,” Horowitz notes. “Black Lives Matter is not a civil rights organization. It is a revolutionary criminal movement whose goals are openly Marxist and communist.” What matters to them, he adds, is not black lives but “the anti-American revolution they are advancing and the fantasy world they think they will achieve by destroying the most equitable, inclusive, tolerant, and free society that has ever existed.”
Horowitz correctly points out that “Never in the history of nations has a previously oppressed minority like black Americans been so integrated into the dominant culture of a nation.” In addition, there is not a single crime statistic to support “the harsh claims of a hunting season on blacks by police.” On the contrary, I Can’t Breathe marshals irrefutable evidence that the truth about crime and race in this country is exactly the opposite of BLM’s “malicious racial fiction.”
Horowitz answers the question he poses in one chapter heading – “What Kind of Movement is This?” – with an exposé of BLM’s proud links to cop-killers and domestic terrorists such as Assata Shakur and Susan Rosenberg (who now sits on the board of Thousand Currents, a nonprofit that has funneled millions of dollars into BLM coffers); to black racists and anti-Semites like Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan ; to a coalition of radical groups like the street thugs of Antifa and the Labor/Community Strategy Center (headed by former Weather Underground terrorist Eric Mann, the ideological mentor of BLM founder Patrisse Cullors ); and to major funders like far-left billionaire financier George Soros and the Ford and Kellogg Foundations.
Horowitz also addresses BLM’s indoctrination of schoolkids, its takeover of the culture, its anti-family agenda (the declaration of which was scrubbed from the organization’s website when it began to attract too much outraged attention), and its perpetuation of destructive, anti-American myths such as “systemic racism.”
In his concluding chapter, “Whose Future?”, Horowitz links the BLM movement’s aims to the broader agenda of the Democrat Party under decrepit puppet President Joe Biden, who himself publicly promotes the shameful lie that blacks in America are oppressed by a “systemic racism” which demonstrably does not exist.
Whose future, indeed? If we are to repel Black Lives Matter’s full-on assault on our values, institutions, and character, it will only be if all American patriots summon the kind of courageous, truth-telling resistance David Horowitz displays in his indispensable book I Can’t Breathe to expose and condemn the corrosive racial hoaxes perpetrated by BLM and the Democrat Party.
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