The Left vs. the Constitution; Where Did ESG Come From; & Money, Money, Money
The Left vs. the Constitution; Where Did ESG Come From; & Money, Money, Money
Enemies of the People: Mitch McConnell
Michael Walsh, in his weekly Editor’s Column, discussed the Left’s long war against the U.S. Constitution. And he mentions that he’s begun to notice a familiar (and unpleasant) smell about our country, one he’d hoped to never encounter again.
What's the Constitution Among Friends?
Thus spake the great George Washington Plunkitt, of Tammany Hall fame, and it makes a fitting epitaph for the noble experiment in self-government that is, or was, the United States of America. Last week, we discussed the now-explicit anti-constitutionalism and anti-Americanism of the modern Left, and their desire to see it on the ash heap of history, now that it's served its purpose (like John Hurt in Alien) as their incubator and victim. From at least the time of Woodrow Wilson, the Democrats have despised the Constitution—which they think let them down in the battle over slavery—and have sought to kill it by the death of a thousand cuts, some of which have been delivered by the Supreme Court, some by legislation, and some by sheer inanition.
It's time now to begin going into detail about what can be done and what can't. The good news is, there are solutions, or rather, one simple one. The bad news is, it will never be implemented, because the century-long browbeating of the American public via the political establishment and their handmaidens in the news media makes that effectively impossible.
Free speech, the cornerstone of our Republic, dies in several ways, most obviously by suppression and prohibition. We might term this the punch-in-the-face, "shut up, he explained" approach much beloved by national-socialist fascists and totalitarians everywhere…
But it also dies from self-strangulation, which is currently the preferred murder weapon. Having just emerged from Facebook prison for the second time in less than three months (a month in stir for each "offense against community standards," i.e. thou shalt not speak ill of the Chinese or the Ukrainians), and having been permanently anathematized by Twitter for (I believe but cannot prove, since they won't tell me) publicly correcting the mistakes of a certain "presidential historian," which act of lèse-majesté the reigning robots of Tweetville deemed "targeted harassment," I am bloodied but unbowed.
Social media has proven itself a very great evil, and in the coming kingdom needs to be atomized and resurrected as a genuine free-speech platform, not an implement of government and "community" censorship hiding behind the increasingly slipping mask of private enterprise.
This is in contradistinction to the U.S. Constitution, and in particular the Bill of Rights, derided by leftists such as Barack Obama as "a charter of negative liberties" in that it tells the authorities what they may not do, not what you the citizen may not do, but which in reality is the sole guarantor of personal freedom left in these crumbling United States, which almost certainly will not last out this century and is unlikely to make it to its 300th birthday intact. But then, the Left has never really been interested in freedom—intellectual, spiritual, or personal—when it can enforce conformity via the trigger fingers of all of the non-constitutional agencies with which it has supplanted the Declaration of Independence. License, especially the sexually exotic, is what they mean when they say "freedom," and if you don't like it you're a bigot who deserves to be cancelled or charged.
That said, it's becoming increasingly likely that the Left won't be crushed at the polls this November. That the Burden of Brandon may not, in fact, bring the houses of Congress tumbling down around Nancy Pelosi's and Chuck Schumer's ears. At the highest levels, nobody cares who's "President." One guy named Joe signing the bills is as good as another, especially given the fact that the nomenklatura runs the national-security state today, just as it did in the old Soviet Union. A nebbishly nonentity, such as Mr. Thompson in Atlas Shrugged, is just what the moment calls for.
Neither side wants to upset the worm-ridden applecart. Resuscitate a dead nuclear deal with Iran without Senate approval? "Forgive" student loans for gender-studies unemployables at taxpayer expense, without bothering to get the House to originate the spending bill? No problem! What part of "our democracy" don't you understand?
It's like the relationship between the CIA and the KGB during the Cold War. Both teams loved the status quo and neither wanted things to change, ever. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, at which I had a ringside seat, caught them both completely by surprise. But in the cozy modus vivendi of the current Washington racket, an accommodation has long since been reached between "progressivism" (always good) and "conservatism" (always bad) by which things will gradually but inexorably shift leftward until the Last Trump, when the charade collapses under its own weight and we have finally reached the New Jerusalem: one zillion consecutive life terms in Hell.
This past week The Pipeline published our tenth and final excerpted essay from our new book, Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order. The book will be published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster. It is now available now for pre-order at the links above.
Excerpt from "The Great Reset, Feminist-Style" by Janice Fiamengo
Introduction: Equity for Women
What would a Great Reset mean for women and girls—and the men who love them? In COVID-19: The Great Reset (2020), WEF founder Klaus Schwab and his coauthor Thierry Malleret do not address the status of women at length. But they do refer, on the very first page, to the search for social justice, stating that a positive consequence of Covid-19 has been its exposure of the “fault lines of the world” and its galvanization of the will to redress them.
By far the most destabilizing fault line in the western world is the one that feminism has opened between men and women. It is set to widen even further if Reset proponents have their way. In its institutional forms, feminism is a radical ideology alleging that women are oppressed in a patriarchal order created and maintained for male benefit through institutions such as the traditional family. Developed in the North American universities of the 1970s and 1980s, feminism’s assertions about male control of women have spread far into the wider society as feminist students graduated into careers in teaching, journalism, law, social work, public relations, and business. Though often claiming to seek equality between the sexes (itself a dubious, oft-unrealizable goal), feminists regularly call for special privileges for women and corresponding restrictions for men.
Feminism shares with the Schwabian Reset a utopian vision of a reimagined world in which the historically disempowered will be compensated and protected by enlightened leaders who will manage all aspects of our social, economic, and domestic lives. In this transformed world, a never-before-achievable righting of injustice will become possible as the enemies of fairness and of the common good—the selfish, the competitive, the predatory, and the retrograde—will be once and for all neutralized by government fiat.
Discussions of post-Covid she-covery (recovery with a female face) focused mainly on four feminist Reset blueprints: 1) liberating women from the unfair burdens of family life; 2) empowering women to close wage and employment gaps; 3) mandating leadership roles for women, especially in politics, business, and academia; and 4) advancing the sexual agenda of the #MeToo movement. All, as will be shown, are underpinned by profoundly antimale assumptions and contempt for established social and legal norms. Whether any of these blueprints will make women happier is a highly doubtful proposition: bitter and resentful women, rather than contented ones, are precisely what Reset discussions and policies are designed to create….
In the earliest days of Covid, medical data showed that men were more likely than women to die from the virus or to experience the most severe forms of illness, accounting for about 80 percent of acute care admissions and up to 70 percent of the dead. Yet even as these staggering reports hit the headlines, media accounts were busy framing the pandemic as a women’s issue.
By March 8, 2020, when the effects of the virus were being felt in Europe but had not yet hit North America, the emphasis on female suffering had already been established. The BBC World Service informed readers that “Across Asia, it is women who are being disproportionately affected.” A humanitarian advisor to the U.N., Maria Holtsberg, was quoted saying that “Crisis always exacerbates gender inequality.” According to the article, women were bearing the brunt of the pandemic not only as primary caregivers for their children, forced to stay home when schools closed (with no mention of the breadwinner husbands continuing their work and thus at presumably greater risk of infection) but also—and somewhat contradictorily—as the majority of workers on the “front lines.”
Joan Sammon contributed two must-read pieces on ESG and where it came from:
The Malign Genesis of ESG - Part I
In the weeks since the S&P 500 announced Tesla’s removal from its ESG Index while inviting Exxon to join, but leaving Chevron out, the incongruous nature of the environmental, social and governance (ESG) construct has never been more obvious. It reveals what some might consider proof of the fraud that ESG represents. But what exactly is ESG? Where did it come from? Understanding its genesis and purpose of ESG will clarify what it actually is, not what many purport it to be.
Beginning in 2000, the World Economic Forum (WEF) embarked on an initiative that over two decades later can only be described as a Trojan-horse attack on free markets, private property, and democratic institutions. Founded in 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab, the WEF describes its mission in part as, "improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas." Agenda-shaping it seems can be transformational, for good or bad, and quite lucrative.
Well-funded and well-organized, what has grown from that initial effort over two decades ago, is a sophisticated network of NGOs, foundations, and nonprofit entities working to achieve unprecedented ideologically inspired political, social, and financial change inside America and throughout the world, using the ESG construct.
With the promise of profit, this network engaged key asset management and banking partners, including giants like BlackRock, Vanguard, and Bank of America. Together these activist profiteers, best described as the ESG/Industrial Complex, are engaged in an extraordinary effort to fundamentally undermine and replace free markets while circumventing democratic institutions of governance and lawmaking. Seeking to force companies into behavior based on political ideology—often in defiance of the best interest of their investors—the ESG Industrial Complex represents a nefarious source of boardroom bullying and attacks on industries with which they politically disagree but whose assets they seek to control.
Using the pretense of social diversity and environmental protection needed to repair damage caused by capitalism, this network established the ESG construct. It represents a geometrically increasing impediment to many industries and the larger corporate culture. Though nebulous and ill-understood by both Wall Street and Main Street alike, it constitutes competing frameworks, reporting systems, and scoring systems for environmental and social reporting—but it lacks continuity and a quantifiable measurement. A meta-analysis of more than 1000 studies on ESG performance found that, “studies use different scores for different companies by different data providers.” These self-ascribed arbiters of politically appropriate values, behavior, and outcomes intend to identify, scrutinize, and then using ESG scores, punish public and private companies—and eventually individuals—who do not agree to live by the network’s validation feedback loop.
The second part is here:
The Malign Genesis of ESG—Part 2
Former Wyoming resident David Cavena wrote about the devastation being wrought upon the eagle population in that sparse, beautiful state.
Killing the Eagles with 'Climate Change' Malice Aforethought
If there is more beautiful country in the lower 48, more varied wildlife and greater opportunity to experience it than in the Rocky Mountains of western Wyoming, I’m not aware of it. But it’s the eagles that draw attention. High, regal, effortlessly gliding, circling above us, having long-ago conquered the skies in a way man never will.
And being destroyed by wind “farms,” in which wind energy companies get “kill” permits to destroy these amazing raptors using the wind highways they have used for hundreds of thousands of years only suddenly to encounter instant, unknowable death. Male, female, young, old they are killed by the incredible blunt force of a 12-ton blade moving at over 100 mph. Force = Mass times Acceleration. You do the math. For a kilowatt. For a company profiting on tax dollars devoted to an energy form civilization left-behind centuries ago, and that could not have powered our progress to today, nor keep us warm, alive, fed and producing, as Germans are about to discover. Yesterday Solyndra, today ES Windpower, Inc. Tomorrow? Who will destroy our environment with our tax dollars tomorrow?
Federal wildlife officials are pushing wind companies to enroll in a permitting program that allows them to kill eagles if the deaths are offset.
Look up in the sky at an eagle circling, rising, falling. In your mind’s eye, or here if you don’t live where they soar effortlessly across the land. “If deaths are offset?” What kind of bureaucratic mumbo jumbo for the slaughter of these magnificent birds is that? How do you “offset” a dead eagle? With a check? A tear? A carbon credit? How do you offset hundreds of them?
And Tom Finnerty contributed two blog posts, one on CNN’s ludicrous claim that the recent, slight reduction in gas prices constitute a $100 raise for every American.
Fools and Their Money
And the second on big money businessmen, in our present time of economic downturn, telling the wokeratti to cut the crap.
Money Talks, Woke 'Batgirl' Environmentalism Walks
The best example is the ruthless work being done by David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery. Upon taking the reins of the newly created entity -- a product of the merger of the two corporations -- Zaslav wasted no time pulling the plug on the company's $300 million CNN+ streaming service just three weeks after it had launched! Everyone could see that CNN+ was off to a rocky start, but the quick hook was clearly meant as a company-wide warning to anyone who thought he/she/it wasn't expendable….
Zaslav also sent shockwaves through the entertainment industry when he cancelled the release of Batgirl, a multimillion dollar superhero flick (of course), because it was way overbudget and test audiences were hating it. Zaslav's options were to either write a blank check for rewrites and reshoots or else just to put the whole project down as a tax write-off, guaranteeing it would never see the light of day. He chose the latter. And that despite Hollywood's shrieking that it was a "bad look" to cancel a superhero movie with a minority woman lead. But that was the point -- for Zaslav, the race-swapping, female empowerment angle meant nothing. He only cared about whether it would make money, and the answer was no.
Similarly, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon made waves recently when he spoke in defense of investing in oil and, especially, natural gas. Speaking to a gathering of journalists and investors Dimon asked rhetorically, “Why can’t we get it through our thick skulls" that American oil and gas production can help us hit emission reduction targets, and thus ultimately is good for the environment. Continued Dimon, "because of high oil and gas prices, the world is turning back on their coal plants. It is dirtier.”
Of course, environmentalist policies and anti-fossil fuel ESG investing trends are a big reason for those high prices. And, as Joan Sammon has discussed here at The Pipeline, Dimon's own company has been one the biggest proponents of the ESG fraud. Still, in this instance, he's absolutely right -- our present energy crisis, which can be blamed as much on our ruling class's fanatical devotion to so-called renewable energy as on Russia's war in Ukraine, has left countries throughout the world searching desperately for reliable alternate energy sources, and the one they've landed on is coal, the consumption of which is projected to return to 2013 levels by the end of the year. Transitioning from coal to natural gas, made possible by the fracking revolution, has led to America leading the world in emissions reductions since the turn of the century. The transition from natural gas to wind and solar has, in practice, meant the triumphant return of coal.
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by John O’Sullivan, Clarice Feldman, and Tom Finnerty. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!