[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 149 (Tuesday, September 24, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H5651-H5652]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
RETURN TO TRUE CAPITALISM
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from
North Carolina (Ms. Foxx) for 5 minutes.
Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, the final frontier of the woke mind virus is
the banks and capitalism themselves. They have already tarnished
America's other institutions.
Last week, House Republicans passed H.R. 5339, the Protecting
Americans' Investments from Woke Policies Act, a bill that would
confront and dispatch one of the most nefarious and hidden forms of
wokeness: environmental, social, and governance investing, or ESG for
short.
In his book, ``Go Woke, Go Broke,'' author Charles Gasparino
punctures the woke mind virus and ESG.
Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record the book review of ``Go Woke, Go
Broke.''
[From the Wall Street Journal, Sept. 8, 2024]
`Go Woke, Go Broke' Review: The Worst Investments
(By Tunku Varadarajan)
Charles Gasparino is a gladiatorial journalist. When he
steps into the arena to fight a money-man or enterprise that
he believes is anticapitalist or crooked, he can be brutal.
Making an enemy of him is not for the faint-hearted: Watch
him trade insults with his critics on social media. He was
once a Wall Street reporter for this newspaper, where
[[Page H5652]]
editors and colleagues remember him for his no-holds-barred
style. Which is precisely how we'd describe the approach in
``Go Woke, Go Broke,'' Mr. Gasparino's blistering account of
``how corporate America became something close to a foot
soldier in the progressive movement.'' Now a senior
correspondent at the Fox Business Network, Mr. Gasparino is
also a columnist at the New York Post, whose irreverent,
indignant (and often irresistible) tabloid style is very much
in evidence here. (Fox, the Post and the Journal share common
ownership.)
``Go Woke, Go Broke'' is a takedown of ``corporate
wokeness,'' which Mr. Gasparino describes as the ``noxious
ideology of progressive politics in the boardroom--an
ideology, he says, that ``needs to die a thousand deaths.''
The book can be seen as a demotic complement to ``Woke,
Inc.'' (2021), by the brainy (and sometimes tiresome) former
Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy. Mr.
Gasparino's is the better book for its plainspokenness: Many
more Middle Americans--whose jobs have been outsourced or
have been imperiled by the high-minded dictates of
``diversity''--will grasp its message. These are the people
who, Mr. Gasparino argues, have been shafted by the Wall
Street ``fat cats'' who've grown ``much fatter'' by their
``feeding at the ESG trough.''
ESG stands for ``environmental, social, and governance''--
metrics intended to direct or funnel investment in an
ostensibly socially responsible direction. Mr. Gasparino is a
populist-capitalist, and ESG is his bete noire, along with
``diversity, equity, and inclusion'' (DEI). These ``leftist
shibboleths'' have, the author says, ``warped'' American
business practices for nearly two decades and grew in
intensity under the second Obama administration.
Mr. Gasparino traces the roots of ESG to the 1980s and
'90s, when business leaders began embracing so-called
corporate social responsibility (or CSR, in its now archaic
abbreviation). CSR, in time, evolved into bien-pensant
notions of stakeholder capitalism, championed by the likes of
Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland. Davos Man, writes Mr. Gasparino,
``represents the ultimate marriage of the progressive
globalist corporate citizen with the globalist progressive
regulatory bureaucrat.''
All this performatively moral investing is a revolt against
Milton Friedman, the economist who in 1970 stated that ``the
social responsibility of business is to increase its
profits.'' Friedman, writes Mr. Gasparino, would have hated
ESG and DEI, ``among the most heinously anti-American
management philosophies ever developed.'' (Readers of Mr.
Gasparino's robust book will realize pretty quickly that
nuance is for wimps.)
Basing his book largely on a host of interviews with
``company insiders,'' Mr. Gasparino gives us entertaining
(and informative) accounts of corporate blunders in the name
of wokeness. He reminds us of the time AB InBev--the holding
company for Anheuser-Busch and its beer, Budweiser--thought
it would be a great idea to use a ``transwoman influencer''
named Dylan Mulvaney to market its top-selling Bud Light.
Middle America revolted and stopped buying the beer,
heretofore branded as a manly beverage. Mr. Gasparino also
recounts how the discount retailer Target was punished by
consumers for promoting ``tuck-friendly bathing suits for men
transitioning to women'' alongside rainbow-colored onesies
for toddlers. And Disney, recalls the author, erred
politically and financially when its chief executive, Bob
Chapek, embarked on a bruising battle with Florida's Gov. Ron
DeSantis and challenged the validity of a state law barring
public schools from teaching sexual education to children
before the fourth grade. In each case, the company's stock
price tanked and sales plummeted.
It enrages Mr. Gasparino that America's corporate
management luxuriates ``in progressive causes as a side
hustle.'' But in some cases, he tells us, these causes are
the main course. Among the villains trying to ram ESG down
our throats are Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock; Jamie
Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase; David Solomon, the CEO of
Goldman Sachs; and the ``ESG-obsessed'' Gary Gensler,
President Biden's chairman of the Securities and Exchange
Commission, whom Mr. Gasparino describes as ``a male
version'' of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, ``among the most woke,
annoying, and . . . dangerous bureaucrats in government.''
Add to the list Adena Friedman, the CEO of Nasdaq, which
demands that companies seeking to list on its exchange
disclose board-level diversity statistics and, if the need
arises, explain why they don't have a diversity of directors.
Such demands aren't, of course, slapped on Chinese companies,
which are, Mr. Gasparino points out, curiously exempt from
all the wokest rules. When was the last time a Chinese
company was asked why it didn't have a Uyghur on its board,
or an LGBTQ+ person?
Attacking Larry Fink as ``Mr. ESG,'' says Mr. Gasparino,
has become ``a rallying cry on the populist right,'' whose
backlash against corporate wokeness has been so fierce that
even BlackRock has started to dismount from its moral high
horse. Consumers' Research, a conservative advocacy group
pushing back against ESG, derides the abbreviation as
``elitists, socialists, and grifters,'' as well as ``erasing
savings and growth''--pungent and effective put-downs. More
and more investors are aware that ESG-specific funds are
expensive and rarely beat the market. In fact, writes Mr.
Gasparino, ``they're some of the worst investments,'' even as
they make it harder to tackle inflation by forcing curbs on
fossil fuels. But Middle America appears to have woken up to
the perils of ESG and is giving voice to its displeasure.
``It's now their Arab Spring,'' says Mr. Gasparino. This may
be hyperbolic overreach, even for the crusading Mr.
Gasparino, but he's confident that America's version of a
grassroots people's revolt will end better than the one in
the Middle East. Let's pray he's right.
Ms. FOXX. He describes ESG, and diversity, equity, and inclusion,
DEI, as `` . . . among the most heinously anti-American management
philosophies ever developed.''
This book amplifies the points we made when we passed our legislation
last week. ESG is an ideological cancer buoyed by asset managers,
banks, and financial institutions that kneel at the altar of
anticapitalism.
Americans saving for retirement don't want to see their hard-earned
money go up in flames in ESG funds. They want a sizeable return on
their investments.
We need to embrace true capitalism again in America. This woke
garbage needs to be put out to pasture and left to die.
____________________