[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.

                          ____________________