Major Company Reverses Woke ESG Credit Rating Practice, Victory Against Political Activism

ESG HURTS

In a victory for consumers nationwide and the State of Texas all affected by financial companies prioritizing ideological “environmental, social, and corporate governance” (“ESG”) considerations over purely financial factors, S&P Global Ratings announced it would no longer publish new ESG credit indicators or update outstanding ESG credit indicators.

This follows numerous efforts by Texas’s Office of the Attorney General (“OAG”) to combat the ESG investment doctrine that aims to weaponize the financial sector for ideological goals related to environmental extremism, racial and gender identity politics, and more.

In September 2022, Texas and a coalition of states sent a Civil Investigative Demand (“CID”) to S&P Global requesting information relating to its incorporation of ESG factors into its credit ratings analysis.

The OAG, under Ken Paxton, launched several other initiatives to address the trend of financial woke companies behaving as an extension of politicians, New World Order operatives, and activists by adopting ESG practices.

In January 2023, Attorney General Ken Paxton launched a lawsuit against the Biden Administration’s illegal attempt to expose workers’ retirement accounts to ESG investing, putting their financial futures at risk by allowing asset managers to consider non-financial factors when investing client funds.

The OAG has also launched aggressive defenses of Texas laws that forbid conducting State business with financial companies that discriminate against firearms businesses and the oil and gas industry.

“In recent years, the financial industry has been pressured to use their enormous power over consumers to advance fringe causes that Americans do not agree with,” said First Assistant Attorney General Brent Webster. “Texas is proud of our litigation and investigations that have obviously caused companies to think twice about becoming an arm for political activism, and we will continue to monitor companies closely.”

Evidence against this political propaganda and movement became solid last year when researchers from Columbia University and London School of Economics the ESG record of U.S. companies in 147 ESG fund portfolios and that of U.S. companies in 2,428 non-ESG portfolios.

• They found that the companies in the ESG portfolios had worse compliance record for both labor and environmental rules.

•They also found that companies added to ESG portfolios did not subsequently improve compliance with labor or environmental regulations.

The conclusion to be drawn from this and other evidence “seems pretty clear: funds investing in companies that publicly embrace ESG sacrifice financial returns without gaining much, if anything, in terms of actually furthering ESG interests,” concluded the Harvard Business Review in March 2022.

At least as disturbing is the fact that Tariq Fancy, BlackRock’s first global chief investment officer for sustainable investing between 2018 and 2019, warned in 2021, after realizing this was part of the plot for New World Order global dominance strategy, that sustainable investing is a “dangerous placebo that harms the public interest.”

He noted that financial institutions have an obvious motivation to push for ESG products given these have higher fees, which then improves their profits.

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