Capitalism saving the Earth? GOP won’t allow it | Will Bunch Newsletter

The NFL has a lot of dumb ideas, so having a two-week lead-up to the Super Bowl isn’t close to the worst. But it is on the list. Last Tuesday’s euphoria has melted into this Tuesday’s “just get on with it, already!” It’s a shame most of the Ramones and Tom Petty are long gone, because “I Wanna Be Sedated” and “The Waiting” would be perfect songs for a “halftime show” for two weeks of football purgatory.

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Climate change, and the killer floods, tornadoes, and wildfires that come with it, is endangering the planet — but that’s not all. The crisis posed largely by 150 years of humans polluting the sky by burning fossil fuels, and by the money changers who made it all happen, is also an existential threat to capitalism.

The growing embrace of radical plans to replace oil and gas with clean energy — like the Green New Deal, which was supported by 57% of all U.S. voters in a 2021 poll — has happened at the same time that a growing number of young voters at least say that they support socialism, a system that many advocates say is the only way to end carbon pollution.

In boardrooms high above Wall Street and probably on the occasional yacht, captains of American finance realized that Big Money needed to change its ways ... or die. Some billionaires, backed by their young Ivy League hires, now posit that the capitalist system that created our polluting SUVs is also a vehicle for solving it.

The folks who came up with “greed is good” in the 1980s developed a new mantra they call “ESG Investing,” which weighs the “Environmental, Social, and Governance” factors of a new investment, and not just solely how much money — dirty money, in too many cases — it would rake in. The ESG concept that encourages a social-good factor means, for example, that analysts might consider a gas-burning power plant with an initial high profit margin a bad long-term investment if its host city will be underwater in a couple of decades.

Top Republicans have a different name for ESG: “woke capitalism.” Conservatives are using the biggest lever they have: control of numerous state governments, including large states like Texas and Florida, to squash socially conscious investing like a bug on an overheated Sunbelt windshield. And their audacious anti-planet and anti-wokeness stance may be working.

Last week, Oklahoma enacted a law called the Energy Discrimination and Elimination Act that orders the state treasurer to investigate which firms are using ESG scores in investment decisions and withdraw any state monies, such as pension funds, from those firms found, in the twisted language of the GOP, to be “boycotting energy companies.”

In threatening to withdraw its dollars, and they are considerable, with more than $6 billion in state retirement funds invested through BlackRock — a leading voice for more socially conscious investing — Oklahoma joins other red states like Texas, Louisiana, and Kansas in using the coercive power of government and Orwellian bizarro-world language about “energy boycotts” to block Wall Street from weighing the fate of the earth in U.S. capitalism.

In December, Malvern-based Vanguard Group, the investment giant that is the world leader in mutual funds, withdrew from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative (NZAM) — in which asset managers pledged investments will be carbon-pollution neutral by 2050. This happened just days before its rivals BlackRock and State Street were grilled by Texas pols at a hearing. Analysts say Vanguard funds are most popular with retail investors who are most interested in short-term profits, and who may be more susceptible to cries of “woke capitalism.”

That Vanguard move won’t satisfy a coalition that includes as many as 25 GOP attorneys general and top Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill who are threatening investigations or legal action against firms like BlackRock or Vanguard, as well as Biden administration agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Labor Department for issuing regulations that would support socially conscious investing.

BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, is wearing the biggest target. In the past, BlackRock was slammed from the left for investments in fossil fuels or Amazon deforestation, but when CEO Larry Fink announced in 2020 that the firm was pulling $500 million in coal investments and creating new funds that shunned oil and gas, the leading environmentalist Bill McKibben called it, “A huge — if by no means final — win for activists!”

Indeed, the socially aware ESG concept endorsed by BlackRock and its rivals is arguably revolutionary. It is a reversal of what became the guiding principle of modern, late-stage capitalism as promulgated by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman in the tumultuous year of 1970, when he wrote: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”

Friedman’s philosophy that shareholders and their profits mattered and nothing else — not stakeholders like a company’s workers or its local community, and not things like consumer protection or the environment — became the underpinnings of modern late-stage capitalism. We are familiar with the outcomes: the crushing of labor unions as CEO pay skyrocketed, a frozen federal minimum wage, low taxes on corporations and millionaires and billionaires, and the corporate-funded PR campaign to deny that climate change was taking place.

The failings of “the Friedman doctrine” — at least when it comes to climate — may be clear now to some Wall Street leaders, but the Republican Party sees ESG investing not only as a threat to its big-money fossil-fuel owners but also to its guiding philosophy. “ESG is an illegal leftist scam for circumventing democratic processes to impose arbitrary standards on corporations to hijack them for political purposes,” Steve Milloy, who advised Donald Trump, wrote in praising the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for pulling $2 billion out of BlackRock.

But the only political hijackers here are the Republicans and their rank hypocrisy. The free-market economics that conservatives claim to support should include investors’ freedom to decide that planetary destruction is a bad long-term bet. What lawmakers and governors from Austin to Tallahassee are doing to thwart socially conscious investing is abusing the power of the state to block their liberty — an abuse also known as fascism.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. The anti-ESG laws are of a piece with an increasingly authoritarian GOP doctrine that seeks — and has been increasingly successful — in telling women what they can do with their bodies, in telling the LBGTQ community who they can love or even what they can wear, in controlling what classroom teachers can teach, and even punishing corporations when they promote tolerance or racial justice.

It’s a Republican Party that is learning to love state coercion, while becoming a death cult in the process. An autocratic Ron DeSantis only cares if he’s above water in the 2024 presidential polls thanks to his attacks on “woke corporations.” It’s for the next generation to sink or swim when — thanks to the oil, gas, and coal companies propped up by this right-wing power play — large swaths of Florida are under water.

Question: How do we stop the Republican attack on education, specifically the DeSantis led use of culture war rhetoric for a fascist takeover of public ed, including higher ed? — via Toad and Stick Farm (@ToadAndStick) on Twitter

Answer: I’m probably going to write my next column about pretty much this, because the battle for the minds of America’s next generations is the most important story in the nation right now, and you are correct to identify Florida as the front line in this war against knowledge. But for now I want to call your attention to a column out this week from the always-spot-on Greg Sargent at the Washington Post, who not only criticizes the cynical politics of Ron DeSantis but looks at where Democrats are fighting back. Sargent spotlights Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who plans an overt effort to publicize that “Illinois doesn’t ban books,” and a nascent campaign in Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s Michigan to emphasize teacher recruitment over culture wars. The reality is that most U.S. parents want to give their kids’ teachers better support — not tear them down. If Dems are smart, they’ll take advantage of that. Always a big “if,” right?

Whatever crazy thing happens on Super Bowl Sunday — and you know there’ll be some insanity that Philly fans will be arguing about 100 years from now — it won’t top the greatest miracle of my life, forever tied to the Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs. It happened in 2005 — the fall that Andy Reid’s Eagles were coming off a heartbreaking Super Bowl loss — and it started with a genius idea from my wife. The Inquirer was raising money for United Way, and the vehicle was two separate raffles for a free weekend jaunt to see the Birds play at Kansas City’s iconic Arrowhead. Everyone bought the $1 or so tickets of the traditional raffle and no one was crazy enough to buy the $50 (!) tickets of the second offering — except for my wife, who bought five. Her scheme worked, and a short time later I was boarding a chartered jet with 150 of the Eagles’ biggest fans with my son Jesse, who was 10-going-on-11.

I can’t remember who won the 76ers game last week, but more than 17 years later I can tell you everything that happened those 48 hours — grabbing player autographs in the hotel lobby near Donovan McNabb’s mom perched like a queen in a big comfy chair, sitting behind Merrill Reese and Mike Quick on the bus to a cholesterol-flooded KC steakhouse, crashing the empty hotel pool on an unseasonably warm first day of October, and the “Missouri Nice” of the Chiefs’ fans in the vast upper deck of Arrowhead, who didn’t harass Jesse over his newly purchased McNabb jersey but instead incessantly asked, “How do you like our city?”

The true miracle wasn’t the kindness of our Chiefs Kingdom frenemies, or that we had won a lottery to get there, or even that the Eagles — after falling behind 24-6 in the second quarter and provoking “Oh well it was still a great trip” shrugs — stormed back to win 37-31. That victory felt significant ... until the glory era of T.O., McNabb, and Reid imploded just days later. But the hours that a dad got to spend with his 10-year-old son were a prize that can never be taken away — regardless of whether the Eagles or Chiefs hoist the Vince Lombardi Trophy on Sunday night.