The Roots Of ESG And How To Get Rid Of It

Posted By: Lincoln Brown via PJ Media October 11, 2022

ESG exists as part of the WEF’s Great Narrative leading to the WEF’s Great Reset. It is primarily used to attack the US, demolish ing the world’s engine of capitalism and free market economics. It also became provided the bond between Big Business and Big Government. ⁃ TN Editor

At this point, everyone knows about ESG, and everyone knows that companies and firms that embrace it are intent on pushing an environmental, social, and governance agenda, mostly on America. But the full story is very interesting and extremely disturbing.

Recently, I had the chance to hear Vivek Ramaswamy, the founder of Strive Asset Management, speak about ESG, how it came to be, how it functions, and how to combat it.

Ramaswamy said that the problems of ESG are not state or even national economic ones. They make up a transnational, trans-partisan battle for the heart and soul of democracy itself. It is not Democrats versus Republicans, Left versus Right, black versus white, or gay versus straight. Rather, the real issue at stake is democratic-republican self-governance versus monarchy. Ramaswamy said that it is not a 2022 question but a 1776 question. ESG, says Ramaswamy, is a secular religion that started when ideas such as identity and the ability to achieve in life based on race, gender, or sexual orientation rose to the fore.

According to Ramaswamy, there were two toxic ideologies of the 20^th century—the first being German Nazism, and the second Soviet-style Marxism. Blend the identity politics of the first with the oppressor-oppressed philosophy of the second and you have planted the seeds of ESG. This, in turn, allows for the application of labels to those who question the new cultural norm. Those labels include, but of course are not limited to, “racist,” “misogynist,” “climate-denier,” and “bigot.” Once those labels are applied, all debate is silenced.

The current problem, said Ramaswamy, began with the 2008 financial crisis. Ramaswamy was working for a Wall Street investment firm. He said anger began to rise when banks received financial bailouts, causing people to begin to question modern American capitalism. It also served as a nursery of sorts to the Occupy Wall Street movement. This movement, running on the fumes of the old progressive ideology, demanded that money be taken from the rich and given to the poor. But the neo-progressive movement was just starting to come into its own, and this movement postulated that the real problem was not poverty or economic injustice but rather racial injustice, bigotry, misogyny, and climate change.

Ramaswamy said that Wall Street saw a way to get off the hot seat. Corporations realized that they could get activists off their backs by doing things such as putting token minorities on corporate boards and championing the combatting of climate change and its supposedly racist impact. But the corporations said that the price would be for the Left to conveniently look the other way with regards to corporate power. In addition to being left alone, these companies also expected that the movers and shakers in government and these movements would give them certain business advantages. Ramaswamy cited a move by Goldman-Sachs in which it said it would not take a company public if it did not have a sufficiently diverse board. Ramaswamy called it a cynical grand bargain or even an arranged marriage between two sides that didn’t even so much as like one another. Ramaswamy likened it to “mutual prostitution,” which resulted in the “Woke ESG Industrial Complex.” This is a far more powerful entity than Big Business or Big Government, which allowed both elements to accomplish together what they could not do on their own.

This created the chance for new asset management companies to ride in on their proverbial white horses in the wake of the ’08 financial crisis. These included companies like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, which would create “better capitalism.” According to Ramaswamy, these three companies, over 15 years, have acquired enough assets to manage more than $21 trillion of investment funds. This money is then used to advance a progressive agenda that would have never survived a legislative session.

Seeing Wall Street’s success, Ramaswamy said that Silicon Valley realized that it would also like a piece of the action. Even back in 2008, the tech lords knew that it was the Left that posed a threat to their burgeoning monopoly on at least a philosophical level. So the tech lords said they would use their corporate power to advance progressivism, doing things like censoring opinions and eliminating “hate speech,” as the Left defined it. In return, the Left would conveniently ignore the tech monopoly.

Seeing how well things worked out for Wall Street and Silicon Valley, much of corporate America would follow suit. Ramaswamy cited Coca-Cola speaking out against Georgia’s voting laws and forcing its employees to take diversity training, including courses on how to be “less white.” At the same time, Coke could ignore its product’s effects on American obesity. Nike could condemn “systemic racism” in America, while people overseas toiled in sweatshops for slave wages and, as Ramaswamy asserted, in conditions of slave labor to make high-end sneakers for sale in the U.S., often to people who might not be able to afford coats for their children.

Even though the two sides still loathe one another, the system, which is the merger of state and corporate power, stays in place because it continues to work so well. Ramaswamy called it the most powerful force in modern American life. Ironically, liberals allowed themselves to forget about their skepticism of big business, and it duped conservatives because the system was presented in the context of the free market. Ramaswamy said that he knows principled people on the left and the right who are deeply concerned about the issue, in part because free speech and open debate in the public square, where all voices and votes count equally, is being neutralized.

That is the “S” or social prong of ESG. Far more sinister, said Ramaswamy, is the “E” prong, or energy. Climate change has been used to envelop the social prong and make it a Trojan horse. The major asset management firms and banks have served as an arm of the government to implement climate change policies, such as the Green New Deal, which could not have passed Congress. Democrats realized that the private sector could be used to that end. Climate Czar John Kerry was able to get companies across the nation to sign a “climate pledge” to put the Green New Deal into effect without any debate or vote in the legislative branch. Ramaswamy said that the tactic has not only contributed to a generational supply/demand imbalance for global energy, but it also hasn’t even been effective. This is because we are in a global energy market, and countries like China and Russia snap up every unit of energy that ESG takes out of play in the West. So, according to Ramaswamy, on the other side of the world, carbon emissions continue unabated. On top of that, Russian and Chinese energy production is much dirtier than it is in the U.S. Methane produced by those countries is far worse than in the U.S.

Read full story here…

Source:  technocracy.news

 

 

The Common Roots Of Climate Change And COVID-19 Hysteria

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Posted By: Patrick Wood March 29, 2020

IIntroduction

People want to know: just how bad is the COVID-19 virus and is fighting it worth the destruction of the world’s economic and financial system while disrupting the lives of hundreds of millions of people? The story behind the story will make it clear that things are seldom as they seem.
In short and when seen through the lens of Sustainable Development, aka Technocracy, the whole world has just been punked and then panicked into destroying itself over COVID-19.
The culprit? A world-class Technocrat in Britain: Dr. Neil Ferguson, PhD is a professor at Imperial College in London that bills itself as a “global university”. It is thoroughly steeped in Sustainable Development and more dedicated to social causes than academic achievement. In fact, Imperial is very well-known for its alarmist research reports on climate change, carbon reduction, environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, etc.
The problem with the global warming meme is that it is a tired, worn-out racehorse that much of the world simply ignores. Global warming alarmists have tried every trick in the book to stampede the world into Sustainable Development. They have knowingly falsified climate data, flooded the world with inaccurate academic reports, held world meetings like the Paris Accord in France, threatened and bullied their critics, created a global youth movement to shame leaders into action, etc. All of these strategies have failed to usher in the UN’s Sustainable Development, aka Technocracy, and show little promise of success in the future.
What the Sustainable Development crowd needed was to put their non-performing racehorse “Global Warming” out to pasture and find a brand new horse that could finally run and win the race to what the UN calls “deep transformation” of the entire global economic system. The new horse is named “COVID-19”. Different horse, same jockey, same race, same finish line.

Imperial College

The President of Imperial College is Professor Alice Gast. She considers the college to be part of a “new paradigm of the global university” that promises to be “a contributor to a better future.” Gast also notes the three general areas of focus of Imperial are “epidemics, shortages of natural resources and environmental crises.” In other words, the environment, natural resources and epidemics are seen as intertwined and inseparable.
The “global university” is indeed a new paradigm, and one that radically transforms the traditional role of education into one of social activism. Success is measured by social impact on society and not according to scholastic achievement.
Furthermore, the global university is invariably framed as a champion of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development and Imperial is no exception. The head of Sustainability at Imperial is Professor Paul Lickiss. His web page states, “Sustainability should run through the whole of College thinking and activity at all levels and across all campuses.” A casual examination of the various departments at Imperial confirm this statement: sustainability, environmentalism and climate change themes are seen everywhere.

The Work Begins

Once the release of COVID-19 in Wuhan was recognized as a potential pandemic, academic researcher Dr. Neil Ferguson went to work developing a computer model to track and forecast its rapid spread. At the top of his field, Ferguson is a professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College in London, and has had extensive experience in tracking other infectious diseases such as the swine flu in 2009, Dengue in 2015 and Zika in 2016.
Ferguson is a British epidemiologist and a professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College. According to the World Health Organization (WHO),

Epidemiology is the study of the distribution and determinants of health-related states or events (including disease), and the application of this study to the control of diseases and other health problems. Various methods can be used to carry out epidemiological investigations: surveillance and descriptive studies can be used to study distribution; analytical studies are used to study determinants.

With a Master of Arts degree in physics, he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in theoretical physics. He has no medical or related degree, but rather chose to apply his education to use his mathematical skills by modeling the spread of infectious diseases.
In other words, Ferguson is a data-driven Technocrat with direct access to policy-makers around the world. According to the New York Times,

Imperial College has advised the government on its response to previous epidemics, including SARS, avian flu and swine flu. With ties to the World Health Organization and a team of 50 scientists, led by a prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, Imperial is treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.

Ferguson’s COVID-19 Study

Early on in the COVID-19 outbreak, Ferguson began to advise officials in Britain and the United States on the spread of the infection as well as ways to fight it. Thus, he served as both researcher and policy advisor at the same time.
Ferguson’s conclusion that COVID-19 would kill as many as 500,000 people in Britain and over 1.1 million in the United States, set off a tidal wave of panic that has not subsided. His policy recommendations were just as shocking, namely, that societies must be entirely locked down in order to survive.
On March 16, 2020, Ferguson finally released his formal report, Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID19 mortality and healthcare demand.
Here are some quick observations from reading this report:

• Well before publishing, he advised policy makers. His modeling study “informed policymaking in the UK and other countries in recent weeks”
• Comparable to 1918 Spanish flu: “it represents the most serious seen in a respiratory virus since the 1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic”
• Applied this and previous model to UK and US: “we apply a previously published microsimulation model to two countries: the UK (Great Britain specifically) and the US”
• There are two possible strategies: Mitigation and Suppression
• Mitigation: This proposed social distancing, home-isolation of sick, home-quarantine of relatives, “We find that that optimal mitigation policies (combining home isolation of suspect cases, home quarantine of those living in the same household as suspect cases, and social distancing of the elderly and others at most risk of severe disease) might reduce peak healthcare demand by 2/3 and deaths by half”
• In spite of reducing deaths by half, “the resulting mitigated epidemic would still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive care units) being overwhelmed many times over”
• Thus, he argues that Suppression is the only option
• Suppression: Additional measures include social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of infected, household quarantine of family members, school and university closures
• Long term: Suppression “will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more)”.

These doomsday predictions, based entirely on computer simulations similar to those used in climate studies, were believable enough that national leaders accepted them at face value. Worse, they also accepted Ferguson’s policy recommendations, which were then implemented with precise detail. Here are some of the more prescient excerpts from the report’s conclusion section:

Our results demonstrate that it will be necessary to layer multiple interventions, regardless of whether suppression or mitigation is the overarching policy goal. However, suppression will require the layering of more intensive and socially disruptive measures than mitigation. The choice of interventions ultimately depends on the relative feasibility of their implementation and their likely effectiveness in different social contexts. (p. 14)

Overall, our results suggest that population-wide social distancing applied to the population as a whole would have the largest impact; and in combination with other interventions – notably home isolation of cases and school and university closure – has the potential to suppress transmission below the threshold of R=1 required to rapidly reduce case incidence. A minimum policy for effective suppression is therefore population-wide social distancing combined with home isolation of cases and school and university closure. (p. 14)

To avoid a rebound in transmission, these policies will need to be maintained until large stocks of vaccine are available to immunise the population – which could be 18 months or more. (p.15)

Technology – such as mobile phone apps that track an individual’s interactions with other people in society – might allow such a policy to be more effective and scalable if the associated privacy concerns can be overcome. (p. 15)

Perhaps our most significant conclusion is that mitigation is unlikely to be feasible without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US healthcare systems being exceeded many times over. In the most effective mitigation strategy examined, which leads to a single, relatively short epidemic (case isolation, household quarantine and social distancing of the elderly), the surge limits for both general ward and ICU beds would be exceeded by at least 8-fold under the more optimistic scenario for critical care requirements that we examined. In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US. (p. 16)

The mind of a Technocrat can be clearly seen in this whole package. All of these draconian measures must be maintained until a vaccine is created, which is at least 18 months. The use of mobile phone apps to track the world’s population could be effective if citizens could be railroaded into it. What is not seen is one word about the destruction of the global economic system that would certainly result from these draconian policy measures.
Climate alarmists who articulated the Green New Deal policies also call for radical measures to transform society and they are likewise silent about the inevitable destructive effects such policies would have on the global economy.

Destroy Capitalism & Free Enterprise

Why do Technocrats not discuss the destruction of Capitalism and Free Enterprise? Because that is their exact goal. When Christiana Figueres was head of Climate Change at the United Nations in 2015. She clearly stated:

“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history. This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time to change the economic model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution. That will not happen overnight and it will not happen at a single conference on climate change, be it COP 15, 21, 40 – you choose the number. It just does not occur like that. It is a process, because of the depth of the transformation.” (emphasis added)

People argue with me that this cannot be the goal, that it’s just too big to comprehend. My reply is that if a killer points a gun at you and angrily says he is going to kill you, will you take defensive action or just stand there and let him shoot you? Hardly. Direct threats must be taken seriously, especially when the perpetrator has the means to carry out the threat.
In the heat of the Great Depression during the early 1930s, Technocrats were certain that Capitalism and Free Enterprise would be dead within months. Their economic replacement system of Technocracy would not and could not work unless the existing economic system was completely failed. Unfortunately for them, Capitalism recovered and Technocracy withered.
Today, however, the United Nations is clearly articulating the same premise and it is at the ready with its resource-based economic system called Sustainable Development, aka Technocracy. The most clearly articulated example of Sustainable Development is the Green New Deal as recently unveiled by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA).

The World Panics

Thanks to Neil Ferguson and Imperial College, the entire world has panicked over COVID-19 and worse, leaders have implemented all of their policy recommendations lock, stock and barrel. Meanwhile, the entire global media obediently follows behind, fanning the flames of fear into a raging forest fire.
As a result, the U.S. economy is in a tailspin, the financial system is on the verge of total collapse, stocks have entered a full-blown bear market, some U.S. Treasury notes are trading at negative interest rates and unemployment claims soared to 3.3 million last week as businesses shut their doors. Employment experts forecast that over 40 million Americans will have lost their jobs by the end of April.
In short, the economy has been dealt a mortal wound. Even if all restrictions were immediately lifted globally, it is highly doubtful that the economy could recover to its former state. Moreover, that doubt is increased for every week that restricted activity continues.
In the United States, the primary agent of panic has been the highly-esteemed Dr. Anthony Fauci who also has close ties to the World Health Organization. According to National Review, Fauci hypothesized in late February in the New England Journal of Medicine that the fatality rate of COVID-19 may be “considerably less than 1% because many people who are infected experience either no symptoms or very mild symptoms and therefore do not report.” And yet, the media routinely states that the mortality rate is 3.4% or higher. Dr. Fauci himself continues to claim that COVID-19 is 10x as bad as the flu, even though his own estimates of 100K to 200K deaths compares to the CDC’s reported deaths during the 2019-2020 flu season of between 24,000 and 62,000. If Fauci’s 10X figure is accurate, then he should be estimating between 240,000 and 620,000 deaths, which he is not. His numbers simply do not add up!

Conclusion

We are all rightfully saddened for anyone who loses their life to COVID-19, but we are going to be a lot more sorry for having trusted a Technocrat to tell us how to deal with the pandemic. The destruction of the economy will result in many more deaths and hardships than COVID-19 could ever imagine.
There is much more to be written on this topic. The main point of this article is to establish the “panic of 2020” as a Technocrat operation so that Sustainable Development, aka Technocracy, can be quickly moved forward if not completely ushered in. Furthermore, it is a replacement strategy for global warming to induce panic. As stated above, different horse, same jockey, same race, same finish line.

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For full documentation and further explanations on Technocracy, please see my books Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation and Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order. Both are also available at Technocracy.news.