Last week I spoke with Harold Hamm, the oil and gas business magnate who founded Continental Resources. Harold had given a talk at the Heritage Foundation to launch his book “Game Changer: Our 50-Year Mission to Secure America’s Energy Independence.” He devoted an entire chapter to the left-wing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) agenda.
Harold told me that a main reason he had taken his public company private was to avoid being forced to invest in “green” energy and other ESG goals.
Another CEO of a company that exports generators informed me that he won an annual industry award several years ago. This year, he was unable even to apply, because his company had no diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or ESG policies.
Even trade associations are now promoting these policies, and companies without them are being refused bank loans and even insurance.
DEI management is now the second-fastest growing job on LinkedIn, as companies are increasingly pressured to increase their ESG social credit scores.
Driving this movement is the American company B Lab. This company encourages other companies in the U.S. to become benefit corporations, focusing on ESG and DEI objectives rather than on generating returns for shareholders or valuable products or services for customers.
B Lab’s website states that it is “the non-profit network transforming the global economy to benefit all people, communities, and the planet…We won’t stop until business is a force for good.”
But business is already a force for good, in that it creates wealth, jobs and government tax revenues. No community is sustainable without business.
B Lab perversely suggests that business, and shareholder capitalism in general, is not a force for good, but exploitative, patriarchal and “transphobic.” B Lab is now pressuring companies to change their purposes in their articles of association in order to receive its certification and become “B Corporations.”
The U.S. government needs to put a check on this leftist “social justice” movement before it gains as much ground as it has in Canada and the United Kingdom.
In the UK, B Lab founded the registered charity B Lab UK, which goes even further with its justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion principles, the perfect JEDI mind trick to make corporate officers behave ridiculously.
B Lab UK is now promoting a Better Business Act which, if passed by Parliament, would coerce British companies to implement ideological policies and report on them annually.
Social justice may sound harmless or even positive, but creating a new fiduciary duty for company directors to “reduce harms or costs the company imposes on wider society and the environment” would potentially leave directors disqualified and personally liable if they fail to sign up to critical race theory, transgender ideology, or the “net zero” plan.
My experience working in the UK — where these intersectional polices are fully and unquestioningly embraced — attests to the fact that woke distractions create an unproductive and divisive working environment.
At my previous job, I was hired to work on trade policy. But I was mandated to spend a ridiculous 20 percent of my working hours promoting woke social projects — and this was strictly assessed in my quarterly performance reviews, so there was no getting out of it to get actual work done.
My colleagues and I were supposed to focus on promoting exports, but instead we were bombarded with training, and events about critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, “lived experience” (that is, truth presented as infinite, personal and subjective), white privilege, unconscious bias, decolonization, witchcraft, intersectionality, biphobia, toxic masculinity, nonbinary genders, transgenderism, gay history and environmentalism.
We were also told that “Gay Pride Month” is now “Gay Pride Year.”
My former employer declared “tolerance” an offensive word because it means passive acceptance. We were instructed that, to be a social justice organization, we should instead use “inclusion,” interpreted as celebration of “marginalized” groups.
Through the dogma of intersectionality, everyone was encouraged to discover a personal victimhood to celebrate, setting off a race-to-the-bottom competition over who was the most oppressed. Colleagues were even encouraged to cross-dress, so as to explore the “lived experience” of “oppressed members of society.”
In July, it was exposed that UK banks have even closed the accounts of thousands of people who expressed views that go against this dogma. The most high-profile case was that of Nigel Farage, who had his accounts closed by Coutts Bank, a subsidiary of NatWest, after the banks were certified as B Corps by B Lab UK. The bank then lied about the political nature of these account closures. After the truth was exposed, the CEOs of Coutts and NatWest were forced to resign.
Here in the U.S., Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in part because its risk committee had no members experienced in risk management. They appeared more concerned about promoting ESG and DEI than banking. The rapid promotion of unqualified people to their next level of incompetence on woke grounds is a habit I have repeatedly witnessed in organizations that embrace the B Lab agenda. We are replacing meritocracy with DEI compliance as the main criterion for advancement and success in the corporate world.
China and Russia see this behavior as further evidence of Western decadence and weakness. Rather like the former Soviet Union’s “active measures,” exposed by the late Yuri Bezmenov, the West’s adversaries are weaponizing the West’s own weaknesses by actively propagandizing woke ideas in the U.S. There is now a movement to create a BRICS currency to challenge the U.S. dollar. China is clearly preparing to invade Taiwan and continues its genocide against the Uyghurs unabated.
Meanwhile, an overprivileged Anglosphere destabilizes itself by obsessing over luxury beliefs.
Andrew Hale is the Jay Van Andel Senior Policy Analyst in Trade Policy at the Heritage Foundation.