ESG: A Patriot’s Primer to Corporate and Governmental Control
“Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.” - Henry Kissinger
Prescient words from Henry Kissinger, though he may not have known quite how ESG would invade our lexicon and economy. Environmental, Social and Governance, known as ESG, is a creeping set of criteria designed for compliance. Its adoption is underway and curbing it begins with understanding its ramifications.
If you don’t know, ESG is system that ranks the investment quality of businesses and countries based on their impact on the Environment (carbon footprint, sustainability, etc.), their Social score (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion or wokeness) and Governance (their adherence to the E and S of ESG). This ranking system takes priority over fiduciary responsibility, economic viability, profitability and liberty.
E is for Environmental: Breaking the Food Supply Chain
The Environmental portion of ESG reaches from our soil through our food system, from our local lives and government to globalist organizations.
You may merely be a consumer of food, but if you farm, ranch, or operate any agribusiness, ESG criteria will be expressed in new regulations designed to change your farming and livestock management practices. Under the guise of “sustainability” regulations will dictate your use of fuel, fertilizer, animal husbandry and farming practices.
ESG compliance breeds false economies like carbon capture credits and pipelines, and mandates devastating practices like the elimination of synthetic fertilizers.
ESG is tied to the Biden administration’s “America the Beautiful” Executive Order and land grab program whereby 30% of the land and water in the United States will be moved under permanent government protection by 2030 - including arable land currently being farmed or grazed. ESG is also tied to the United Nations “Race to Zero.”
Survival of family farms tied to livestock
Of one of the few remaining ways for farmers in South Dakota to either expand their operations and bring their families back to the farm, or for young farmers to get their start is through adding livestock production. ESG, including through Biden’s America the Beautiful executive order (formerly known as 30x30), particularly targets animal agriculture, demanding a 30% reduction of methane by 2030. If you are not familiar, methane is a byproduct of livestock production.
One thing we learned during the pandemic is that we need a robust food supply chain. Without access to capital, many farms will fail causing more farm consolidation, which in turn leaves our food supply chain more brittle, not more resilient.
Here’s where this is headed
If you have a family, and especially if your family is food insecure, you’ll feel ESG at the grocery story. We need only look to Sri Lanka with its nearly perfect ESG score of 98.1% compared to our own at 50% to understand our future. Inflation in Sri Lanka peaked in September of 2022 at 69.8%, with food prices rising 95.5% and transportation costs 319%. More than 500,000 people have sunk into poverty in Sri Lanka as of early 2022 and that was before inflation peaked. Sri Lanka’s economy is devastated, and its people are starving.
S is for Social: They See You
In a country where surveillance cameras are on track to outnumber the population, we can already see how technology makes it feasible to monitor and control individuals in China. By recognizing your face or even your gait, you can instantly be identified and tracked. Surveillance cameras, artificial intelligence, and machine learning make it feasible to sum up your activities into a score. A score that will restrict your consumption, transactions, movement, employment, business ownership and access to capital.
Did you attend a public gathering during Covid, maybe church? Do you own a gun? A hunting lodge? Have you traveled to a gun show? Attended a conservative event? Liked the wrong meme? Your purchases are already tracked. Purchases of people in proximity to you will add to your score. We already embrace these privacy violations by use of our smart phones and credit cards. The advent of smart cities, with even more surveillance, streamline the process. And because the law doesn’t protect our privacy and certainly cannot keep up with the expansion of technology, our current trajectory indicates social scoring is our future. Quantum computing will make it affordable even in rural areas. There will be no place to hide.
G is for Governance: Brought to you by Wokesters
If you own a business, ESG means you’ll be forced to comply with ever-expanding Diversity, Equity and Inclusion regulations and reporting. You’ll have to document your business’s carbon footprint and hiring practices, and those of your vendors. ESG scoring and compliance reporting will be equal to financial reporting through the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). According to SEC Chair, Gary Gensler, future SEC filings will include ESG-related disclosures.
The burden of reporting and compliance will devastate small and medium businesses, but not large corporations who will use their staff attorneys to comply, then celebrate their newfound lack of competition. Walmart loves ESG. Even if ESG criteria is not yet codified, it has already moved from activist’s rhetoric to best practices to standard operating procedures in global corporations and banking.
ESG: Great Faces, Great Places
There are banks and corporations in South Dakota that already tout ESG as part of their corporate initiatives. If allowed to spread, ESG regulations will impact our most basic freedoms and eventually our ability to feed our families and survive. We can see already what has happened in China and Sri Lanka. Without our grassroots efforts to change this, ESG’s control will touch us all.