The founder of anti-woke asset management firm Strive, Vivek Ramaswamy, put heavy emphasis this past Wednesday that state attorneys general should be making use of their power as a means to push back against the various financial institutions trying to force Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) standards.
The Strive founder made reference to multiple states taking action recently against the various financial institutions that try and mandate their ESG agenda to investors who are just wanting to have corporations focus on making profits. Many companies make use of ESG standards as a means to push for green energy initiatives, racially-based management quotas, and many other extreme-left agenda items.
“I think that state AGs actually have a lot of power on these issues because states aren’t just regulators,” stated Ramaswamy. “They’re also market actors. What do I mean by that? States are actually, through their pension funds and through their state treasuries, directing the capital of their constituents to these large asset managers.”
“So if these other large asset managers are then using the money of those state constituents to advance social and political agendas, that most of those constituents don’t want to see advanced, that’s a big fiduciary problem,” expressed the Strive founder.
Last week, the attorneys general of a group of 19 Republican states came together in a letter targeted at the investment firm BlackRock, telling the company that its use of shareholder activism “may violate multiple state laws.”
“BlackRock’s past public commitments indicate that it has used citizens’ assets to pressure companies to comply with international agreements such as the Paris Agreement that force the phase-out of fossil fuels, increase energy prices, drive inflation, and weaken the national security of the United States,” expressed the letter. “These agreements have never been ratified by the United States Senate. The Senators elected by the citizens of this country determine which international agreements have the force of law, not BlackRock.”
Ramaswamy stated that the companies, such as BlackRock, that want to push an extreme leftist agenda are not only a cultural problem, but that certain actions could also be downright illegal. The entrepreneur stated that the various state attorneys general are finally waking up to the idea that it is “a legal violation to use the money of my state’s constituents to advance agendas that my state’s constituents don’t want to see advanced with their money.”
It was then highlighted by the former biopharmaceutical CEO that Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, issued his legal opinion for the state that expressed that making use of ESG practices violates state law. “I think that alone is actually a lot less expensive, a lot less time-consuming, a lot less risky than litigating cases or bringing cases, but showed the effect in the shockwaves that a single state AG can send through the system,” stated Ramaswamy.
Just last year, Texas also issued a statement standing against companies that try to strongarm ESG initiatives when it banned state pensions from investing in financial firms that boycott oil and gas companies. Moves such as the one carried out by Texas and Kentucky could just end up motivating other states to step up and take action against ESG-focused corporations over the coming months.
“What many citizens across this country want is companies to focus exclusively on being as profitable as they can be on making great products and services for people without mixing that with political and social ideologies,” he stated.