Southwest Exemplifies the Tyranny of BlackRock’s ESG

Stop Larry Fink

Dallas-based Southwest Airlines is losing its heart.

The Epoch Times:

Faced with pandemic-related staffing shortages and pressure to add minorities, the company has changed the way it hires, trains, and disciplines workers—mostly to benefit less-qualified new hires representing the diversity rainbow, the employees say.

One Southwest flight attendant, a Hispanic female, said: “They are compromising safety for the sake of race, gender identity, and sexual preference … They’re risking people’s lives because of agendas.”

While promoting diversity sounds like a great idea, the inclusionary policies have actually become exclusionary at Southwest, employees say. Disparate treatment has divided their ranks into two distinct camps: those with “desirable” or “approved” personal, social, or political characteristics—and those without.

Minorities or people with leftist political views, varying gender identities, and alternative sexual orientations appear to be given wide latitude. This “protected class” is allowed to bend or break rules, and new hires in these classifications may be given extra chances to pass required skills tests, the employees said.

She and others say the targeting of conservatives is common—and they point to the recently publicized case of fired Southwest flight attendant Charlene Carter as a prime example.

Last month, a federal jury in Texas awarded Carter more than $5 million after finding that Southwest wrongfully terminated her and that her union didn’t live up to its duty to represent her. The company fired Carter after she expressed her pro-life views to a union leader via social media and opposed the union’s pro-abortion activism.

The company supported the union’s political activism, Carter’s suit says, by accommodating work-shift changes for union members so they could participate in the Women’s March on Washington, D.C., in January 2017.

The Epoch Times then suggests, correctly, the corporate push to increase “ESG Scores” is the fundamental cause:

DEI data play a significant role in corporate ESG scores—ratings of a company’s “environmental, social, and governance” performance. It’s a complex—and controversial—way to assess which companies are considered “good corporate citizens.”

Most of the interviewed airline employees believe that the pursuit of ESG scores is driving corporate personnel practices, including ignoring well-qualified male applicants while eagerly hiring less-experienced female and minority candidates.

Increasingly, ESG scores can help determine whether a company sinks or swims. A good ESG score can attract investors, government contracts, and favorable loan-interest rates—benefits that are especially important for the airline industry, in which lucrative U.S. Department of Defense contracts are at stake and profit margins are razor-thin because of astronomical costs for equipment and personnel.

ESG stands for Economic, Social and Governance metrics. With the exception of the governance metrics, these are political metrics that have nothing to do with corporate profitability. ESG thus destroys capitalism by turning corporations into left-wing activist non-profits. The main thrusts of ESG are the “Green New Deal” and to remove straight white Christian men from positions of power—the “diversity equity and inclusion” component. The purpose of ESG is to establish systemic discrimination against straight white Christian men.

How does this work in practice? ESG is imposed on all publicly-traded corporations through the large voting blocks controlled by large asset managers, the biggest of which are BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and state pension plans (such as CalPers).

BlackRock controls the largest block of shareholder votes in virtually every corporation in America. BlackRock is what is known as an asset manager. It manages mutual funds, including those commonly used in 401(k) and pension plans. The head honcho at BlackRock is Larry Fink, who by the way, is not a Christian.

With his claws at the levers of power at every corporation, Larry Fink is one of the most powerful men in America, more so than the illegitimate Joe Biden.

Despite controlling a powerful financial corporation, Larry Fink is a Marxist at heart.

Independent:

Fink wasn’t on assignment that day. He was at the march as a young Marxist. “Everything I did back then, I felt, was for the revolution,” he says.

Thus, it is noteworthy that so-called “woke capital” is rooted at state-or-union-controlled pension funds, and large mutual fund firms hijacked by Marxists like Larry Fink.

Larry on his way to the BlackRock shareholder’s meeting (Current Revolt archive photo).

Larry leaving the shareholder meeting after imposing ESG mandates. (Current Revolt archive photo).

When corporations hold shareholder votes, asset managers like BlackRock get to vote on behalf of the mutual fund investors. So, let’s say you invest your 401(k) funds in the BlackRock IVV ETF (an S&P 500 tracker). You are putting your money at risk. But Larry Fink gets to use your proxy votes in AT&T. So Larry Fink gets all the votes even though he is not risking his money. How convenient! This is a perversion of capitalism. Larry Fink gets all the power of the shareholder votes with none of the risk. If AT&T goes bankrupt due to ESG it’s no skin off Larry’s back.

The Wall Street Journal:

“We have a new bunch of emperors, and they’re the people who vote the shares in the index funds,” Charlie Munger, the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and Warren Buffett’s business partner, said earlier this year.

Since the Larry Fink is not a Christian, he uses his power to push a far-left anti-White and anti-Christian agenda.

Let’s see what BlackRock itself tells us about its goals.

BlackRock:

Commitment to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion. This includes a company’s efforts to recruit, retain, and develop diverse talent, create an inclusive workplace for all workers, support executive training for underrepresented groups, and address any compensation gaps across different workforce demographics

BlackRock only supports executive training for favored demographics (not straight white Christian men).

Note the section on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Remember, it’s a Marxist that gets to define what the above means in practice. Larry Fink’s primary goal is to remove straight white Christian men from positions of power in corporations and replace them with demographics more likely to support left-wing extremism. His secondary goal is to push the Green New Deal scam, which is costing Texans jobs.

BlackRock is also joined at the hip with the illegitimate Biden regime.

Yahoo Finance:

Another BlackRock Inc. executive is joining the Biden administration, adding to the close ties between the Wall Street heavyweight and the seat of power in Washington.

Larry Fink’s $8.5 trillion investing giant has been gaining clout in Washington as the Biden administration has stocked its ranks with ex-BlackRock executives. That means the company is now seen as one of Wall Street’s key conduits to the power center in Washington -- a tag that was more closely associated with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. through prior administrations.

Leftists, with the help of Larry Fink, are doing an end-run around the Constitution. Since they cannot get the Green New Deal through Congress, and they cannot just terminate all straight white Christian men, they are trying to get those policies in through the back door.

Larry wagging his finger at Texas corporations.

So what has Texas done about this? In 2021 the Texas legislature passed an anti-ESG bill which only aimed to protect energy companies.

InvestmentNews:

Texas’ public pension funds would be required to “sell, redeem, divest, or withdraw all publicly traded securities of [any] financial company” that “boycott[s] energy companies.”

In accordance with that law, Ken Paxton joined 19 state attorney generals in a letter to Larry Fink.

Ken Paxton:

Our states will not idly stand for our pensioners’ retirements to be sacrificed for BlackRock’s climate agenda. The time has come for BlackRock to come clean on whether it actually values our states’ most valuable stakeholders, our current and future retirees, or risk losses even more significant than those caused by BlackRock’s quixotic climate agenda

Of course, the letter did not accomplish anything when facing a committed anti-white Marxist in cahoots with the illegitimate Biden regime. So last week, Texas finally blacklisted BlackRock in accordance with the law.

The Wall Street Journal

Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar on Wednesday published a list of 10 financial companies and nearly 350 investment funds, an exercise mandated under a state law meant to punish Wall Street banks that have purportedly burnished their green image by turning away from oil and gas.

Well, at least that is a start. But it is not enough because the law only covers energy companies. It does not protect Southwest employees from discrimination on account of their race, sex, ethnicity, or political beliefs. Any law directed against Larry Fink’s ESG should also protect targeted groups such as men, conservatives, heterosexuals, Christians, and the most targeted group of all: straight white Christian conservative men. Remember, Larry Fink’s goal is to disempower the most Republican-leaning demographic and remove them from corporate power structures.

A systemic solution would be to ban asset managers from voting more than 1% of the shares of publicly-traded corporations, and force them to either forfeit the votes or pass them through to the underlying investors. Unfortunately, we could probably only fully implement this with independence. However, there are things Texas could do, like expand the blacklist to cover discrimination against straight white Christian men. It’s not just oil companies that need protection. Southwest employees, like Charlene Carter, need protection too. TXlege should accordingly amend the existing statute to cover ESG discrimination against straight, white, and Christian Texans. Texas must put an end to systemic ESG discrimination.

Southwest in better days, before Larry Fink.

Look how joyful they were. Southwest could be this again, if Larry Fink were disempowered.