“This is something in many respects that is crushing the little guy,” he said. “So we want to make sure that we’re standing on the side of average people.”
“From Wall Street banks to massive asset managers and big tech companies, we have seen the corporate elite use their economic power to impose policies on the country that they could not achieve at the ballot box,” he said. Conservatives in the United States, closely aligned with the oil and gas industries, have begun calling foul as companies and investment firms embrace efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address international and local inequities. And in recent months, they have pushed beyond rhetoric to punish corporations they say are unduly focused on issues that they argue are unrelated to a company’s bottom line.
“Stakeholder capitalism is not about politics,” he wrote. “It is not a social or ideological agenda. It is not ‘woke.’ It is capitalism, driven by mutually beneficial relationships between you and the employees, customers, suppliers, and communities your company relies on to prosper.”Tensions between conservative and corporate America have been growing for years.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, a potential presidential contender in 2024, said this summer that he wanted to “rein in” ESG. “I see this anti-ESG push as the next extension of the ongoing culture war,” Kristoffer Inton, an analyst with the research firm Morningstar, said in a recent report. “Many of these thoughts, and even some of the bills, are written without a great understanding of sustainable investing. Any investor who ignores ESG risk, like any other risk, does so at their own peril.”