“If the Schiff/Pelosi gang can impeach @RealDonaldTrump in order to cover up Biden corruption, why not impeach Biden for actual corruption. And let me be clear, the FBI and DOJ are irredeemably corrupt. In the least, no more blank taxpayer checks for the political enforcement arms of the Left and the Democratic Party. Because the Left and partisans using federal law enforcement to try to destroy political opposition could be the end of the Republic.” ~ Tom Fitton @TomFitton
Well, Speaker McCarthy, get on with the impeachment.The world is waiting on you.
Tom Fitton. President, Judicial Watch. Fact checker. “Expert”
“Trump is absolutely right, our greatest threat currently is right here at home. We must “fundamentally change” by severely reforming the government deep state bureaucracy. They (among many parts of our USG) represent a menace to our way of life.“
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) occurred just days after Congress passed the Braun-Barr resolution, which overturns the Biden administration’s “Prudence and Loyalty” rule and its encouragement of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing by pension managers under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). The timing could hardly be more instructive. The Prudence and Loyalty rule, the White House had recently argued in its defense, “reflects what successful marketplace investors already know – there is an extensive body of evidence that environmental, social, and governance factors can have material impacts on certain markets, industries, and companies.”
How true. SVB’s bankruptcy shows that focusing on ESG factors can indeed be material to investment performance, but not in the way that the Biden administration believes.
SVB reeked of ESG. “SVB’s Executive Committee, chaired by CEO Greg Becker, is responsible for oversight of our ESG program and providing insight on ESG risks and opportunities related to SVB’s business,” the bank’s ESG governance program states. Chief marketing and strategy officer Michelle Draper was responsible for ensuring that ESG was integrated into SVB’s business strategy, indicating that ESG was more about window-dressing for clients than anything to do with the robustness of the bank’s business model.
The now-failed bank checked all the ESG boxes. Forty-five percent of its board directors were women. Its Community Reinvestment Act plan was accorded an outstanding accolade. Nine pages of its ESG report are taken up with its World Economic Forum (WEF) Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics. On the WEF dignity and equality metric, SVB responded that the bank “benefits from a diverse workforce and aims to continue to increase diverse representation at all levels of the company.” It boasts of more than halving its greenhouse gas emissions. “SVB recognizes the significant societal, ecological and economic threats of climate change,” its 2021 climate-related disclosure report said.
Sensitivity about the purported economic threat posed by climate change seems to have been inversely correlated with awareness of the changing financial climate caused by inflation and rising interest rates and the havoc that might wreak on its balance sheet and liquidity. “Everyone, except SVB management it seems, knew interest rates were heading up,” observed the Wall Street Journal’s Andy Kessler. “Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has been shouting this from the mountain tops.” Astonishingly, SVB had been operating without a chief risk officer for its last nine months before it went under. According to a report in the International Business Times, the head of financial risk management for SVB’s U.K. division introduced initiatives including the organization’s first month-long Pride campaign and a blog emphasizing mental-health awareness for LGBTQ youth.
ESG has a precursor from decades earlier: CSR, which stood for corporate social responsibility. While engaged in a massive business fraud, Enron was giving millions of dollars to charity, topping CSR rankings, and scooping upprestigious awards, including the Council on Economic Priorities’ Corporate Conscience Award and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate Protection Award. What Enron and now SVB show is that distracting investors from core business drivers by throwing out bundles of virtue-signaling chaff is a strong signal that’s something is probably amiss – in the case of Enron, that it was fraudulently making up its financial numbers; in the case of SBV, that rising interest rates threatened its solvency and sustainability.
There is a correlation here to investment managers running other people’s money. Under ERISA, retirement savings must be invested for the exclusive purpose of providing retirement benefits. With the rise in fashion for ESG investing and its dubious claim of “doing well by doing good,” the Trump administration decided that the Labor Department needed to clarify application of the law’s intent that the sole objective of pension investing is to do well by seeking to maximize risk-adjusted returns. The result was a 2020 rule that skilfully clarified the legal duties of investment fiduciaries. Far from preventing them from considering ESG among other factors, as the Biden administration subsequently alleged, the 2020 rule doesn’t even mention ESG. Instead, it de-fanged ESG by requiring that fiduciaries consider only pecuniary factors in selecting plan investments. If a factor doesn’t make the cut as pecuniary, it should not be taken into consideration.
This, the Biden administration claimed, had a chilling effect on incorporating ESG, especially climate factors, into investment decisions – as well it should. Most of what constitutes ESG is investment chaff. This represented an obstacle to the administration’s climate-policy ambitions. In May 2021, President Biden signed an executive order to use corporate climate-risk disclosure to help achieve its aim of decarbonizing the economy by 2050. Under White House instruction, in October 2021, the Labor Department rushed out a draft rule that appeared to suggest that fiduciaries should consider climate and other ESG factors in making investment decisions. Together with other provisions, it would have driven a coach and horses through ERISA. For this reason, it stood little chance of surviving inevitable legal challenge.
The final rule, which the Braun-Barr resolution nullifies – barring a presidential veto –substantially weakens the earlier draft but inevitably retains the climate tilt, stating that investment decisions must be based on factors that fiduciaries reasonably determine are relevant to a risk-and-return analysis that “may include” the economic effects of climate change and other ESG factors. The rule makes 161 mentions of climate or climate change. Prudence and loyalty this isn’t. The rule’s aim is facilitating the use of retiree savings in progressives’ fight against climate change.
One lesson of SVB’s collapse is the critical importance for business to focus on the essential. Harnessing data on the stock performance of companies taking positions across the political spectrum – including not taking a position at all – Michael Edleson and Andy Puzder conclude that companies that focus on profits outperform companies that don’t. “As a corollary,” they add, “it seems obvious that asset managers won’t maximize shareholder returns if that isn’t their focus.”
In the case of retiree plan managers covered by ERISA, the law requires that financial performance be their sole objective. Not only does the Biden administration rule give investment managers cause to find ways of circumventing the express intent of Congress when it enacted ERISA; it’s also very likely that it would lead to worse investment performance, reducing retiree incomes and weakening America’s financial health. In the aftermath of SVB’s demise and the case study of how management’s obsession with ESG put up red flags about its negligent risk management and its sustainability as a business, Congress’s decision to nullify the new rule is sound. Conversely, a veto would demonstrate just where the president’s priorities really lie.
China — currently the world’s most populous country — has fretted for years about the effect of its ageing population on the economy and society, but population was not expected to go into decline for almost a decade.
Tuesday’s revelation that there are now fewer people in China is predicted to turn into a lasting trend, impacting population for years to come.
China is forecast to lose almost half of its people by 2100, plunging from more than 1.4 billion to 771 million inhabitants.
“Obama knew. Clinton knew. Biden knew. Comey knew. Brennan knew. McCabe knew. Strzok knew. Clapper knew. Schiff knew. FBI knew. DOJ knew. CIA knew. State knew. They all knew Trump was innocent but they smeared and spied on him. Worse than Watergate. Trump is a crime victim!”
Tom Fitton is anAmerican conservative activist and the president of Judicial Watch. He has thirty years’ experience in conservative public policy and is one of the world’s leading experts on government corruption, with Judicial Watch having filed hundreds of lawsuits to expose government misconduct and abuse.
Meme borrowed from the music video at the link down below by “Rawking the Boat one parody at a time!“
The various, numerous, compounding crises that result from eliminating consequences, as VDH discusses below, derive in direct proportion to erasure of Protestant Christian morality in families and education. Protestants comprised more than 80% of American colonists at the date of the U.S. Constitution. Teaching no distinction between right or wrong, moral relativism, one opinion is presumed to be equal to another opinion, etc. results in institutionalized national narcissism and sociopathy. The victimized narcissists need “safe places” where their opinions cannot be challenged. Then censorship. Then SWAT teams appear at the doors of sane and moral people. The Magna Carta and precepts that followed are burned or ignored.
What is the point of studying Plato, for example, if one opinion is as good as another? Every year of our lifetimes, graduate students in philosophy, for example, learned less of the classical information previously required for matriculation and invested less thought, yet they had higher opinions of themselves, and expected higher grades. As documented by lifetime educators. California teachers apparently do not want to require algebra to graduate from high school.
By this process, decisions are to be handed over to AI, nominated experts, and bureaucratic technologies, e.g. human resources management, and un-validated computer models for everything, all presumed to be neutral. By this process, there is no need to study the history of anything, neither successes nor failures. The current resident of the White House nominated a candidate to run the Federal Aviation Agency who has zero experience in aviation or aviation management, but he is a politically correct color of the moment. What could possibly go wrong?
As a culture, woke people lose incrementally each year the knowledge and understanding required to build things. Vote woke, go broke. Civil rights are lost because the only people studying them are people who intend to transform them, and the crusaders trying to save them, both are 2 sigma groups. The normal population will own nothing and be happy. Ever since WWII, all college graduates were indoctrinated to believe they go forth to change the world. Two generations of indoctrinated revolutionaries were primed to fundamentally transform the nation and the world without first considering it. Fertile ground for “We are the people we have been waiting for.” Let’s build a Net Zero world without considering the benefits of CO2 or the fully loaded costs of such an scientifically ignorant idea.
Civil rights are lost when civics becomes social studies, the balance of offsetting political powers becomes unrecognized and unvalued. Then, history can be eliminated, statues and precepts torn down, and righteously done according to unwitting true believers. What remains of The Bill of Rights perhaps is a museum piece, such as people entering ancient churches to admire the art, but not to worship. This is wokism, the village-pillage people, cultural subversion, no equal justice for all, curb your tongue of they will put you on the curb with no consequences to them.
This is how cultures decline and fall, always followed by anarchy and tyranny. In the case of the pillage people, decline and fall is their intentional goal. Crises are not wasted but created specifically like chess moves to achieve that goal: a fundamental transformation laid out by a trained revolutionary backed by an amoral NAZI, aided by the pillage people who work with them; but there have been no negative consequences for their continuing treason.
The pillage culture is implemented as community organization so that citizens and non-citizens de-value the precepts that enabled success of their culture; equal gaming the system for all, a free cell phone in every pocket, critical race theory and drag shows and gender changes in schools without parental consent. The Great Reset is the pillage people’s name for return to feudal tyranny, bend that knee. Feudal honor, chivalry, loyalty, etc. does not prevent decline and fall, it protects pillagers. In the unlikely event resetters considered the precepts of sovereignty and freedom, nevertheless they persuade their audiences to devalue these God-given precepts as just another person’s opinion, out of date with the inevitable coming industrial revolution. Though the precepts are built upon thousands of years of experience, the audience cannot define sovereignty, or even find Omaha on a map. ‘Take the jabs, transform your genes, it’s the next industrial revolution, don’t waste your time evaluating good-versus-bad throughout history.’ Slavery, traditional families, God, are just a few examples. Tear down that statue.
Let’s make a baby with the DNA of a same sex couple. Can be done. Let’s make a virus that only infects (or corrects the defect) in a specific group of people. Can be done. Let’s print as much money as we want, or allow cryptos to go to any value, based only on demand. Let’s put a human brain in a forever-nurturing robot and teach it all human knowledge and let it manage the world, or vis-a-versa as Ray Kurzweil would have it, put tiny computers containing all human knowledge into human brains to create a singularity. What could go wrong?
The Price of Eliminating Consequences What is common to the pandemic of smash-and-grab robberies, carjacking, and deadly shoot-outs is the same assura…
budbromley 
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