Op-Ed: ESG vs. USA

ESG is a relatively new term for evaluating environment, social justice and governance impact. ESG scores have become a routine part of assessing businesses used by governments, non-governmental organizations and banks around the world.

Like an individual's credit score can determine their ability to purchase a home, high ESG scores are increasingly important in assuring any company's ongoing profitability, freedom from meddlesome regulations and investment-capital for future growth.

In other words, instead of an enterprise being judged by their objective business practices they are increasingly being judged by subjective standards of ideological conformity.

It is no longer sufficient for an entrepreneur to provide a useful product or service at a fair price and with good customer service. Nor is it enough for an owner to build an effective organization staffed by dynamic and skilled professionals who are dedicated to earning a profit.

Today, business leaders are being manipulated into warping their enterprises so they serve a decidedly Left-wing agenda. This is a great reason why, in the face of intensifying consumer backlash, so many companies are stubbornly implementing increasingly divisive ideological policies.

From a consumer's point-of-view, companies that "go Woke go broke." For example, Disney's willful destruction of the Star Wars franchise by replacing classic mythological storytelling with social-justice allegory has been a financial disaster. Gillette's razor company ads attacking "toxic masculinity" resulted in a boycott. So did Coca-Cola's demand that their employees strive to be "less white." Even the Salvation Army recently proclaimed a social justice agenda that harmed its public standing along with its fundraising.

Yet, from a corporate viewpoint, making some effort to implement ESG's has just become part of the cost of doing business. This is not by any means the first time that contemporary companies have bowed the knee to political imperatives. Any business who wants to function in the People's Republic of China must be silent about the Communist's genocide against the Uighurs of Xinjiang, their efforts to eliminate Tibetans within Tibet, their crushing of a free people in Hong Kong, and their threats to do the same after conquering Taiwan.

In fact, ESG is based on the Chinese Communist Party's Social Credit Score. Every single person under Communist control is stringently assessed in their every utterance and observable action. Abetted by U.S. tech companies, cameras everywhere with face-recognition software enable the CCP to discern more about individual conduct than George Orwell's telescreens from his dystopian novel "1984."

Every private action is open to party scrutiny. Politically correct actions bring business, educational, residential, travel and entertainment opportunities. Dissent results in lost employment, status, home, and even identity. Every person is relentlessly punished for any thought crime.

It is this system that the international Left has brought to bear on private businesses in the West. And, if companies betraying their customers to curry favor with ideologues is any indication, it seems to be working!

ESG is the "Critical Race Theory" of today's business climate, a political power grab designed to bypass democratic deliberation by politicizing commerce.

Each of us as customers, employees, stockholders, entrepreneurs, and citizens should ask questions about ESG in our midst. Do our local businesses strive for high ESG scores? If so, why, and to what effect? We should inquire of our elected officials about the feasibility of eliminating the use of ESG scores in the regulation of banking and in the awarding of government contracts.

ESG scores corrupt free enterprise and compromise our citizenship rights. We should each endeavor to bring such practices to light and root them out as an insidious danger to our liberty.

• • •

In Maine and then Idaho, Ralph K. Ginorio has taught the history of Western Civilization to high school students for nearly a quarter century. He is an “out-of-the-closet” Conservative educator with experience in special education, public schools and charter schools, grades 6-12. He has lived in Coeur d’Alene since 2014. Email: rginorio@cdapress.com