Best of 2022: 'How the World Really Works' by John O'Sullivan

The year of Our Lord 2022 has been a good one for us here at The Pipeline, which has seen the launch of our weekly Substack column; the release of our first book, Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order; and the publication of a lot of excellent content from our wonderful group of contributors. As the year comes to its close, we thought we would spotlight some of our best work, chosen from our most clicked articles.

How the World Really Works

John O'Sullivan, 31 July, 2022

Some very odd things are happening in the modern world of government and politics that don’t conform to democratic theory. I’m thinking, for instance, of the mass protests against anti-Covid regulations in cities across France, Germany, Austria, New Zealand, Italy, Australia, the United States, and in Canada without much attention from the international media; the brutally violent police tactics used against protesters in most of these cities, especially farmers in Holland and car-owners (the Gilets Jaunes) in France, again with not much media coverage; the attempts by the Canadian government to crush the truckers’ parking protest in Ottawa by such extraordinary (and extra-legal) methods as seizing the bank accounts of people who wanted to help them financially; the violent overthrow of the Sri Lankan government because it had instituted agricultural policies banning the use of fertilizers on the advice of the World Economic Forum that led to crop failures and widespread hunger; and the signing of a memorandum of understanding on future cooperation between the United Nations and the aforementioned W.E.F. which is little more officially than a conference of corporate CEOs (though it boasts of planting its former interns in high government positions around the world).

In short, though I haven't weakened yet, I'm tempted to become a conspiracy theorist.

The mere existence of the W.E.F., an international conference of billionaires and CEOs who fly in annually to a remote Alpine resort to discuss how the world should be governed, to which prime ministers, presidents, and “opinion formers” are flattered to be invited, arouses my curiosity. It sounds (and acts) like a sinister conspiracy in a dystopian novel by writers as various as G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley, or like Karl Marx’s “executive committee of the bourgeoisie.” Yet it is deeply respectable—it signs MoU’s with the U.N. for heavens sake!—and is seen as mildly and desirably progressive. Moreover, because it brings together “top people” from all enterprises and institutions, its policy prescriptions have an almost automatic credibility rooted in a general expectation that the W.E.F. network will get these things done. Next step: they’re inevitable!

But the sad (or cheering) fact is that almost all its “big projects”—the euro, open borders, anti-Covid lockdowns, vaccine mandates—have crashed upon launching. Its motto is “global problems require global solutions” but a better one would be “Ah well, back to the drawing board...”

Main Street v. Wall Street on 'ESG'

In recent weeks there have been giant strides in the effort to challenge the legality of the "Environmental, Social and Governance" (ESG) construct that has become a threatening obsession of the titans of Wall Street. Though ESG remains a unfamiliar acronym for most Americans, Main Street investors whose pension dollars are funding ESG investments are beginning to ask questions.

While constituting competing frameworks, reporting systems, and scoring systems for environmental and social reporting for companies, the ESG construct lacks any quantifiable or worthwhile measurements. Put plainly, it is an entirely subjective scheme, created and funded by political activists. Under the pretense of environmental protection and social diversity, these activists recognized that they had allies in the financial services and banking sectors who could be incentivized to do via the capital markets that which the activists knew they could never achieve using traditional market forces or democratic institutions. In short, voters would never agree to ruin their own economies, livelihoods and futures in the name of political ideology. To be successful, it necessarily needed to be stealthy and unchallenged.

Recognizing this reality, attorneys general Jeff Landry and Todd Rokita of Louisiana and Indiana issued a letter earlier this month warning their states’ pension boards that ESG investing is likely a violation of fiduciary duty and potentially opens their investment staff and investment advisers to liability if they continue allocating funds to ESG-promoting asset managers such as BlackRock.

Fink: BlackRock or black hat?

The Landry and Rokita letters follow another letter sent last month from them and seventeen other state AGs to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. That letter warns the asset management giant that BlackRock’s ESG investment policies appear to involve what they describe as, “rampant violations” of the sole interest rule, a well-established legal principle. The sole interest rule requires investment fiduciaries like BlackRock, to act to maximize financial returns, not to promote social or political objectives.

Yet, it is clear that BlackRock and industry counterparts are doing precisely that. They are attempting to use the ESG pretext of "protecting the environment" to re-orient trillions of dollars of their clients’ capital toward what are unquestionably their own political and social objectives. This effort is borne out in the companies in which they invest and the trends they curate and then fund. As is repeatedly touted in the literature of the most prolific ESG advocates, they believe that because their asset management partners, including BlackRock, manage such a substantial percentage of the total investment market, their ESG world view is above constraint of law, or beyond the reach of the institutions that have traditionally protected investors from dubious investment schemes.

ESG reporting and scoring is a scheme initially launched over two decades ago with the creation and funding of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) by the World Economic Forum (WEF), both of which advocate for political and social objectives. Out of the initial CDP funding effort has grown a network of non-profit entities, foundations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and, via the incentive of profit, the largest asset management firms and banks in the world. Together they constitute a validation-feedback loop. Left unconstrained, their political and social objectives will be paid for by investor capital, potentially in defiance of the best interest of their investors.

Marx: definitely a black hat.

So does this history square with Blackrock’s framing of their ESG policies? To answer, one need only start at the top, with BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink and his affiliation with the WEF, the originators of the Great Reset. The WEF, by mission, seeks to shape global, regional, and industry agendas, underpinned by so-called "stakeholder" theory, the mechanism needed to integrate communist principles into economic practice without getting sullied by the bloody history malignant socialism has left in its wake. According to the WEF:

The market mechanisms under capitalism do not provide incentives for preserving the environment. Firms are constantly threatened by market competition to cut costs and optimize profit. The environment thus falls prey to the compulsive market behaviour of the capitalist mode of production. Without the intervention of non-market entities such as the state, international organizations and social forces, capitalism as an economic system simply will not safeguard our planet.

With Fink as a Trustee Member of the WEF and an Agenda Contributor, one must assume Fink agrees with the objectives of the WEF. Is he an agenda-contributor who represents the views of BlackRock’s clients or, as it appears, is he ensuring that the Forum's agenda gets codified into and funded by the capital markets using BlackRock’s investors’ capital? Is it possible that Fink is doing the bidding of the stakeholder-focused Davoisie, in defiance of the sole interest of BlackRock’s own clients? With a recent $1.7 trillion loss in the first six months of this year in its ESG-indexed funds—the largest amount of money lost by an individual investment firm over that time period—one could certainly argue that he is doing just that.

In his 2021 Letter to CEOs , for example, Fink regurgitates key WEF concepts. “We have long believed that our clients, as shareholders in your company, will benefit if you can create enduring, sustainable value for all of your stakeholders.” Apparently, shareholders just took second seat to the stakeholders. So much for sole interest. He continues, “In January of last year [2020], I wrote that climate risk is investment risk. I said then that as markets started to price climate risk into the value of securities, it would spark a fundamental reallocation of capital.” But it turns out that capital re-orientation is a stated goal of the WEF-funded CDP too:

Through its engagement, advocacy and partnerships, CDP helps align corporate and governmental strategies with international goals, supports investors to shift capital to finance the low carbon transition; and changes expectations, ambitions and practices to pave the way to a new, restorative and sustainable society. CDP helps align corporate and governmental strategies with international goals, supports investors to shift capital to finance the low carbon transition; and changes expectations, ambitions and practices to pave the way to a new, restorative and sustainable society.

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The BlackRock/WEF cabal has also made its way into the highest reaches of government as well. Brian Deese serves as the Director of the National Economic Council (NEC). As a non- cabinet level position, it doesn’t require Senate confirmation. The confirmation process would have allowed an opportunity to challenge Deese’s obvious conflict of interest; a former Obama advisor and a passionate advocate of ESG, Deese became global head of sustainable investing at BlackRock in 2017 before joining the Biden administration.

Similarly, in June 2022, Tom Donilon, chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute, the firm’s global think tank, was appointed by secretary of state Anthony Blinken to co-chair the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. The board advises State on "strategic competition" with Beijing. Coincidently, last September BlackRock was permitted to open a mutual fund in China, making it the first American firm approved to sell financial products there.

With a future fraught with legal questions about ESG, perhaps investors should remind BlackRock of the difference between their sole interest and BlackRock's self-interest.

Why the Left Hates Workers, Uniting

An important point from Glenn "InstaPundit" Reynolds, writing in the New York Post:

For more than a century, lefties have talked about [a working class] revolt. But if you really paid attention, the actual role of the working class in their working-class revolution was not to call the shots — it was to do what it was told by the “intellectual vanguard” of the left.

A working-class revolution led by the working class is the left’s worst nightmare because the working class doesn’t want what the left wants. The working class wants jobs, a stable economy, safe streets, low inflation, schools that teach things and a conservative, non-adventurous foreign policy that won’t get a lot of working-class people killed. It’s not excited about gender fluidity, critical race theory, “modern monetary theory,” foreign adventures and defunding police.

At least since Karl Marx, leftist intellectuals have valorized the working class, speaking in paternalistic terms about its plight and proposing utopian schemes to put workers on an equal footing with the well-to-do. But when they have to deal with actual workers, they're disgusted. This is because actual workers tend to be, in the words of Pat Buchanan, "conservatives of the heart" who might not "read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke" but who are patriotic and hold to the very traditional values that the Left defines itself against. Marx himself had to condemn religion as the "opiate of the masses" because "the masses" were much more interested in the faith of their fathers than his own harebrained ideology.

Reynolds is right that this familiar story is playing itself out once again in the streets of Ottawa, where truck drivers, sick and tired of Covid restrictions, have descended upon the city to demand things be set right. They've already contributed to the fall of opposition leader, Erin O'Toole, a significant feat in its own right. But they're determined to get more substantive policy changes from the party in power. So of course the government is openly contemplating sending the military after them.

Remember the freak-out when Senator Tom Cotton called on Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act during the George Floyd riots? Mass hysteria, followed quickly by the defenestration of the op-ed page editor who greenlighted the column, James Bennet (who's now in court as the defendant in a lawsuit brought by Sarah Palin over another Times editorial he oversaw). Apparently it's okay to send in the Mounties when it's a Liberal government being protested and the entirely peaceful protestors are singing and playing hockey.

At the moment it is unclear what, if any, substantive concessions the Freedom Convoy truckers might win from the government. But their biggest success thus far has been demonstrating the contempt Canada's liberals, in government as well as the media, have for people like them.