Financial Institutions Retreating from ESG Claptrap

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Or are they? Are they, maybe, simply moving to disguise their ESG claptrap in other ways or only altering their rhetoric without materially altering their censorious behavior?

States have responded [to the explosion of ESG irrelevances] with a barrage of legislation that restricts the use of ESG factors or targets entities that boycott certain industries.
Financial institutions are reacting to these state-level actions with what appears to be a retreat from their commitment to ESG, but there are questions if they are changing or just regrouping the efforts under new names.

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Concerns Regarding “Unreasonable” Searches

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There are concerns that a bill under consideration in the House, the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, goes too far in protecting us Americans from 4th Amendment violations by the government at the expense of our counterintelligence capabilities.

The bill…would ban the government from buying information on Americans from data brokers. This would include many things in the cloud of digital exhaust most Americans leave behind online, from information on the websites they visit to credit-card information, health information, and political opinions.

Worse, goes the argument, the bill

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Contempt for Average Americans

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Television personality Katie Couric has made it plain. Herb Croly, one of the founders of the modern Progressive Movement, wrote a century ago in his The Promise of American Life, that

the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

Couric had this to say on Bell Maher’s podcast:

The socioeconomic disparities are a lot and class resentment is a lot and anti-intellectualism and elitism is what is driving many of these anti-establishment—which are Trump voters—so, I think that is a huge problem that we have to address[.]

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Some Progressive-Democrats…

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…are beginning to rue the consequences of their Party’s no borders policies. But only a couple seem willing to say so out loud. The Chicago City Council’s Budget and Government Operations Committee voted 20-8 to move Progressive-Democrat Mayor Brandon Johnson’s wish for $70 million for illegal alien support to the Council floor for debate and voting up. (Aside: is there political featherbedding here? 28 Council members on the Budget Committee out of 50 members on the whole Council.)

Progressive-Democrat 29th Ward Alderman Chris Taliaferro is one of only two of those eight willing to demur from this vocally.

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Free Speech NPR-Style

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And by extension, given the leftist (not the nearby center-left part of the political spectrum) bias of National Public Radio, here is the concept of the Left’s free speech. This is illustrated by NPR‘s retaliation against one of its own who spoke apart from the Narrative™.

Recall that Uri Berliner, a 25-year denizen of NPR and lately Senior Business Editor, wrote an op-ed for The Free Press that called out NPR for its far left and growing farther bias in its news reporting, extending even into the stories it chooses to publish or ignore.

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“Tightrope”

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is walking a tightrope as he tries to deal with Israel. President faces pressure from both his left and right on Middle East conflict goes the subheadline.

Maybe pressure from the Left is there, maybe not.

There are two possibilities. One is that Biden is letting himself feel pressure from an extremely vocal but small Leftist faction that supports Hamas’ terrorists in their war against Israel, disguising their protests as support for Palestinians. Their constant chants of “from the river to the sea” demonstrates that disguise. If Biden really is that easily manipulated by the loudness of a small minority of the Left, actually feeling their “pressure,” then he’s too weak to be trusted with reelection to that office.

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Biden’s Inflation

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This is what Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s proudly touted Bidenomics has inflicted on us: continued high inflation.

Tacitly, Biden knows his policies are a failure, but he won’t admit it.

For now, officials said, Biden and his senior aides aren’t planning any major policy or rhetorical shifts.

Yet,

Behind the scenes, administration officials said there was no magic bullet to slow rising prices immediately, an issue that has dogged the president for years.

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Housing and Inflation

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There is some concern that inflation won’t abate further until housing inflation, especially rent inflation, abates further. This graph, though, suggests that there’s more to overall inflation’s stubbornness than just rent, or housing in general, inflation.

The CPI being largely flat the last few months, despite rapidly falling housing inflation, suggests a lack of importance of housing to overall inflation relative to other factors at current levels of both. Food inflation, reflecting what we actually buy rather than the government’s idealized and mythical sack of groceries, and fuel inflation, and energy inflation seem more significant factors.

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Deterrence and Punishment

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Iran fired over 300 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic rockets at Israel in the overnight (my time) of last Saturday. That’s what the question of deterrence and of punishment must respond to.

Israel’s leaders were considering whether to respond to the wave of more than 300 drones and cruise and ballistic missiles fired by Iran. [Pedantic nitpick: missiles are guided; ballistic “missiles,” being unguided, are rockets.]

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A Governor Betrays our Children

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Kansas’ Progressive-Democrat Governor Laura Kelly has vetoed a bill that would have banned gender surgeries and hormone treatments for minors. Her rationalization:

targets a small group of Kansans by placing government mandates on them and dictating to parents how to best raise and care for their children. I do not believe that is a conservative value, and it’s certainly not a Kansas value.

A small group: leave aside the Left’s mantra (apparently only when convenient) of “if it saves just one life….” Protecting children from mutilation that’s far too often crippling as well isn’t a conservative value?

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