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Jan. 11, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
26:27
ESG: Friend or Enemy of Liberty?

Many people have come to realize that there's something very strange and unnatural about big corporations all walking lockstop to push the "latest thing." Real life just doesn't work that way. There must be some kind of leverage used to create this unnatural situation. The leverage used to push this very specific ideology is, of course, money. Fortunately, states like Texas, Florida, and West Virginia are fighting back against so-called "Woke" Capitalism.

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Corruption of ESGs 00:05:40
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Chris Rossini, our co-host.
Chris, welcome to the program.
It's great to be with you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
We have a few things to talk about today.
One part of our main interest today will be talking about, you know, the corruption, philosophic corruption, and economic corruption of ESGs and what they get away with.
But they may be getting a little bit of pressure to back off.
So that's an interesting subject.
But before I do that, I want to do a brief update about, you know, the markets.
We could probably do a program just on what's happening in the market.
But Pyle gave a speech up at Jackson Hole, and I don't think anybody should be surprised at all of what he said because he more or less, from my viewpoint, said that the Federal Reserve doesn't have the vaguest idea what they're doing.
We're flipping a coin.
We're going to pay tough.
People urge us to be tough, so we're going to keep the interest rates higher for a lot longer than anybody dreamed.
But what I'm thinking, Chris, is what's going to happen.
That's going to injure a few people on Wall Street already.
The immediate reaction to that short speech was the stocks were done.
I was down 550 points.
So that's a reaction.
But other things happened too.
Interest rates went up, and that's generally interpreted as good for the dollar because the dollar will pay more interest.
But that didn't really happen.
That was pretty flat.
But interest rates, when they go up, they say, oh, that'll always hurt gold, which isn't true.
That didn't happen in the 70s.
But for the last hour, yes, gold.
Gold looked at this, and gold went down rather sharply.
But by the end of the day, that might be adjusted again because long term, gold is a good measurement of what happens.
And, you know, I think the big players, the ones who run the show, the deep staters and the Federal Reserve, I think they pretend gold isn't money and they ignore it and all this.
But the experience I had in Washington was they were very, very interested in it.
It was sort of subtle.
Oh, no, we don't care about gold.
Gold is nothing.
It's not money anymore.
At the same time, they're very interested in it.
Interested enough that I am so conspiratorial.
I believe they would engage in manipulating the price of gold with a collusion of the bank.
I get a lot of people that would agree with that, and some people say, no, that's too conspiratorial.
Because I think about it on the long run.
You know, what is it going to do on the long run?
And basically, the market wins out, and that's why Bretton Woods finally failed.
The market said it was going to fail, even though a lot of prognosticators knew that it was going to fail a lot sooner.
So this is something that we'll have to have to deal with, but it's also, you know, very, very important that we do this.
The one thing I think the Fed drives them nuts is the deep down knowledge that their policies aren't working.
You know, transitory inflation.
Of course, they might not be policy.
They might be just a little fibbing, you know, and try to convince the people.
And I do think, though, that they're panicked because they cannot control stagflation.
And there's more conversation on that.
And they can worry about stagflation because I think for a lot of people that's already the case and it's going to get worse.
But what they really should be worried about is an inflationary depression.
That's the kind of thing that happens in Zimbabwe and Venezuela.
You know, we work on the assumption of a sort of an old-fashioned Keynesian idea.
Well, if you get inflation going, the economy will grow.
So all you have to do is inflate a little bit, and that will take care of it.
And we have our inflation, but the economy is just on the verge of recession.
For a lot of people, it's already in recession.
So it is interesting stuff.
But I want to tell our viewers that, you know, the Birch Gold Company is the company I work with, and they participate and help us on our program.
They'll offer, and you can see on the bottom of the screen, there's a number that you can text in because they will have some information for you if you're interested.
Because sorting this out, to me, I wish it weren't so serious because I find it interesting and fun and try to anticipate the illusions of people and try to compare all the economic system.
But I think it's really, really dangerous, and people are starting to realize it's really hurting their investments.
So if you're interested in finding out a little bit of information, call on that number on the screen and text that number.
And because the material they're sent to is for free.
That's a pretty good deal.
So I would say give it a try.
I also want to talk about another subject today, Chris, with you.
And that is something that we have found, we've talked about a little bit, we have found it fascinating.
It's just getting into the common media.
Most of the time it was settled because I remember writing something about this a year, a year and a half ago about Larry Fink and his investment companies.
Getting Into Common Media 00:05:00
And he's the one that right now, and he's not been doing this like for 30 or 40 years.
He's been around a bit, but he's been very, very, he's in with the Federal Reserve.
He participates in some of their programs.
And he's under the management of $10 trillion.
And he probably have as much day-to-day opportunity to manipulate markets and make money and scare people and intimidate than even the Federal Reserve Board Chairman because this is powerful.
But he's also a friend of ESG.
That's the environmental and the social and the governance of good investors.
So they want to control this and they do it with intimidation and threats and blackmail and get corporations to do nasty things.
And it's one of the answers, Chris, of why so many people have asked us over the years.
Why does the businessman do this?
Well, for various reasons.
If you're in the business of manufacturing weapons, there's a good reason to do it.
Or if you're manufacturing medical weapons too, the vaccines and all, they have a lot of interest in it.
So there's a lot of reason to connect in there.
But I tell you what, it's not holy.
It's very wicked.
And Chris, I know you've looked into this a bit and have a good sense of what actually is going on.
Right, Dr. Paul.
And a lot of people, especially around me, have noticed, you know, there's something very strange about corporations all falling over each other, whatever, you know, about whatever the latest thing happens to be.
I mean, you can't even go down the street and get people to agree with one another on something, yet these big corporations just parrot the same exact line.
And a lot of times it hurts their business.
You know, there's now a saying, go woke, go broke.
I mean, why would you purposefully hurt your business?
There has to be some kind of common glue in the background that is making something like this happen because it's just not normal.
And that common glue is money.
You know, these big, huge corporations have the same big investors.
And you mentioned $10 trillion, and that's BlackRock.
And then you have Vanguard.
And these investors have this crazy ideology.
And they use money as a leverage.
So they're pushing this ideological agenda, and their leverage is money.
And we're finally starting to see some big pushback from states.
One, Dr. Paul lives in, Texas, Florida, West Virginia.
You know, Governor DeSantis in Florida said that corporate power has increasingly been utilized, key word, you know, they're being used, corporations, to impose an ideological agenda on the American people.
And these states have had enough.
They said, you know what, we're not going to allow the government funds to be used in this way anymore.
And this is all very, very good.
This could be a big domino to fall against this nonsense.
Yes, and to make your point about seeing more information about this, I'm not going to read all these titles, but I think I have about five or six titles sort of addressing this.
Like, DeSantis eliminates ESG from state pension investment.
That's a big deal.
And they say, well, should it get to be political and tell them what they can invest in?
Really not.
And that's why these people shouldn't be getting away with it.
But they shouldn't be doing this.
It's government money.
And if they're investing to benefit this social reforms and this cultural Marxism, yes, a governor or whoever is able to, they should step in and get these directions.
So they're clamping down.
They're sort of canceling some of these companies.
They don't use the word canceling, but I call it canceling because that's what they've been doing to some of the good people.
If you didn't do what they, well, one, they intimidate you.
They cancel you in a cultural sense and they kick you off all the opportunities that you have.
Here's another one.
GOP fury over SG triggers backlash with U.S. pensions.
And Florida, Ron DeSantis, bans ESG.
So it's on and on.
It's out there, and they're talking about it.
And I think it's important for people to realize this because they've been intimidated by saying they're going to save the world because, you know, global warming, we have to worry about it.
Hey, Chris, I don't know if you saw it, but August of this year was the first time in many, many years that they didn't have one name storm that came into the Gulf.
I mean, it was no hurricanes, and yet it was one of the hottest sins.
Oh, okay.
Well, no, we're into climate.
We're not into global warming.
Covid's Impact on Small Businesses 00:11:33
That doesn't work out so well for us.
But if you're into climate, it was too hot.
People, you know, that's the reason the electric bills went up.
Sure, and maybe a few other reasons too.
Their electric bills went up.
So it's something that is very important.
If you look at what's happening in a system of a monetary system like we have, and there's management of money, dictation, dictating of interest rates, you get artificially low interest rates, and then you have malinvestment because people make the wrong choices because the market generally thinks if you have capital available, people earned it, it was productive, and they're saving this.
But that's not what it is.
It's all artificial.
So this distorts things, and people don't know what to do.
Now, here you come in, and on top of it, you have the natural malinvestment and excesses that the system creates, the monetary system.
But here you come along, and then you have the Minutia of telling don't do this company, don't do this company, and we're going to be reforming the whole country through withholding and punishing people if you don't obey the law.
So it was a pretty much hypocrisy.
I think yesterday when we heard from our president that he threw out the term of fascism for Republicans.
Well, the whole system, as far as I'm concerned, is fascistic because it's so much corporation and government maneuvering together.
So he was saying that.
But I also have another theory, and that is the more they say that somebody is doing something, the more guilty they themselves are.
Just look at the Russia gay, and you find out, huh, guess who was really guilty of all those accusations?
Chris.
Right, Dr. Paul.
And, you know, this agenda, this ideological agenda that's being pushed is very anti-small business.
And we got a big taste of that during COVID.
You know, take a look at, we remember those policies.
They benefited the big businesses and they punished hard the small businesses.
You know, don't shop in that little store where nobody is there.
Close that down.
Go shop with the crowds at Walmart.
I mean, it made no sense, but the big guys were taken care of.
The small guys, many, many, went out of business and destroyed lives for no reason whatsoever.
It never had to happen.
Now, today we're experiencing inflation, which is another effect of all the money printing.
Well, who can weather inflation better?
The big businessman or the small business guy?
You know, I see the restaurants around me, their food prices are skyrocketing.
It's making it harder to sell their products, but they have no choice.
They have to stay in business.
So today, even with inflation, small business is suffering.
And I have another question.
Who do you think those 87,000 IRS agents are going to go after?
The big businesses that are going along with the woke agenda or all the small businesses?
So small business is under relentless attack.
And the reason why is because they are outside of this agenda.
You know, the big businesses, obviously, if they control them, they all say the same exact thing, do the same exact thing.
You can't have a bunch of little guys out there saying, you know, we're not a part of any of that.
Come shop here.
So they want to get rid of that to the degree that they can.
And that's why this woke capitalism is all about control.
And the small business, you know, is in the way.
And they're obviously doing things to get rid of them.
Chris, that's very good.
And I want to follow up with that because, you know, radical environmentalism is around and it scares the people to death.
The good people say, oh, you know, somebody came up to me the other day and said, do you know that the whole country in just so many years is going to have an average temperature of 130 degrees?
You know, and by that time we'll probably be in a cooling stage.
But the COVID prompted the opportunity for those who believe in cultural Marxism and Marxism itself because chaos is what they want.
And so, yes, this was natural.
So was this sort of a routine way of treating a so-called virus?
No, it was an exceptional.
They've never done that before.
And all those lockdowns and all the penalties, and we're still suffering from that.
And it's still difficult to get the truth out because there's still very much bias against people who want to tell the truth.
But the people are still suffering from the vaccines and sicknesses and economically speaking as well.
But in a way, the environmental stuff is similar to taking advantage of the COVID.
You know, they come in, aha, another time we can expand our power because people do get very frightened.
I mean, they are so frightened in California that their legislature, and I think it's in the state of Washington as well, that they think they're going to improve the world and they're going to ban gasoline cars.
They never stop to think, and I've seen some statistics that show by the time you pay and pollute with all the batteries and disposals of that and some of the downside of even wind power and solar, that there is no savings whatsoever.
And yet, well, they aren't going to ban it.
Can you imagine how many people are going to suffer from that?
But you know, if you see it from their perspective, this is why I see it from their perspective because I can't see how any of it would make any sense.
And that is, they will thrive on it.
Their purpose is to scare people, cause chaos, destroy what we have.
You know, Marxism always dictated, that's not the neo-Marxism and the softer Marxism.
This is old-fashioned Marxism.
Destroy what you have.
You can't modify.
That was one shift that they have.
You can't really modify it.
You have to destroy it and start from scratch.
So even they'll say, oh, yeah, you did get a little bit of benefit, but that's because the capitalists did it and this sort of thing.
Their criticism of capitalism is they criticize the honest, true free market people, and they want to come in and take over.
But this, to me, is another thing.
This ESG, along with the COVID, has given them a tremendous boost.
But here we had DeSantis standing up to the COVID monstrosities, and here we have him and others.
And Texas is standing up to it, and other states are.
And I think that this may cause a wave, maybe just like I always loved it when a town or a school district finally said, hey, this is crazy.
We have to do something about it.
And they turn out in droves and they start firing people.
So maybe, Chris, even though we worry about this and hope we can contribute to making some positive changes, that maybe what lies ahead for the rest of this year, will be some changes where people are having their say.
And I think that is very, very important that the people wake up and realize they don't have to put up with this.
There's only one rule you have to follow that I try to talk about is if they're asking you to sacrifice something in order to get what you think is necessary, don't do it.
Freedom does not need sacrifice because you can get your freedom just by eliminating somebody else's benefits.
You eliminate their bonuses and maybe the way the school district is running and all this.
But that is not a personal sacrifice.
You should never have to sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect liberty because liberty doesn't come from the government.
And that sort of implies the fact, well, it's up to the government as long as we play games and trade with the government.
They'll give us a little bit of our liberty back.
That's how our tax codes work.
Sure, they tax us.
But they claim, well, it's just a little bit for a few people.
Yes, but it's the principle.
They take all your money and what is left, they tell you you have to get permission from the government to know how to spend every penny.
And that's why it's one of the worst tax.
Second to it, the inflation tax, which we were witnessing right now.
Very good, Dr. Paul.
I will finish up with my final statements.
And I believe that we must remain optimistic.
You know, when you have truth on your side, you can't be a downer.
It's good we have to bring this up.
You have to know what the problem is.
But we can never be beaten, especially in our minds.
And, you know, we now see states fighting back against this woke capitalism, Tom, the get-lost.
And, you know, one way to look at it and be like, oh, there's only a few, you know, Texas, Florida, West Virginia.
But a few is all that it takes.
Look at what Ron DeSantis did during COVID, as Dr. Paul mentioned.
He made all the other states look like fools.
You know, compared to the rest of the country, he made Florida the land of the free.
And it sets such a huge example for not only people in our country, but around the world too, because everybody was looking at Florida.
Hey, why am I locked in my house?
And those people in Florida, they're walking without masks.
They're not locked down.
He just made fools out of everybody.
You know, and that is why the authoritarians, they try to steamroll everyone.
They don't want even one with the truth because it throws a monkey wrench into their entire plans.
All it takes is one to knock it all down.
And they tried their best.
They tried to call him Death Santis and this and that, and it didn't work.
He was right.
They were wrong.
And look at where we are today.
When you look at the status today, this is not what they wanted, where they wanted to be at this point.
Their whole thing is in shambles, whether it's the vaccines, the lockdowns.
People get all the shots and they're getting COVID twice.
It's a total disaster.
So we have to remain optimistic.
These people are omnipotent.
They're not all-powerful.
They create a lot of damage, but we can't get down thinking, oh, there's only one.
There's only one standing up for the truth.
We should instead say, thank God there is one that is standing up because then it's only a matter of time before all the lies collapse.
Very good.
And, you know, you mentioned the idea that DeSantis sets a good example.
And I think that's part of the process that we go through.
Because setting the example quietly and sternly and showing people is everybody, well, probably more powerful than shouting and screaming and hollering.
That doesn't work.
Voluntary Choices Matter 00:04:13
But setting the example, you know, right now the example, he sets an example.
I understand, Chris, you correct me if I'm wrong.
That there are more people moving to Florida than they are to New York.
Oh, they're leaving New York.
So that's setting an example.
He didn't need a gun to go up there and say, hey, we need more people in Florida.
But, you know, setting an example is very good.
Persuasion, I think, is very important.
There's no reason why you can't use persuasion.
But it also has to be peaceful persuasion because ideas have consequences.
And if it's truly a good idea, I've said so many times, those ideas can't be stopped, even with the messing around with the internet where it becomes, people get canceled for saying the truth on the internet.
But matter of fact, someday they're going to have a list of those people.
These are the top 20 people who got punished on the internet and got kicked off.
Oh, well, they're our heroes now.
You know, that thing.
And I think the other thing to remember is the relationships between two bodies, two people, should always be voluntary.
And that's the way the market works.
The market works.
There was a time in economics where if somebody bought something and paid something, one person benefited and the other person suffered.
And it's amazing that it took years and years of thought about that until they find out, that's not right.
Both sides benefit.
You know, when you have an agreement, one person gets what they're buying, the other person gets the money they want, as long as it's voluntary, as long as you keep the government out of it.
And once they start regulating, either with interest rate manipulation or price controls, which are yet to come before they're going to wise up.
But the voluntary approach, I think, is the example that we have.
You know, most libertarians look carefully at the word democracy, and it's used incessantly by the left.
But the founders actually said, don't use it.
It's not good.
It can lead to a type of dictatorship because all you have to do is have 51% of the people who can take over the 49%.
That rights become arbitrary.
So a voluntary system, the true democracy, is when the market is free and everybody can get to do what they want.
You say, oh, wouldn't they be the polluters?
Wouldn't they do it?
And here we have these groups investing in people who understand the issue.
Yeah, that's not true, though, because what they're understanding is how to make more money and pressure people into more authoritarianism.
So the voluntary approach is what we really want to promote.
And that, of course, means each individual is a free person and should be able to make their own choices, good and bad.
That's the one thing that people say, oh, they might make a bad choice.
They might smoke a marijuana cigarette.
Oh, well, one time we, well, if they can't smoke marijuana, we've got to put them all in jail.
You know, this sort of thing.
So volunteerism is a wonderful thing.
It's freedom.
Individuals have a lot of responsibility.
Some people have been taught to be totally dependent on the government.
The government, right now, I'll bet you the majority of the American people say, yeah, things are tough, but they're not that tough.
I could do it if the government would just give me some more money.
And of course, by the time they get the money, the money depreciated and the prices went up more.
So they need a lot more money.
And that's the cycle we have.
Anyway, there's a problem out there.
We deal with it the best we can.
But we also know that the answers are there.
It's part of the American tradition.
And we encourage people to look into the principles of liberty.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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