Other People's Money: How Progressives Hijacked Your Investments to Achieve Their Aims

Description

At their core, ESG investing and woke capital are a rejection of our nation's founding principles and virtues and a serious threat to both our economic freedom and our personal liberty. In addition to being an attempt by the cultural Left to take over the last of the Western institutions of cultural transmission, woke capital is and always has been a tool to centralize power in the hands of corporate elites, enabling them to use the American private sector as the means to avoid the inconvenience and messiness of free elections and free markets. Starting on January 20, 2021-the first day of the Biden presidency-woke capital began evolving in a different and more malignant way as well, creating an environment in which Big Government and Big Business could marry their power and impose their will on the nation and its people. No one elected any of these business overlords, yet massive Asset Managers are now working with the Federal government's Wilsonian bureaucratic elites at a host of agencies to create the "woke-industrial complex," and to turn corporations into vehicles for social change rather than generators of prosperity. The centralizing tendency of democratic institutions and, in turn, the bowdlerizing propensity of centralization have combined to threaten much of what makes the United States and its strain of free-market capitalism unique and powerful.

ANDREW F. PUZDER is the former chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants. He is Chairman of the Board at 2nd Vote Value Investments, Inc., a Visiting Fellow of Business and Economic Freedom at the Heritage Foundation, Senior Fellow at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy and the America First Policy Institute, a member of the Reagan Institute's National Leadership Council, and a director at The Job Creators Network. He is on advisory boards at Washington University Law School, Prager University, and the State Financial Officers Foundation. Puzder is a frequent author and lecturer on economics and politics. He co-authored Job Creation: How It Really Works and Why Government Doesn't Understand It and authored The Capitalist Comeback: The Trump Boom and the Left's Plot to Stop It. In 2020 he authored two Broadsides for Encounter Books-Getting America Back to Work and It's Time to Let America Work Again. STEPHEN R. SOUKUP is the author of the critically-acclaimed The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter Books, 2021). He is the senior commentator, vice president, and publisher of The Political Forum, an "independent research provider" that delivers research and consulting services to the institutional investment community, with an emphasis on economic, social, political, and geopolitical events likely to have an impact on the financial markets in the United States and abroad. He is also the director of The Political Forum Institute, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to creating and preserving community, primarily among those who earn their livings and create wealth for the nation through the capital markets. Mr. Soukup has followed politics and federal regulatory policy for the financial community since 1996, when he joined the award-winning Washington-research office of Prudential Securities. He was also the Fellow in Culture and Economy at the Culture of Life Foundation.