Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Wednesday announced additional actions his administration hopes to take to combat the emergence of corporations imposing “woke ideology on the economy.”
This is something that has become “very prevalent throughout the upper echelons of our society,” the governor said during a press conference in Tampa, Florida, explaining that it is, specifically, “imposing woke ideology on the economy usually by some of the biggest economic actors that we have in our country.”
“Whether it’s Wall Street Banks, whether it’s massive major asset managers, whether it’s Big Tech companies and what you’ve seen as you’ve seen a rise of something called ESG — environment, social governance where they will grade different companies based on how they’re performing on those metrics,” he explained.
“And then even using that when they’re managing pension funds for people, we’ve got retired teachers, law enforcement that rely on these pension funds and they’re putting in all these other criteria rather than just what’s the best investment,” he said, explaining that some companies have taken it a step further, flexing their muscles “in a variety of ways in ways that are more political.”
“This is an important issue because it raises the question of, you know, who governs society? Do we govern ourselves through our Constitution and through our elections or do we have these masters of the universe occupying these commanding heights of society?” DeSantis asked, noting how they can use their economic power to “impose policies on the country that they could not do so at the ballot box.”
“That’s really what you’re seeing with all this, and for every master of the universe whose prattling on about, you know, no emissions and all this stuff, I don’t see very many of them giving up their private jets, you know, they’re living their own life and they want the burden of their policies to fall on working class Americans,” he said, calling out the blatant hypocrisy of the John Kerrys and Leonardo DiCaprios of the world.
“I think we should utilize our own resources here in the United States. Well, I think a woke capital in the ESG movement would say the opposite,” he said, explaining that they would say “stop producing here in the United States and basically make us more dependent on foreign energy and make Americans pay a lot more, not only at the pump with their utility bills and everything else.”
However, DeSantis said these hypocritical, political actors would be unable to run on those radical policies in an election, because Americans are generally against it, so they have to enact their goals through sneakier means:
If they ran on that policy, they would have a hard time winning a lot of elections on that policy because that’s not what most Americans want to see. They want to see affordable energy. They see how much it impacts their family’s budget and the overall economy. You’ve also seen different institutions effectively collude to disfavor certain industries, like the firearms industry. You know, you don’t like that. And so you want to not allow them to say, get financing for banks. You’ve seen asset managers who manage the pension funds. Say they are going to be doing things like ‘stakeholder capitalism,’ which is taking all these political factors and injecting that into the financial system, and think about some of these woke companies. What did they do two years ago? Massive amounts of investment to BLM. Now, what did the BLM leaders do with that? They bought mansions with that money! Have you seen how many mansions some of these people are now living in? So that was a total fraud, and a lot of these companies pumped a lot of money into that.
As a result, DeSantis said they are taking administrative action, as well as pursue statutory reforms “so that we’re putting the people of Florida first and we’re going to do what’s in their best interest, not whatever the delusions of some wealthy woke CEO wants to do.”
One of the actions will be prohibiting the State Board of Administration fund manager from “using political factors when investing the state’s money.”
“We want them to invest the state’s money for the best interests of the beneficiaries of those funds, which is again, the people that are retired — cops and teachers and other public employees.
“We also are going to require SBA fund managers to only to only consider maximizing the return on investment on behalf of Florida’s retirees,” he said, explaining that they are also going to “prohibit Wall Street banks, credit card companies and money transmitters like Paypal from discriminating against customers for their religious, political or social beliefs.”
“They’re using things like social credit scores to be able to marginalize people that they don’t like,” DeSantis said.
Politicization of the economy in this way, DeSantis added, “benefits the largest, most powerful corporations and it disadvantages the small and medium sized businesses.”
“This is not something that is empowering kind of the little guy,” the governor said. He said before introducing Florida State Rep. Paul Renner (R), who described the issue as a “global elite weaponizing American capitalism against us.”:
We’re gonna make sure that the Florida statutes are very clear about what your fiduciary obligation is to the people that that benefit. And we’re also going to make very clear that discrimination, particularly in the financial sector is not something that we want to see here in the state of Florida.
“This is both a national security issue and a pocketbook issue. And so what we have is these large corporations and banks that are pursuing a woke agenda that is artificially driving up our costs and energy,” Renner added:
Corporate elites are using ESG investing to prioritize a liberal agenda These elites are circumventing the FL Legislature and do not represent the people. I look forward to working with @GovRonDeSantis to put FL first! #FlaPol
— Paul Renner (@Paul_Renner) July 27, 2022
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