This is an adapted excerpt from “Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America” (Center Street, August 6). Note: ESG is shorthand for investing principal that prioritizes environmental issues, social issues, and corporate governance).
You could maybe, just maybe, stomach all the phony virtue signaling surrounding ESG from the woke capitalism crowd if they applied it equally to all public companies. They don’t. Not even close.
Take what’s happening at the Nasdaq, a big stock exchange that caters to the tech industry. If you’re a CEO of a company who wants his stock to trade seamlessly, you apply to “list,” or have it traded on a major stock exchange, like the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq Stock Market, the two largest such venues. Meeting Nasdaq’s so-called listing standards should be standard stuff like disclosure of profits, losses, and other logical corporate governance metrics to make sure the CEO isn’t robbing the place blind.
Not quite. In 2020, Nasdaq’s obsession with ESG and wokeness grew to unfathomable levels. The exchange adopted a rule that all but set quotas in the corporate boardroom, forcing all listed companies to disclose boardroom diversity. Critics called it a public shaming exercise; companies are forced to “explain why they do not have at least two diverse directors, including one who self-identifies as female and one who self-identifies as either an under-represented minority or LGBTQ.”
Guess who’s exempt from all of this? The Chinese. China’s economy is on the verge of rivaling
