By Lisa Logan
''You companies can do what we-government-cannot, and will never do. You have to change the world on this issue.” – (then) Vice President Joe Biden
On the stage at the BSR19 Conference hosted by Business for Social Responsibility, Beth A. Brooke-Marciniak, Board Director and Former Global Vice Chair of Public Policy for Ernst & Young relayed details about a private meeting at Davos a few years back with (at the time) Vice President Joe Biden (Figure 1). The back door meeting convened a group of companies working behind the scenes to use their collective political and financial power to push LGBTI policy in business practices. According to Brooke-Marciniak, (now President) Biden sat down with these businesses, looked them in the eye and said, ''You companies can do what we-government-cannot, and will never do. You have to change the world on this issue.” Heeding his words, that same group of companies supported by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and operating in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, launched PGLE in 2019.
Figure 1 Tweet thread by @iamlisalogan
One of the many Collaborative Initiatives housed at the Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), the PGLE, or Partnership for Global LGBTIQ+ Equality, is a coalition of 29 organizations committed to leveraging their individual and collective advocacy to accelerate LGBTIQ+ equality and inclusion in the workplace globally and in the communities in which they operate. They do this in three ways outlined on their website (Figure 2).
Figure 2 From PGLE's What We Do page
The first of their mandates is to operationalize The United Nations (UN) Standards of Conduct for Business, produced in 2017 in collaboration with the Institute for Human Rights and Business. They have been successful thus far, getting 400+ companies to sign on as supporters of the LGBTQIA+ business practices outlined in the Standards (Figure 3), which asserts businesses’ responsibility to combat discrimination against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, and intersex persons, and how they can and should address this issue in their governance, in the business market, and in the broader community. PGLE’s role is to provide tools and resources for companies to self-assess how they are doing in these areas through scoring systems that identify gaps in their implementation of the 5 standards, and then to provide recommendations on how to close those gaps and strengthen policies, processes, and methodologies to support LGBTIQ+ inclusivity. Some of the tools used to accomplish this are the UN LGBTIQ+ Standards Gap Analysis Tool, the UN Global Compact's WEP's Gender Gap Analysis Tool, and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation's 2022 Corporate Equality Index (CEI).
Figure 3: 400+ organizations, including Twitter, have signed on in support of the UN Standards of Conduct for Business.
While the use of these tools and the metrics that come out of them are supposedly voluntary to participate in, it can benefit businesses to offer them up to activist banks and investors who use ESG (Environmentalism, Social Responsibility and Governance) scoring to determine which businesses deserve to receive capital based upon how dedicated they are to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It can also disadvantage those who don’t or those who receive a poor report from these tools.
Figure 4 - Excerpt from the article, "Why & how to build stronger corporate LGBTQ+ inclusion" (Sirvinskas, A., 2022, Conservice)
In a 2022 article (Figure 4) on ESG Reporting from Adam Sirvinskas titled, “Why & how to build stronger corporate LGBTQ+ inclusion,” the author hints that because investors are asking more about what companies are doing in regard to responsible investment, treatment of employees, their dedication to sustainability initiatives and “other activities that fall under the ESG umbrella, it’s important to have answers to these questions.” This type of reporting has become so normalized, in fact, that one could argue many businesses are actually being forced against their will into adopting and measuring policies and practices that cater to the Sustainable Development Goals because the banks and investors they do business with that are participating in this racket are behaving like a cartel, threatening to withhold capital from businesses if their ESG score isn’t up to snuff. In his article, Sirvinskas rightly points out that Walt Disney choosing to speak out publicly against Florida’s bill that banned classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity for kindergarten through 3rd grade was not just a decision that was morally grounded, but also financially motivated. He notes that “sustainable investments received a $120 billion inflow in 2021, more than doubling the $51.1 billion received by ESG funds in 2020 and setting another new annual record. And it appears the upward trend will continue. Global ESG assets are expected to hit $53 trillion by 2025, according to Bloomberg, accounting for more than a third of the $140.5 trillion in total assets under management.”
It is because of this shift in investment capital that the recent backlash and boycotts against retailers like Target, Budweiser, and the like for promoting the LGBTQIA+ agenda in their marketing and products, while annoying to the company’s short-term bottom line, would theoretically have no impact on these companies’ long-term financial health or change their overall behavior. The real impact of these customer punishments will actually be realized in the blowback companies receive from the metric gods in response to their pandering attempts to get in the good graces of their customer base again (e.g. Budweiser abandoning their transgender spokesperson Dylan Mulvaney, or Target moving their transgender clothing line for kids to the back of their stores). Their temporary reverse in course will be a unique opportunity to show how actions like these—that aren’t in line with the socio-political ideology of their banks and investors—can cause a related dip in their ESG and CEI scores, exposing this cartel operation for the RICO and Anti-Trust law violations that it presents. That’s why consumers can and should continue to use their boycotting power strategically, heavily targeting only the companies who lead the pack in their industries in “coming out of the closet,” so to speak. This way, their efforts won’t become watered down in their attempt to punish every company and lose their real impact in the public and in the news cycle. The fluctuation in scores tied to businesses’ support (or lack thereof) of these initiatives because of public pressure will provide the credible proof needed to able to prosecute this at the federal level, showing how these regulatory metrics are being used improperly to push a top-down political agenda.
Figure 5 - Excerpt from Forbes article (McGowan, J., 2023, Like Target, Walmart’s ESG Report Focuses On LGBTQ+ Pride Issues) on ESG and CEI scoring and reporting.
Unless and until this is addressed, there will be no letting up when it comes to the LGBTQIA+ agenda being shoved down society’s throat. The 300+ member companies that are clients of corporate consultancy giants like BSR will continue to be strongly advised to sign on to the UN Standards for Business, join coalitions like the PGLE, and stay the course in making commitments to “inclusivity” that boost their CEI and/or ESG score or be costed out of business. For instance, in order for a company like Target or Walmart to get a perfect CEI score (Figure 5), this “requires donations to LGBTQ+ causes, refusal to donate to non-religious organizations that discriminate based on LGBTQ+ issues, and support of gender transition.” This might explain why member corporations of BSR like Chick-Fil-A, who have long defended and upheld their conservative values, are now willing to throw that out of the window and adopt Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies. They have no choice to but to comply. It also explains why Twitter, who signed on in support of the UN Standards for Business, throttled the extremely popular Daily Wire documentary, What is a Woman?, on the night it was set to be live streamed free to Twitter’s audience, because it “misgendered” a few people in the movie.
Figure 6 - Quote from Benito Mussolini, an Italian dictator who installed a totalitarian regime, a form of government that theoretically permits no individual freedom, and that seeks to subordinate all aspects of individual life to the authority of the state.
The bottom line is that reporting metrics like ESG, CEI and the Standards for Businesses endorsed by the United Nations and the World Economic Forum are putting a stranglehold on both willing and unwilling corporations in an attempt to transform not just America’s culture but cultures across the globe. It’s allowing unelected bureaucrats through public-private partnerships to drive the adoption of unconstitutional business practices and policies that governments wouldn't be able to enforce in law on their own. This merger of state and corporate power, Corporatism, is what dictator Benito Mussolini appropriately called fascism, (Figure 6) and will install a totalitarian regime similar to his that will be able to unlawfully enforce its political agenda upon the free will of the people through coercion and/or repression. This corruption and the political and cultural upheaval resulting from it must be stopped in its tracks as quickly as possible, before it’s too late to be reined in.
Lisa Logan is the host of the YouTube Channel Parents of Patriots and author of the Substack Education Manifesto. If you value her work, please consider supporting it here. As a wife, mother and accidental activist, she has made it her mission to expose the sinister agenda behind the changes to education and other captured systems & institutions in an effort to save our children and the future of our country.
תגובות