May 31, 2022
Dear Friends and Family,
The author of these excerpts is Vivek Ramaswamy, a 36-year-old man who founded a very successful biopharmaceutical company and became its CEO. In 2021, he quit his company because he felt compelled to advocate against corporate America adopting woke driven “stakeholder capitalism” fueled with ESG goals and performance metrics. ESG stands for environment, social and governance. Net, requiring American corporations to pursue social endeavors such as climate change, racism, and critical race theory, etc., or suffer the consequences of negative Wall Street positioning and ratings and potential backlash from a woke workforce.
Ramaswamy makes the case that the adoption of “stakeholder capitalism” puts corporations in a governing position which is a threat to democracy by fostering elite rule. Although, not labeled as “stakeholder capitalism” we saw some of this in practice via previous segments/epilogues by Big Tech and their use of social media to enter the American political sphere.
Advocating against this movement in corporate America is at the heart of Ramaswamy’s new career of democracy advocation. I think you will find he makes a very credible case.
Next: Epilogue 2 will explore “stakeholder capitalism” further – its origins, its tactics, and it current state.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
The author of these excerpts is Vivek Ramaswamy, a 36-year-old man who founded a very successful biopharmaceutical company and became its CEO. In 2021, he quit his company because he felt compelled to advocate against corporate America adopting woke driven “stakeholder capitalism” fueled with ESG goals and performance metrics. ESG stands for environment, social and governance. Net, requiring American corporations to pursue social endeavors such as climate change, racism, and critical race theory, etc., or suffer the consequences of negative Wall Street positioning and ratings and potential backlash from a woke workforce.
Ramaswamy makes the case that the adoption of “stakeholder capitalism” puts corporations in a governing position which is a threat to democracy by fostering elite rule. Although, not labeled as “stakeholder capitalism” we saw some of this in practice via previous segments/epilogues by Big Tech and their use of social media to enter the American political sphere.
Advocating against this movement in corporate America is at the heart of Ramaswamy’s new career of democracy advocation. I think you will find he makes a very credible case.
Next: Epilogue 2 will explore “stakeholder capitalism” further – its origins, its tactics, and it current state.
Happy Learning,
Harley
NOTE: All the excepts in the segment are from Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy (2021)
INTRODUCTION: Wokeness has remade American capitalism in its own image. Talk of being “woke” has morphed into a kind of catchall term for progressive identity politics today. Being woke means obsessing about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Maybe climate change too. Once corporations discovered wokeness, the inevitable happened: they used it to make money.
This new woke-industrial Leviathan gains its power by dividing us as a people. When corporations tell us what social values we’re supposed to adopt, they take America as a whole and divide us into tribes. That makes it easier for them to make a buck. Corporation’s win. Woke activist’s win. Celebrities win. Even the Chinese Communist Party finds a way to win. But the losers of this game are the American people, our hollowed-out institutions, and American democracy itself.
Woke culture posits a new theory of who you are as a person, one that reduces you to the characteristics you inherit at birth and denies your status as a free agent in the world. And it deploys powerful corporations to propagate this new theory with the full force of modern capitalism behind it.
As CEO, I needed to effectively run a business focused on developing medicines without getting intertwined in political matters. Yet as a citizen, I felt compelled to speak out about the perils of woke capitalism. I tried my best to avoid using my company as a platform to foist my views onto others. But eventually I had to admit that I couldn’t do justice to either while trying to do both at once. So, in the end I decided to practice what I preached. It wasn’t easy, but in January 2021, I stepped down as CEO of my own company, seven years after I founded it.
I did it because my own beliefs told me I had to keep business and politics apart. A good barometer for the health of any democracy is the percentage of people who are willing to say what they actually believe in public. As a nation, we’re doing pretty poorly on that metric right now, and the only way to fix it is to start talking openly again. I wasn’t free to do that as a CEO, but now I am as an ordinary citizen.
THE MARRIAGE OF BIG BUSINESS AND WOKENESS: Earlier this year, I got a call from the House Financial Services Committee to testify as an expert witness about a seemingly abstruse issue: new SEC rules that would require US public companies to regularly disclose so-called ESG factors. Congress was weighing new laws to require companies to disclose not only their financial metrics in their quarterly and annual reports but also “environmental, social, and governance” factors as well – things like racial and gender diversity in their workforce, climate change impact and so on.
The marriage of big business and woke culture was made in hell. It certainly wasn’t born from love. It was arranged by necessity. Wokeness needed money. Wall Street needed a moral imprimatur. So, Wall Street eagerly embraced the new identity-based hierarchy and used wokeness to shield itself from the harsh glare the 2008 financial crisis had shed on it. This was the dowry of this arranged marriage. By adopting these new “woke” values, America’s business leaders stumbled upon a once-in-a-generation opportunity to leap from heresy to sainthood. Corporations were no longer the oppressors. Instead, corporate power – if wielded in the right way – could actually empower the new disempowered classes who suffered not at the hands of evil corporations but instead at the hands of straight white men – the real culprits who had exploited their power not only since the birth of the corporation but throughout all of modern history. Enter woke capitalism – or, more elegantly, the “multistakeholder model” of the corporation. The corporation would no longer exist to serve just shareholders but the interest of society at large, including those who deserved the kind of special protections that the rest of society had failed to afford. Women. “People of color.” LGBTQ people. Victims of climate change.
The trade couldn’t have come at a better time for big business. On the back of the government scratching Wall Street’s back with its corrupt bailout, it was corporate America’s turn to return the favor. They did it by directly assuming the responsibilities of democratic government. Big business volunteered to take on the role of liberal government itself – crucially, on terms that were favorable to its own interests. That’s what woke capitalism is all about.
Al Gore – who famously “invented” the internet and then went on the “discover” climate change – had now made his greatest discovery of all: a new model for the corporation that existed to serve not just shareholders but also other societal stakeholders as well. And he raised a large-scale family of ESG (environmental, social, and governance-oriented) funds that turned him from an impecunious former civil servant into an investment titan worth hundreds of millions of dollars. So, corporations embraced wokeness to give themselves cover from the financial crisis and to direct anger toward white men instead of capitalism. While the artificial connection of wokeness and capitalism may do some good for individuals, it’s death for our democracy. A marriage in which each side secretly has contempt for the other cannot end well.
STAKEHOLDER CAPITALISM: By 2020, stakeholder capitalism – the trendy idea that companies should serve not just their shareholders but also other interests and society at large – was no longer simply on the rise. It had been crowned as the governing philosophy for big business in America. If the turn of the decade was a tipping point, then the murder of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of a white police officer in May 2020 broke the dam. Companies ranging from Apple to Uber to Novartis issued lengthy statements in support of Black Lives Matter. Well-respected companies like Coca-Cola implemented corporate programs teaching employees “to be less white” and that “to be less white is to be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be more humble” and that “white people are socialized to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white.” In 2021, the new trend became unstoppable.
For corporations to advance social causes, they must first define which causes to prioritize and what position to take. Yet that isn’t a business judgement; it’s a moral one. America was founded on the idea that we make our most important value judgments through our democratic process, where each citizen’s voice is weighted equally, rather than by a small group of elites in private. Debates about our social values belong in the civic sphere, not in the corner offices of corporate America. Democratically elected officeholders and other public leaders, not CEOs and portfolio managers, should lead the debate about what values define America. Corporations may not be people, but CEOs definitely are, and it’s a good thing when citizens personally engage on civic issues. But there’s a difference between speaking up as a citizen and using your company’s market power to foist your views onto society while avoiding the rigors or public debate in our democracy.
The heart of our democracy isn’t just about casting a ballot in November. Rather, it’s about preserving democratic norms in everyday life, including free speech and open debate. When companies make political proclamations, employees who personally disagree with the company’s position face a stark choice: speak up freely and risk your career or keep your job while keeping your head down. That isn’t how America is supposed to work, yet that is a reality for many Americans today. Stakeholder capitalism poisons democracy, partisan politics poisons capitalism, and in the end, we are left with neither capitalism nor democracy.
DEMOCRACY THREATENED: The American vision of separating church from state, and democracy from capitalism, has been supplanted by this new global vision of mixing them all with one another – leaving us with none of them in the end.
In 2019, I attended a closed-door forum hosted by J.P Morgan for a select group of startup company founders. Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan, spoke to the audience during dinner. Another CEO asked him: “Would you even consider running for president?” Dimon didn’t miss a beat: “I would love to be president. I just don’t like the idea of running for president.” The audience laughed – not because if was obviously outlandish, but because it was obviously true. Dimon couldn’t have better summarized the motives of many CEOs who embrace capitalism: it allows them to exercise quasi-political power without having to go through the hassle of getting elected. Yet that hassle is part and parcel of democracy itself.
In principle, “Stakeholder capitalism” can mean one of two things. It could mean that corporations should affirmatively take steps toward addressing important societal issues like climate change, racism, and workers’ rights. That’s the bandwagon that most companies are jumping on these days – committing capital to fight climate change, making donations to BLM, conducting mandatory training sessions for employees on how to be “anti-racist,” and so forth. This trend has taken corporate America by storm in recent years and threatens to subvert the integrity of American democracy. I believe even honest woke capitalists fail to see how much additional harm they do to American democracy when business elites tell ordinary Americans what causes they’re supposed to prioritize.
So that’s my disagreement with sincere woke capitalists. But my bigger beef is with the insincere woke capitalists. Here’s what the sincere guys miss: when they create a system in which business leaders decide moral questions, they open the floodgates for all their unscrupulous colleagues to abuse that newfound power. Under the guise of doing good, the corporate con artists hide all of the bad things that they do every day. Coca-Cola fuels an epidemic of diabetes and obesity among black Americans through the products it sells. The hard business decision for the company to debate is whether to change the ingredients in a bottle of Coke. But instead of grappling with that question, Coca-Cola executives implement anti-racism training that teaches their employees “to be less white,” and they pay a small fortune to well-heeled diversity consultants who peddle that nonsense.
Stakeholder capitalism inadvertently provides intellectual cover for the real poison at the heart of modern Wokenomics. It’s about business elites telling ordinary Americans what they’re supposed to do and how they’re supposed to think. Each presents an equal affront to American democracy.
Ordinary Americans like the idea of companies pursuing noble social values. That’s exactly what allows a new class of corporate fraudsters to escape accountability from shareholders, competitors, customers, and the government all at once. In 2019, Amazon laudably challenged Walmart to set a $15 minimum wage for its employees. The trick? Jeff Bezos had not suddenly discovered a newfound generosity for workers; rather, he was co-opting a popular social value to undermine his longtime foe Walmart when its profitability was vulnerable. Amazon continued its act in 2020 when it pledged to donate $10 million to groups focused on aiding black communities. “We stand in solidarity with our Black employees, customers, and partners,” it intoned. The trick? Making you forget several workers who dared to speak up on social media about working conditions at Amazon’s warehouses. Many of them were black.
That very same month, Nike acted in synchrony, pledging “a $40 million commitment over the next four years to support the Black community in the U.S.” This followed Nike’s widely aired commercial featuring former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who kneeled during the national anthem in protest of social injustice. The trick? Distracting you from Nike’s practice of employing child labor in sweatshops across southeast Asia or marketing $200 sneakers to inner-city black kids who can’t afford to buy books for school.
Stakeholder capitalism pretends to be a milder form of capitalism, but it is actually capitalism gone wild: it encourages capitalism’s winners to wield greater power in our democracy. As Americans, we now need to separate the power of capitalism from the working of democracy. To keep them alive, we need to keep them apart. In order to do that, we must first understand what the modern corporation is supposed to be – and what it’s not.
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF A CORPORATION? The pressure to publicly support BLM started to weigh heavily on me personally. My peers pressured me to be courageous enough to do the same thing that, well, everyone else was doing. Of course, I believed that black lives mattered. But I definitely didn’t believe in the stated goals of the Black Lives Matter organization – for example, “disrupting the nuclear family structure.” Wouldn’t that harm black families?
There was something curious to me about corporate America’s fixation on the BLM movement, even as other obvious injustices continued to abound. I was personally appalled by China’s persecution of its Uighur population. That too was happening during those same months and was no less relevant to a global business like ours, especially considering that we were still actively doing business in China. Yet none of my employees or directors expressed concern to me about these human rights violations.
The people who invented the American corporation in the 18th century weren’t fools. They knew exactly what they were doing. They were well aware that limited shareholder liability was effectively a necessity to spawn unprecedented economic growth, but they also knew that it would create a monster that could eventually supplant democracy itself. So, they created a clever solution … one that already existed, actually. Counterintuitively, it was actually the legal mandate to maximize shareholder value. To protect against corporations becoming behemoth monsters, corporations needed to be restricted to their purposes. They needed to be kept in their lane.
Let’s get specific: suppose there’s a big parade organized by a bunch of social activists around a particular cause – say, climate change. Right now, if a regular social activist drives a car in that parade and crashed into someone, she faces personal tort liability. She could be sued in court and lose everything she has. But now, suppose she’s the owner of a company and sends one of her employees in the company car to do the same thing, and the exact same thing happens. Then she can’t be sued: her personal assets are protected by limited liability. That gives her a shield that ordinary social activists don’t get. That’s the shield that woke shareholders like BlackRock or other ESG investors enjoy on a large scale today.
So, I’m just proposing that we level the playing field and make those woke shareholders, like BlackRock or Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management, bear the same liability as any ordinary social activist when they engage in ordinary social activism through the companies that they invest in. Limited shareholder liability was never meant to protect well-heeled woke investors from the consequences of their actions during PR stunts at woke parades. Yet that’s precisely the privilege that these woke shareholders enjoy today – one that society never intended to provide when it created limited shareholder liability in the first place.
Source: Woke, Inc. by Vivek Ramaswamy (2021)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
INTRODUCTION: Wokeness has remade American capitalism in its own image. Talk of being “woke” has morphed into a kind of catchall term for progressive identity politics today. Being woke means obsessing about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Maybe climate change too. Once corporations discovered wokeness, the inevitable happened: they used it to make money.
This new woke-industrial Leviathan gains its power by dividing us as a people. When corporations tell us what social values we’re supposed to adopt, they take America as a whole and divide us into tribes. That makes it easier for them to make a buck. Corporation’s win. Woke activist’s win. Celebrities win. Even the Chinese Communist Party finds a way to win. But the losers of this game are the American people, our hollowed-out institutions, and American democracy itself.
Woke culture posits a new theory of who you are as a person, one that reduces you to the characteristics you inherit at birth and denies your status as a free agent in the world. And it deploys powerful corporations to propagate this new theory with the full force of modern capitalism behind it.
As CEO, I needed to effectively run a business focused on developing medicines without getting intertwined in political matters. Yet as a citizen, I felt compelled to speak out about the perils of woke capitalism. I tried my best to avoid using my company as a platform to foist my views onto others. But eventually I had to admit that I couldn’t do justice to either while trying to do both at once. So, in the end I decided to practice what I preached. It wasn’t easy, but in January 2021, I stepped down as CEO of my own company, seven years after I founded it.
I did it because my own beliefs told me I had to keep business and politics apart. A good barometer for the health of any democracy is the percentage of people who are willing to say what they actually believe in public. As a nation, we’re doing pretty poorly on that metric right now, and the only way to fix it is to start talking openly again. I wasn’t free to do that as a CEO, but now I am as an ordinary citizen.
THE MARRIAGE OF BIG BUSINESS AND WOKENESS: Earlier this year, I got a call from the House Financial Services Committee to testify as an expert witness about a seemingly abstruse issue: new SEC rules that would require US public companies to regularly disclose so-called ESG factors. Congress was weighing new laws to require companies to disclose not only their financial metrics in their quarterly and annual reports but also “environmental, social, and governance” factors as well – things like racial and gender diversity in their workforce, climate change impact and so on.
The marriage of big business and woke culture was made in hell. It certainly wasn’t born from love. It was arranged by necessity. Wokeness needed money. Wall Street needed a moral imprimatur. So, Wall Street eagerly embraced the new identity-based hierarchy and used wokeness to shield itself from the harsh glare the 2008 financial crisis had shed on it. This was the dowry of this arranged marriage. By adopting these new “woke” values, America’s business leaders stumbled upon a once-in-a-generation opportunity to leap from heresy to sainthood. Corporations were no longer the oppressors. Instead, corporate power – if wielded in the right way – could actually empower the new disempowered classes who suffered not at the hands of evil corporations but instead at the hands of straight white men – the real culprits who had exploited their power not only since the birth of the corporation but throughout all of modern history. Enter woke capitalism – or, more elegantly, the “multistakeholder model” of the corporation. The corporation would no longer exist to serve just shareholders but the interest of society at large, including those who deserved the kind of special protections that the rest of society had failed to afford. Women. “People of color.” LGBTQ people. Victims of climate change.
The trade couldn’t have come at a better time for big business. On the back of the government scratching Wall Street’s back with its corrupt bailout, it was corporate America’s turn to return the favor. They did it by directly assuming the responsibilities of democratic government. Big business volunteered to take on the role of liberal government itself – crucially, on terms that were favorable to its own interests. That’s what woke capitalism is all about.
Al Gore – who famously “invented” the internet and then went on the “discover” climate change – had now made his greatest discovery of all: a new model for the corporation that existed to serve not just shareholders but also other societal stakeholders as well. And he raised a large-scale family of ESG (environmental, social, and governance-oriented) funds that turned him from an impecunious former civil servant into an investment titan worth hundreds of millions of dollars. So, corporations embraced wokeness to give themselves cover from the financial crisis and to direct anger toward white men instead of capitalism. While the artificial connection of wokeness and capitalism may do some good for individuals, it’s death for our democracy. A marriage in which each side secretly has contempt for the other cannot end well.
STAKEHOLDER CAPITALISM: By 2020, stakeholder capitalism – the trendy idea that companies should serve not just their shareholders but also other interests and society at large – was no longer simply on the rise. It had been crowned as the governing philosophy for big business in America. If the turn of the decade was a tipping point, then the murder of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of a white police officer in May 2020 broke the dam. Companies ranging from Apple to Uber to Novartis issued lengthy statements in support of Black Lives Matter. Well-respected companies like Coca-Cola implemented corporate programs teaching employees “to be less white” and that “to be less white is to be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be more humble” and that “white people are socialized to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white.” In 2021, the new trend became unstoppable.
For corporations to advance social causes, they must first define which causes to prioritize and what position to take. Yet that isn’t a business judgement; it’s a moral one. America was founded on the idea that we make our most important value judgments through our democratic process, where each citizen’s voice is weighted equally, rather than by a small group of elites in private. Debates about our social values belong in the civic sphere, not in the corner offices of corporate America. Democratically elected officeholders and other public leaders, not CEOs and portfolio managers, should lead the debate about what values define America. Corporations may not be people, but CEOs definitely are, and it’s a good thing when citizens personally engage on civic issues. But there’s a difference between speaking up as a citizen and using your company’s market power to foist your views onto society while avoiding the rigors or public debate in our democracy.
The heart of our democracy isn’t just about casting a ballot in November. Rather, it’s about preserving democratic norms in everyday life, including free speech and open debate. When companies make political proclamations, employees who personally disagree with the company’s position face a stark choice: speak up freely and risk your career or keep your job while keeping your head down. That isn’t how America is supposed to work, yet that is a reality for many Americans today. Stakeholder capitalism poisons democracy, partisan politics poisons capitalism, and in the end, we are left with neither capitalism nor democracy.
DEMOCRACY THREATENED: The American vision of separating church from state, and democracy from capitalism, has been supplanted by this new global vision of mixing them all with one another – leaving us with none of them in the end.
In 2019, I attended a closed-door forum hosted by J.P Morgan for a select group of startup company founders. Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan, spoke to the audience during dinner. Another CEO asked him: “Would you even consider running for president?” Dimon didn’t miss a beat: “I would love to be president. I just don’t like the idea of running for president.” The audience laughed – not because if was obviously outlandish, but because it was obviously true. Dimon couldn’t have better summarized the motives of many CEOs who embrace capitalism: it allows them to exercise quasi-political power without having to go through the hassle of getting elected. Yet that hassle is part and parcel of democracy itself.
In principle, “Stakeholder capitalism” can mean one of two things. It could mean that corporations should affirmatively take steps toward addressing important societal issues like climate change, racism, and workers’ rights. That’s the bandwagon that most companies are jumping on these days – committing capital to fight climate change, making donations to BLM, conducting mandatory training sessions for employees on how to be “anti-racist,” and so forth. This trend has taken corporate America by storm in recent years and threatens to subvert the integrity of American democracy. I believe even honest woke capitalists fail to see how much additional harm they do to American democracy when business elites tell ordinary Americans what causes they’re supposed to prioritize.
So that’s my disagreement with sincere woke capitalists. But my bigger beef is with the insincere woke capitalists. Here’s what the sincere guys miss: when they create a system in which business leaders decide moral questions, they open the floodgates for all their unscrupulous colleagues to abuse that newfound power. Under the guise of doing good, the corporate con artists hide all of the bad things that they do every day. Coca-Cola fuels an epidemic of diabetes and obesity among black Americans through the products it sells. The hard business decision for the company to debate is whether to change the ingredients in a bottle of Coke. But instead of grappling with that question, Coca-Cola executives implement anti-racism training that teaches their employees “to be less white,” and they pay a small fortune to well-heeled diversity consultants who peddle that nonsense.
Stakeholder capitalism inadvertently provides intellectual cover for the real poison at the heart of modern Wokenomics. It’s about business elites telling ordinary Americans what they’re supposed to do and how they’re supposed to think. Each presents an equal affront to American democracy.
Ordinary Americans like the idea of companies pursuing noble social values. That’s exactly what allows a new class of corporate fraudsters to escape accountability from shareholders, competitors, customers, and the government all at once. In 2019, Amazon laudably challenged Walmart to set a $15 minimum wage for its employees. The trick? Jeff Bezos had not suddenly discovered a newfound generosity for workers; rather, he was co-opting a popular social value to undermine his longtime foe Walmart when its profitability was vulnerable. Amazon continued its act in 2020 when it pledged to donate $10 million to groups focused on aiding black communities. “We stand in solidarity with our Black employees, customers, and partners,” it intoned. The trick? Making you forget several workers who dared to speak up on social media about working conditions at Amazon’s warehouses. Many of them were black.
That very same month, Nike acted in synchrony, pledging “a $40 million commitment over the next four years to support the Black community in the U.S.” This followed Nike’s widely aired commercial featuring former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who kneeled during the national anthem in protest of social injustice. The trick? Distracting you from Nike’s practice of employing child labor in sweatshops across southeast Asia or marketing $200 sneakers to inner-city black kids who can’t afford to buy books for school.
Stakeholder capitalism pretends to be a milder form of capitalism, but it is actually capitalism gone wild: it encourages capitalism’s winners to wield greater power in our democracy. As Americans, we now need to separate the power of capitalism from the working of democracy. To keep them alive, we need to keep them apart. In order to do that, we must first understand what the modern corporation is supposed to be – and what it’s not.
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF A CORPORATION? The pressure to publicly support BLM started to weigh heavily on me personally. My peers pressured me to be courageous enough to do the same thing that, well, everyone else was doing. Of course, I believed that black lives mattered. But I definitely didn’t believe in the stated goals of the Black Lives Matter organization – for example, “disrupting the nuclear family structure.” Wouldn’t that harm black families?
There was something curious to me about corporate America’s fixation on the BLM movement, even as other obvious injustices continued to abound. I was personally appalled by China’s persecution of its Uighur population. That too was happening during those same months and was no less relevant to a global business like ours, especially considering that we were still actively doing business in China. Yet none of my employees or directors expressed concern to me about these human rights violations.
The people who invented the American corporation in the 18th century weren’t fools. They knew exactly what they were doing. They were well aware that limited shareholder liability was effectively a necessity to spawn unprecedented economic growth, but they also knew that it would create a monster that could eventually supplant democracy itself. So, they created a clever solution … one that already existed, actually. Counterintuitively, it was actually the legal mandate to maximize shareholder value. To protect against corporations becoming behemoth monsters, corporations needed to be restricted to their purposes. They needed to be kept in their lane.
Let’s get specific: suppose there’s a big parade organized by a bunch of social activists around a particular cause – say, climate change. Right now, if a regular social activist drives a car in that parade and crashed into someone, she faces personal tort liability. She could be sued in court and lose everything she has. But now, suppose she’s the owner of a company and sends one of her employees in the company car to do the same thing, and the exact same thing happens. Then she can’t be sued: her personal assets are protected by limited liability. That gives her a shield that ordinary social activists don’t get. That’s the shield that woke shareholders like BlackRock or other ESG investors enjoy on a large scale today.
So, I’m just proposing that we level the playing field and make those woke shareholders, like BlackRock or Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management, bear the same liability as any ordinary social activist when they engage in ordinary social activism through the companies that they invest in. Limited shareholder liability was never meant to protect well-heeled woke investors from the consequences of their actions during PR stunts at woke parades. Yet that’s precisely the privilege that these woke shareholders enjoy today – one that society never intended to provide when it created limited shareholder liability in the first place.
Source: Woke, Inc. by Vivek Ramaswamy (2021)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| glo2_e1l_woke_industrial_complex_--_segment_1.pdf |