Page Title
Summary of
Capitalist Punishment
A
Summary of Vivek Ramaswamy’s book
How Wall Street Is Using Your Money to Create a Country You Didn't Vote For
GP SUMMARY
Summary of Capitalist Punishment by Vivek Ramaswamy: How Wall Street Is Using Your Money to Create a Country You Didn't Vote For
By GP SUMMARY© 2023, GP SUMMARY.
All rights reserved.
Author: GP SUMMARY
Contact: GP.SUMMARY@gmail.com
Cover, illustration: GP SUMMARY
Editing, proofreading: GP SUMMARY
Other collaborators: GP SUMMARY
NOTE TO READERS
This is an unofficial summary & analysis of Vivek Ramaswamy’s “Capitalist Punishment: How Wall Street Is Using Your Money to Create a Country You Didn't Vote For” designed to enrich your reading experience.
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The contents of the summary are not intended to replace the original book. It is meant as a supplement to enhance the reader's understanding. The contents within can neither be stored electronically, transferred, nor kept in a database. Neither part nor full can the document be copied, scanned, faxed, or retained without the approval from the publisher or creator.
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Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.
Introduction
The most important details in this text are that Sam Bankman-Fried, popularly known as SBF, built FTX, a Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange, into one of the largest financial empires in the world, and that his high ESG score was just an unfortunate coincidence. However, SBF wasn't an exception to the rule, but an embodiment of it. SBF is likely going to prison, but the most elite practitioners of the game won't. Goldman Sachs, for example, sold complex mortgage-backed securities to investors that turned out to be worthless. Fabrice Tourre, a twenty-eight-year-old trader who worked at Goldman Sachs, revealed that Goldman's bankers were selling worthless securities.
He boasted about selling "abacus bonds to widows and orphans" in June 2007, which caused the largest recession since the Great Depression. Goldman's most recent CEO, Henry "Hank" Paulson, was the US treasury secretary at the time and used taxpayer money to bail out Goldman Sachs. A decade later, Goldman Sachs rebranded its Blue Chip Fund as its U.S. ESG Equity Fund. Investors who had passed on investing in Goldman's Blue Chip Fund would understand that it was a different investment opportunity.
Goldman Sachs jacked up the price on a floundering fund and slapped an ESG label on it, promising to screen out gambling, alcohol, tobacco, coal, and weapons stocks. The only difference was the fee, which was raised by a mere basis point. Left-wing critics of ESG get upset about this practice, but it is not the biggest ESG scam. Dedicated ESG funds represent a relatively small minority of total funds in the asset management industry. Greensmuggling is the inverse of greenwashing, where non-ESG funds smuggle ESG policies into their investment practices.
This problem is over $100 trillion in scale and is perpetrated by BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, the three largest and most influential financial institutions in US history. BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard manage more than $20 trillion, almost as much as the entire US gross domestic product. However, the real price is not the nominal fee that the Big Three charge, but their voices and votes as shareholders in the global economy. The scheme of using the money of US citizens to advance ideologies that may be revolting is happening on such a large scale that it may be the biggest antitrust violation in history. In 2021, a Dutch nonprofit proposed a shareholder resolution demanding that the US oil giant reduce its Scope 3 emissions.
However, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard all voted for it anyway, using trillions of dollars belonging to hardworking Americans. The vote had its intended effect, leading to Chevron agreeing to a litany of climate-related policies, such as adopting Scope 3 carbon intensity targets, investing in a division called Chevron New Energies, advocating for a new tax on its main product, and endorsing the Paris Climate Accords. US companies have dropped oil and gas projects in recent years, but PetroChina, the listed arm of China National Petroleum Corporation, acquired the project from Chevron for a fire-sale price. BlackRock has become the first foreign asset manager to launch a wholly owned mutual fund business in China, and Apple is conducting a racial equity audit in its workforce. BlackRock and State Street have both voted for ESG proposals, and Apple is conducting a racial equity audit as this book goes to print.
BlackRock is among the top shareholders of Xiaomi, but there is no public record of BlackRock calling for the latter to conduct a racial equity audit or assess how equitably the firm treats its Uighur compatriots. This highlights the vulnerability of developing nations to ESG-inflicted woes, such as the implosion of Sri Lanka in 2019. The Great Reset is a worldview that calls for the dissolution of boundaries between capitalism and politics, nonprofits and for-profits, and nations. A response to this vision is the Great Uprising, a movement of citizens in the US and other democratic nations who reject the dissolution of those boundaries. This movement is about to collide again in 2023, and we'll soon find out if it will break the great nation they once birthed.
What Is ESG?
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is the organizing force behind the Great Reset, stakeholder capitalism, and ESG. It is the head of the snake and summons business leaders, celebrities, and politicians to the resort town of Davos in the Swiss Alps to determine the future shape of the world. The author refused to be named a Young Global Leader due to their opposition to the WEF's imperious ideology. After complaining about it on Twitter, the WEF apologized and promised to remove the author from its site in a day or two. The author was drafted into the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leader program, which is a microcosm of the way it conscripts everyone into its plans.
The program is called "stakeholder capitalism" and its main seminar is "ESG." The author's experience of being drafted into the program is a microcosm of the way it conscripts everyone into its plans. The author's experience of being drafted into the program is a microcosm of the way it conscripts everyone into its plans. The ideological battle between Milton Friedman and Klaus Schwab over stakeholder capitalism began more than fifty years ago. Schwab argued that all parts of a society had to work in concert for the community to prosper, while Friedman argued that businesses had to make decisions for the benefit of all members of society, not just their employees and owners. This clashed with American individualism, which saw pursuing the common good as a task best left to democratic government.
Friedman argued that when corporate executives take responsibility for solving social problems, they essentially steal shareholders’ money to do so. The 2008 financial crisis provided ammunition for critics of greed-is-good profit-above-all capitalism, and the ESG-focused version of stakeholder capitalism emerged from the dogpile. Klaus Schwab had lost the battle with Milton Friedman, but continued to wage the war. In 1973, the European Management Forum published the first Davos Manifesto, which argued that professional management is to serve clients, shareholders, workers and employees, as well as societies, and to harmonize the different interests of the stakeholders. The WEF's influence gradually grew over the decades as it gathered elites from all institutions to realize the Davos vision of stakeholder capitalism.
The idea that businesses have social responsibilities beyond shareholder profit began to take shape as a reaction to the wealth of nineteenth-century robber barons. After World War II, theorists shifted the burden of helping society to businesses themselves. The term corporate social responsibility was coined by Howard R. Bowen in 1953. European-style stakeholder capitalism has gradually colonized American corporate social responsibility. CSR initially tended to focus on making sure businesses didn't harm the communities they belong to, minimizing negative externalities.
Stakeholder capitalism requires corporations to lead civilization into the future, and CSR now increasingly demands the same. Social responsibility has become a vehicle for progressive policies to pass through democratic checks, with liberals pushing the notion of CSR. The World Economic Forum is
Impressum
Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 27.04.2023
ISBN: 978-3-7554-4056-7
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Widmung:
The Wall Street cartel has seized control of the American economy, using your money to do so. Capitalist Punishment is an educational tour de force.