The poison pill smuggled in with the Indian FTA

Another Constitutional Trojan Horse: advancing change through political stealth

FOR ALL THE FOOLISH NONSENSE about "tsunamis" talked about the Indian-NZ Free Trade Deal, there is a genuine issue that Gary Judd KC has identified in reading through it, and it's not about free trade or butter chicken. It's about a poisonous clause inserted at the obvious behest of the NZ negotiators. 

"The striking feature of this Free-Trade Agreement," notes Judd, "is that it brings the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) into the text of a trade treaty. That is not a side issue. It is a political and constitutional declaration inserted into an agreement that is supposed to be about trade. ... New Zealand’s Free-Trade Agreements with the United Kingdom and the European Union refer to indigenous rights and Māori participation. But the India agreement goes further. It is the first to affirm UNDRIP expressly. That is a significant escalation."

Why the hell is it there?

Everything points to this UNDRIP wording having been included at New Zealand’s initiative, not India’s. India appears to have agreed only on condition that its longstanding reservation was recorded. There is no obvious reason why India would want UNDRIP written into a trade agreement with New Zealand. ...

If it truly changed nothing, it would not be there. The obvious reason for including it is not trade with India but politics within New Zealand. A trade agreement is being used to advance a domestic constitutional and political agenda. That is an abuse of the treaty-making process. A provision with no real trade function, but clear ideological value at home, has no legitimate place in a Free-Trade Agreement.

Once this affirmation is in a ratified treaty, it will inevitably be invoked inside New Zealand as proof that the country is committed to UNDRIP in a serious and operative way, not merely in some airy symbolic sense. Lawyers, activists and judges will be invited to treat it as yet another marker of state commitment. To dismiss that as mere technicality would be naive.

You'll remember that Helen Clark, as Prime Minister, was astute enough to have her UN representative vote against the Declaration -- one of only four nations to oppose.  (As Judd notes: "India voted in favour (see here) but immediately made it clear that it did so subject to an important reservation. That same reservation now reappears in the FTA.")

It was John Key who blithely acceded to signing up simply in order to bolster his parliamentary support from Pita Sharples's Maori Party. 

What Key casually signed away was not trivial, as we saw when Ardern's Labour Government began drawing up the He Puapua document under UNDRIP's impetus. "He Puapua is not a minor discussion paper," Judd reminds us. "It is a blueprint for major constitutional change, including forms of co-governance. One example is paragraph 15: 'If they choose, Maori must be able to participate in Crown governance."

Clark's objection to the Declaration was principled, and what Clark's UN representative  Rosemary Banks said about it then is as valid now: Four provisions in the Declaration in particular were [and still are] "fundamentally incompatible with New Zealand’s constitutional and legal arrangements, [with] the Treaty of Waitangi, and [with] the principle of governing for the good of all its citizens."

What were those four provisions?

• Article 26 stated that indigenous peoples had a right to own, use, develop or control lands and territories that they had traditionally owned, occupied or used. For New Zealand, the entire country was potentially caught within the scope of the article, which appeared to require recognition of rights to lands now lawfully owned by other citizens, both indigenous and non-indigenous, and did not take into account the customs, traditions and land tenure systems of the indigenous peoples concerned. The article, furthermore, implied that indigenous peoples had rights that others did not have.
• The entire country would also appear to fall within the scope of article 28 on redress and compensation. The text generally took no account of the fact that land might now be occupied or owned legitimately by others, or subject to numerous different or overlapping indigenous claims.
• Finally, the Declaration['s articles 19 and 32] implied that indigenous peoples had a right of veto over a democratic legislature and national resource management, she said. She strongly supported the full and active engagement of indigenous peoples in democratic decision-making processes. New Zealand also had some of the most extensive consultation mechanisms in the world. But the articles in the Declaration implied different classes of citizenship, where indigenous had a right to veto that other groups or individuals did not have.

In short, the Declaration set up two standards of citizenship based on race, and a legal veto over other's property based on ancestry. Clark understood that. Key was too dim.

And so too are Luxon and Todd McClay, who either called for this clause's insertion in the Indian FTA themselves, or were insufficiently astute to have seen it there and taken out.

The He Puapua programme itself was begun without explicit acknowledgement of its goals. Those goals, indeed its very existence, were only revealed when it began to seem that some underlying framework was at play in Willy Jackson's and Nanaia Mahuta's legislative agenda.  Turns out there was. Media organisations uncovered the document, who then obtained it under the Official Information Act, and it was finally released only in April 2021 after pressure from the Ombudsman. "That is not transparent government," points out Judd. "It is disclosure dragged out by resistance."

The irony is that the same thing is happening here. 

Neither Government appears ready to argue openly for setting up two standards of citizenship based on race and ancestry.

Instead, they have to do it by stealth.

Gary Judd explains the danger in detail here, including illustrations "why ratifying the FTA in its present form is not a harmless gesture." I recommend the read.

He concludes:

What is most objectionable in all this is the contempt it shows for ordinary New Zealanders. Constitutional change of this magnitude should be argued for openly, defended honestly and submitted to democratic judgment. Instead, it has been advanced by ministers, officials and sympathetic elites through opaque processes, delayed disclosure and legal increment. That is no way to alter the foundations of a country.

The obvious remedy is greater democratic control. If politicians, officials or judges wish to drive constitutional change, they should have to defend it before the public in clear terms and win consent for it, not smuggle it through advisory reports, bureaucratic process or the fine print of a trade treaty.

That is the real issue raised by this agreement: not trade, but whether constitutional change in New Zealand will occur by democratic choice or by political stealth.

"The UN has now spent more than three decades issuing countdowns to catastrophe" [updated]

"A recent story on PBS NewsHour, 'UN says world must jointly tackle issues of climate change, pollution, biodiversity and land loss,' by Tammy Webber of the Associated Press (AP), reports on a new UN 'Global Environment Outlook' that repeats the false assertion that the Earth is nearing a global tipping point that can only be avoided through “unprecedented change” and trillions of dollars in new spending to phase out fossil fuels. These assertions are bogus, lacking any basis in data or observable evidence. In fact, the UN has a long track record of failed disaster predictions tied to climate change, going all the way back to 1989 ...

"A history lesson is in order. This is not the first time the UN has announced that 'we’re running out of time.' In 1989, 36 years of global warming ago, the UN Environment Programme’s Noel Brown told the Associated Press that 'entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels' if global warming was not reversed by the year 2000, predicting up to three feet of sea-level rise by then, massive coastal inundation of Bangladesh and Egypt, and a wave of 'eco-refugees.'

"More than three decades later, each of these predictions have proven, not just false, but wildly inaccurate. The 'Climate at a Glance' website’s 'Sea Level Rise' page documents long-term tide-gauge records and NASA satellite data showing global sea level rising at about 1.2 inches per decade, with, at best, a modest acceleration since the nineteenth century. Nor have we seen the millions of 'climate refugees' that the UN forecast. The Maldives are still above water, Bangladesh has more people than ever, and the “10-year window” to avert disaster has been rolled over so many times it could qualify as a wrecked vehicle.

"PBS/AP never mentions this failed track record. Nor does it acknowledge that the UN has now presided over 30 Conferences of the Parties (COPs) without changing the basic trajectory of global emissions or global temperature ...

"The entries at 'Climate at a Glance'’s on 'Deaths from Extreme Weather' and 'Temperature-Related Deaths' highlight a crucial fact PBS never mentions: over the past century, climate-related deaths have plummeted by more than 95 percent, even as global population has quadrupled and temperatures have risen. Independent analyses, such as HumanProgress’ review of disaster mortality, show climate-related deaths falling from about 485,000 per year in the 1920s to fewer than 20,000 per year in the 2010s, a drop of more than 99 percent on a per-capita basis, as seen in their graph below.

"Th[is] is not what 'running out of time' looks like.

"What the article and the UN report completely ignore is the role that affordable, reliable energy, overwhelmingly fossil fuels, has played in making human societies more resilient to environmental hazards. Mechanised agriculture, synthetic fertilisers, modern flood defences, air conditioning, and rapid disaster response all depend on dense, on-demand energy. That is why climate-related deaths as documented by 'Climate at a Glance' have collapsed over the past century. Yet the UN prescription, uncritically endorsed by PBS/AP, is to rapidly phase out the very energy sources that lifted billions from abject poverty, based on a track record of predictions that have repeatedly failed to materialize.

"'Climate Realism' has chronicled this pattern for years. 'UNFCCC Climate Report Lies About Its Own Science' points out how UN political bodies routinely make sweeping claims about 'intensifying destruction' that are not supported by the UN’s own scientific assessments, which identify little or no change in most types of extreme weather events and trends in natural disasters. In 'The IPCC’s 1990 Predictions Were Even Worse Than We Thought,' 'Climate Realism' reviews the early IPCC forecasts of rapid warming and sea-level rise and shows how they overshot reality. Despite this, every new report is marketed as the 'most comprehensive ever' and used to justify more urgent demands for unprecedented, wrenching, transformational remaking of the world’s economy and governing institutions.

"PBS/AP could have told its audience that the UN has now spent more than three decades issuing countdowns to catastrophe ...

"By omitting the long trail of failed UN climate pronouncements, ignoring the dramatic decline in climate-related deaths, and treating speculative model outputs as inevitable futures, PBS and the Associated Press badly mislead their audience concerning the true state of the Earth. A truly public-minded broadcaster would carefully scrutinise the UN’s record and available data rather than uncritically regurgitate its latest false alarm report."

~ Anthony Watts from his post 'Wrong Again PBS, UN Is Pushing Another False Climate Crisis Report'

UPDATE: Bjorn Lomborg writes in the New York Post:

"The main UN model shows that even if all rich countries were to cut their carbon emissions to zero, it would avert less than 0.2°F of projected warming by the end of the century, while imposing massive hits of up to 18% on rich-world GDP by 2050.

"The ever-increasing cost of climate policy is one reason the rich world is cutting back in many other areas, including aid to the world's poorest.

"That, in part, is why philanthropist Bill Gates has called for a strategic pivot on climate.

"He has laid out three tough truths: Climate change is serious but 'will not lead to humanity's demise'; temperature is not the best progress metric; and we should instead focus on boosting human welfare. [bold added; hat tip Gus Van Horn]

Jacinda: "Rarely has a person seemed so suited for a job"

 

"Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand, is reportedly in the running to be the next UN secretary-general. Rarely has a person seemed so suited for a job: an overpraised politician with no ability leading an ineffective organisation with no accountability."

~ Hugo Timms from his op-ed 'Jacinda Ardern leading the UN? God help us'

Milei to the U.N.: "In this very house, that claims to defend human rights, they have allowed the entry of bloody dictatorships without the slightest reproach."

“I want to be clear about something, so there are no misinterpretations. Argentina, which is undergoing a profound process of change at the present, has decided to embrace the ideas of freedom.
    "Those ideas that say that all citizens are born free and equal before the law, that we have inalienable rights granted by the creator, among which are the right to life, liberty and property. ...“Argentina will not support any policy that implies the restriction of individual freedoms, of commerce, nor the violation of the natural rights of individuals. ...
    

"We are at the end of a cycle. The collectivism and moral posturing of the woke agenda have collided with reality and no longer have credible solutions to offer to the actual problems of the world. ...

"In this very house, that claims to defend human rights, they have allowed the entry of bloody dictatorships, like those of Cuba and Venezuela, without the slightest reproach. 

    "In this very house, that claims to defend the rights of women, it allows countries that punish their women for showing skin, to enter the committee for the elimination of discrimination against women. 

    "In this very house, there has been systematic voting against the state of Israel, which is the only country in the Middle East that defends liberal democracy, while simultaneously demonstrating a total inability to respond to the scourge of terrorism. ...

“World history shows that the only way to guarantee prosperity is by limiting the power of the monarch, guaranteeing equality before the law, and defending the right to life, liberty, and property of individuals.

    “We believe in the defence of life, for all. 

    "We believe in the defence of property, for all. 

    "We believe in freedom of expression, for all. 

    "We believe in freedom of worship, for all. 

    "We believe in freedom of commerce, for all. 

    "And we believe in limited governments, all of them. ... 

“The doctrine of the new Argentina is nothing more nor less than the true essence of the UN: The cooperation of nations in defence of freedom....

    "Long live freedom, godammit!"

~ Javier Milei speaking to the U.N. 

 

There are two ways to throttle business. One is a noose thrown over them involuntarily by government — the other is the noose they put on themselves voluntarily.  One contemporary self-chosen noose is known as 'corporate self-responsibility', aka collectivism applied to corporations, explained in this guest post by Kimberlee Josephson. Corporations, she notes, have come to view themselves as social stewards for moral and social change, and are increasingly declaring that they have to "give back." But is that a good thing?

A Brief History of Corporate Social Responsibility

by Kimberlee Josephson

The phenomenon of so-called CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) gained notoriety with Howard R. Bowen’s 1953 publication Social Responsibilities of the Businessman, and although times have since changed and CSR has taken on various forms since, a constant question remains unchanged.

What is the role of business in society?

Some claim that a greater focus on corporate social performance over corporate financial performance is now warranted, while others adhere to a more classical viewpoint, siding with Theodore Levitt’s assertion that business should simply aim to achieve material gain while operating in good faith. Levitt, a German-American economist and professor at the Harvard Business School, spoke of “The Dangers of Social Responsibility” in a 1958 Harvard Business Review article. He posited that profit maximisation over the long term should be the primary goal of business as this would have a 'spillover effect' improving the wellbeing of society. [As if business's primary goal itself is unimportant! - Ed.]

The propensity to exchange to benefit oneself as a means for societal advancement was most notably espoused in Adam Smith’s 1776 magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations. ("It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner," he declared, "but from their regard to their own interest."), but Milton Friedman later drove this message home in his seminal essay in the New York Times Magazine about how the “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.”

Yet, the prioritisation of self-gain has proven to be a hard pill to swallow for a culture that seeks emotional fulfillment via altruism. As such, businesses have not only been encouraged to engage in CSR, but also to harness it and pursue a 'higher' calling.

A prominent depiction of the evolution of business interest in CSR, along with society’s expectations for business behavior, is Archie Carroll’s 'CSR Pyramid,' first published in 1991.

At the base of the pyramid is the economic responsibility for firms to be a productive element of society and contribute to the financial wellbeing of the organisation. The next level concerns the legal responsibility of a firm to abide by the ground rules and regulations within the societies they operate. Further up the pyramid concerns a firm’s ethical responsibility, since laws are not sufficient in and of themselves for maintaining order. Indeed, societies establish mores and conventions which influence culture and communal interactions. For instance, it is not illegal to cheat on one’s spouse, but it does violate the institution of marriage; and to the same extent firms are wedded to the societies they are established within and should abide by certain expectations to maintain a healthy relationship.

The top of the pyramid is designated as the discretionary responsibility of philanthropy, wherein the company “gives back,” and this responsibility was posited to be “desired” by society rather than required.

The CSR Pyramid is still widely referenced and Dr. Wayne Visser, CSR professional [sic], who attests it to be a useful framework for managerial decision making. However, over time, the expectations for the top two tiers of the pyramid have expanded, and even what constitutes ethical behaviour has evolved since Carroll’s publication.

In today’s competitive landscape, CSR constitutes a management strategy that goes beyond corporate giving and charitable networks. In fact, as defined by the United Nations, CSR is quite distinct from philanthropy given that in addition to an economic impact it takes into consideration a firm's social and environmental impact.

An emphasis on the people, planet, and profit has become par for the course, and a variety of methods and forms of assessment regarding "sustainability" have come about for companies to prove their “good” work. John Elkington, who coined the term triple bottom line (TBL) for determining the social, environmental, and economic impact of a firm, claims TBL doesn’t go far enough and the business view of CSR is too narrow. Elkington claims that firms should go beyond aiming to be the “best in the world” and instead aspire to be the “best for the world.”

What is “best,” and for whom it is best, though, is largely subjective and open to interpretation. For instance, some social issues are undebatable, such as the desire to end world hunger, but the means for addressing them are usually complex and contestable. [And corporations by their own productivity — and by focussing on their day jobs — have been doing that dramatically in recent decades with barely any applause whatsoever. — Ed.]

Nevertheless, corporations now view themselves as social stewards with a moral charge, and this is an important shift to note, particularly since it is being driven by public opinion.

A 2018 study reported that 78 percent of Americans believe companies must have a positive societal impact beyond their productive purpose, and 77 percent of Americans “feel a stronger emotional connection” to purpose-driven corporations. Companies are responding to public sentiments and reinforcing such expectations through cause-related marketing campaigns and social labelling schemes, and this is a worrisome matter given the potential to compound the issues at hand.

Unlike the stages of the CSR Pyramid, which tended to be industry oriented, firms stretching beyond their domain of competence to prove themselves as worthy contributors to society at large (rather than streamlining efforts toward core stakeholders) is disconcerting for shareholders and distracting for budding entrepreneurs.

The spearheading of virtuous ventures and advocacy advertising show no sign of slowing down—and it won’t, until social pressure shifts back to value rather than virtue.

[Kimberlee's post first appeared at FEE.Org. Hat tip Loiuse Lamontagne and Thomas Miovas Jr]

UN 'integrity'

"Twenty years of soft power, lobbies and corruption and we have a UN where Russia occupies the chair of Security Council, Iran chair of Disarmament, Saudi Arabia as chair of Gender Equality and Women's Rights."

~ Arthur Rehi

Robin Cooke's Treaty Principles

Some readers and the odd hyperventilating blogger may need to breathe gently while receiving another wee reminder that the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi  were not written in stone on an ancient tablet brought down from the mountains. They were instead written in 1987 on yellow legal pad by one Robin Cooke, then president of NZ's Court of Appeal, and later to be canonised as a justice, gonged as a Lord, and then again as a Baron.

In the absence of any parliamentary guidance, for which we can blame Geoffrey Palmer, it was he who was asked to define what Geoffrey might have meant when he imported from Labour's 1972 manifesto the phrase "have regard to the principles of the treaty" — and he, therefore who, out of whole cloth, was led to declare that the Treaty "created an enduring relationship" between the parties that is "akin to a partnership."

The standing professional evaluation of Cooke's greatness ("a great judge; the finest we have produced") comes from Sian Elias. "His impact on New Zealand law," she said at his funeral, "has been immense." This is true. Not necessarily for the better. "His particular vision of New Zealand law was not without its critics," began one carefully phrased respectful tribute to his passing, "and at times those critics could be savage." And at times the criticism was much deserved." [1]

It's true, for example, that he "mapped out" the ultimate limits to parliamentary power. "I do not think," he said in 1986, "that literal compulsion, by torture for instance, would be within the lawful powers of Parliament. Some common law rights presumably lie so deep that even Parliament could not override them." [2]

This is good. This is very good. The problem with activist judges however, observed Damien Grant recently, "is that they rarely know where the line is. Cooke was so brilliant he was able to see what others couldn’t. Possibly, he was able to see what was never there in the first place."

It was he, for example, who decided that our courts should move away from following the common law of the Commonwealth, founded largely on precedent and the protection of property rights, and move instead towards creating new rights based on United Nations declarations and on judge's subjective and oft unpredictable notions of "fairness." He who declared, without the guidance of a constitutional foundation here, that it would nonetheless be the courts who would decide whether or not give effect to parliament's written law. He who decided that it is "the duty of the courts ... to ascertain the democratic will of the people." [3] He who can be considered "the instigator of judicial activism on the Treaty." [4] He who so interspersed decisions with political statements that parties had to page through carefully in case one missed the actual judgement. He who so merged the common laws with that of equity that it attracted the ire of Australian legal commentators for his "unprincipled decisions."

"The blame," for the destruction this caused in law,  even over the Tasman is, said some of Australia's leading judges, "largely attributable to Lord Cooke’s misguided endeavours." [5] Slating his disregard of “learning and principle,”[6] they deplored "that one man could, in a few years, cause such destruction exposes the fragility of contemporary legal systems and the need for vigilant exposure and rooting out of error.” [7] 

They could have been writing about Cooke's Treaty Principles.

[1] Geoff Mclay, 'Sir Robin Cooke,' NZ Law Institute

[2] Taylor v New Zealand Poultry Board, above n 39, 398 Cooke J. See also Keenan v Attorney-General [1986] BCL 1505 (CA)

[3] (Fundamentals, [1988] NZLJ 158)

[4] David Round, 'Judicial Activism and the Treaty: The Pendulum Returns,' Otago Law Review, (2000) Vol 9 No. 4, p. 654

[5] Preface – Fourth Edition, Meagher, Gummow and Lehane’s Equity, Doctrines and Remedies, p xi.

[6] Fourth Edition, Meagher, Gummow and Lehane’s Equity, Doctrines and Remedies, p. 839

[7]  ibid, p xi.

"The twenty-seven Conferences so far have had no effect on total global emissions. "

Pic from Watts Up With That

"The forthcoming 28th session (COP28) of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ... will convene from 30 November to 12 December in the United Arab Emirates. The ‘Parties’ are UN member states plus some observers. The last one, COP27 at Sharm el Sheik in Egypt, had 12,000 delegates from over 200 countries.
    "There has been one every year since except for 2020. All 27 have warned about the increasingly noxious state of the atmosphere and declaring that something must be done about it before it’s too late. ...
    "The CO2 content of the atmosphere has been measured since 1957 and has risen steadily every year. The twenty-seven Conferences so far have had no effect on total global emissions. Nations have realised their people’s need for electricity had to come first. The cheapest and quickest way to provide that is by way of fossil-fuelled power stations.
    "Leaders of nations may also have wondered at the increasingly manic shouts of: ‘global boiling’; ‘July the warmest in human civilisation’s history’; ‘oceansgrowing hotter … triggering global weather disasters … heat searing enough to knock out mobile phones’; ‘daily temperatures hitting a 100,000 year high’; ‘the September data shows … the planet’s temperature reached its warmest level in modern records and probably in thousands of years.’
    "Advisers to leaders of nations may have pointed out that we have only been measuring daily world-wide temperatures for about 140 years. NASA makes it quite clear that ‘before 1880 there just wasn’t enough data to make accurate calculations.’ The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago; the advisors may have advised that it would therefore seem reasonable to expect that records will be broken, will continue to be broken, and may or may not have anything to do with global warming.
    "There has curiously been very little comment about the willingness of the UN to go on having Conferences calling for actions that don’t [and shouldn't] happen."

~ Ivor Williams, from his post 'Why COPs Should Have No Teeth'

UN's Human Rights Council chair is world's biggest human rights violator.

News just in:

The UN: on the board of which sit some of the world's biggest criminals and most vile dictators -- and now, on the human rights council, sits the worst violator of human rights. This, at the same time as they sponsor terror around the world, and are fuelling three wars simultaneously in the Middle East, the bloodiest of the 21st century -- not to mention the war which their Islamic Republic morality police are carrying out against their own people.

There is precisely zero reason ever to take this organisation, or its endless pontification, seriously.

The ghost of Mahsa Amini rises up in horror.

When an institution reaches the degree of corruption, brazen cynicism and dishonor demonstrated by the U.N. in its shameful history, to discuss it at length is to imply that its members and supporters may possibly be making an innocent error about its nature—which is no longer possible. There is no margin for error about a monstrosity that was created for the alleged purpose of preventing wars by uniting the world against any aggressor, but proceeded to unite it against any victim of aggression. (Ayn Rand)

NB: To tinfoil-hat wearers: No, this is not an argument against "globalisation." It's to point out that the UN is a sick joke.

"It’s a miracle": Cash to UN 'heals' healthy Great Barrier Reef

"It’s a miracle. It’s only six months since they were elected but the Australian Labor Party says the Great Barrier Reef is OK now....
    "Apparently the UN uses the 'in danger' listing a form of coercion to squeeze more money for their favourite causes. It’s nothing about the actual reef. Nothing about what Australians want. And it was never about 'The Science.' ... UN labels are just a form of foreign interference to drum up money for friends which benefit from 'climate money'– like the Bankers who invest in renewables, or the Chinese Communist Party that sells us the windmills and solar panels."

~ Jo Nova, from her post 'UN shakedown: Threats to list healthy reef as in danger just a way to extort “climate” money'

World-class surfer of central banks' tidal wave of counterfeit capital,

Klaus Schwab, speaking to fellow surfers at his absurdly influential World 

Economic Forum. [Image credit: World Economic Forum, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

Vladimir Lenin once boasted that capitalists would sell the rope to hang themselves -- and then set about organising things to make that happen. He failed, but so-called capitalists still line up to keep trying: one latest attempt being something they call 'stakeholder capitalism,' characterised by so-called 'responsible investing.' As Dan Sanchez explains in this Guest Post, it's anything but...

"ESG" -- Capitalism's 'Great Reset'?

Guest Post by Dan Sanchez

Capitalism needs few descriptive adjectives beyond the words "laissez-faire" or "unhampered." In recent years however, so-called "stakeholder capitalism" has taken the global economy by storm. Its champions proclaim that it will save—and remake—the world. Will it live up to its hype or will it destroy capitalism in the name of reforming it?

Proponents pitch their "stakeholder capitalism" as an antidote to the excesses of so-called “shareholder capitalism,” which they condemn as too narrowly focused on maximising profits (especially short-term profits) for corporate shareholders. This, they argue, is socially irresponsible and destructive, because it disregards the interests of other stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, employees, local communities, and society in general.

"Stakeholder capitalism" [which earns every inverted comma we can muster - Ed.] is ostensibly about offering business leaders incentives to take these wider considerations into account and thus make more “sustainable” decisions. This, it is argued, is also better in the long run for businesses’ bottom lines.

The Rise and Reign of ESG

Today’s dominant strain of "stakeholder capitalism" is the doctrine known as ESG, which stands for “environmental, social, and corporate governance.” Got that? The acronym was coined in the 2004 report of Who Cares Wins, a joint initiative of elite financial institutions invited by no less than the United Nations “to develop guidelines and recommendations on how to better integrate environmental, social and corporate governance issues in asset management, securities brokerage services, and associated research functions.”

In other words, how best to make businesses throw themselves under the bus before governments do it for them.

Who Cares Wins operated under the auspices of the UN’s Global Compact, which, according to the report, “is a corporate responsibility initiative launched by Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000 with the primary goal of implementing universal principles in business.” For "universal" read "the UN's."

Much "progress" has been made toward that goal. Since 2004, ESG has evolved from talk of “guidelines and recommendations” to hard, explicit standards that hold sway over huge swathes of the global economy and billions of dollars worth of investment decisions. ESG has begun to move the world.

These standards to which businesses are all-but required to dance are set by ESG rating agencies like the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and enforced by investment firms that manage ESG funds. One such firm is Blackrock, whose CEO Larry Fink is a leading champion of both ESG and SASB.

In December, Reuters published a report titled “How 2021 became the year of ESG investing” which stated that, “ESG funds now account for 10% of worldwide fund assets.”

And in April, Bloomberg reported that ESG, “by some estimates represents more than $40 trillion in assets. According to Morningstar, genuine ESG funds held about $2.7 trillion in managed assets at the end of the fourth quarter.”

To access any of that capital, it is no longer enough for a business to offer a good return on investment (or, sometimes, any at all). It must also report “environmental” and “social” metrics that meet ESG standards.

Is that a welcome development? Will the general public as non-owning “stakeholders” of these businesses be better off thanks to the implementation of ESG standards? Is stakeholder capitalism beginning to reform shareholder capitalism by widening its perspective and curing it of its narrow-minded fixation on profit uber alles?

Capitalism Is for Consumers

To answer that, some clarification is in order. First of all, “shareholder capitalism” is a misleading term for laissez-faire capitalism. It is true that, as Milton Friedman wrote in his 1970 critique of the “social responsibility of business” rhetoric of the time:

In a free‐enterprise, private‐property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.

Since the owners of a publicly traded corporation are its shareholders, it is true that they are and ought to be the “bosses” of a corporation’s employees—including its management. It is also true that corporate executives properly have a fiduciary responsibility to maximise profits for their shareholders.

But that does not mean that shareholders reign supreme under capitalism. As the great economist Ludwig von Mises explained in his book Human Action:

The direction of all economic affairs is in the market society a task of the entrepreneurs [which, according to Mises’s technical definition includes shareholding investors]. Theirs is the control of production. They are at the helm and steer the ship. A superficial observer would believe that they are supreme. But they are not. They are bound to obey unconditionally the captain's orders. The captain is the consumer.

The “sovereign consumers,” as Mises calls them, issue their orders through “their buying and their abstention from buying.” Those orders are transmitted throughout the entire economy via the price system. Entrepreneurs and investors who correctly anticipate those orders and direct production accordingly are rewarded with profits. But if one, as Mises says, “does not strictly obey the orders of the public as they are conveyed to him by the structure of market prices, he suffers losses, he goes bankrupt, and is thus removed from his eminent position at the helm. Other men who did better in satisfying the demand of the consumers replace him.”

Under laissez-faire capitalism therefore, the principal "stakeholders" whose preferences reign supreme are not not shareholders, but consumers. And (as Mises wrote in his paper “Profit and Loss”) shareholder profit is a measure of—and motivating reward for—success “in adjusting the course of production activities to the most urgent demand of the consumers.” 

What this means for the “stakeholder capitalism” discussion is that, to the extent that the profit-and-loss metric is discounted for the sake of competing objectives (like serving other “stakeholders”), the sovereign consumers are dethroned, disregarded, and relatively impoverished.

Now it’s at least conceivable that ESG standards are not competing, but rather complementary to the profit-and-loss metric and thus serving consumers. In fact, that’s a big part of the ESG sales pitch: that corporations who adopt and adhere to ESG standards will enjoy higher long-term profits, because breaking free of their fixation on short-term shareholder returns will enable them to embrace more “sustainable” business practices.

In a free unhampered market, whether that promise would be fulfilled or not would be for the sovereign consumers to decide, and ESG would rise or fall on its own merits.

Who Complies Wins

Unfortunately, our market economy is far from free or unhampered. The State has instead rigged capital markets for the benefit of its elite lackeys in the financial industry: like those “Who Cares Wins” fat cats who started the ESG ball rolling in 2004 under the auspices of the United Nations.

One of the prime ways the State rigs markets is through central bank policy.

The prodigious amount of newly created money that the Federal Reserve and other central banks have pumped into financial institutions in recent years has transferred vast amounts of real wealth to those institutions from the general public. As a result, those institutions—big banks and investment companies—are now much more beholden to the State and much less beholden to consumers for their wealth.

As they say, “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” So it’s no surprise that these institutions are stumbling over themselves to get on board the State’s ESG bandwagon. 

And that means that if non-financial corporations want access to the Fed’s money tap, and thus to the stream of counterfeit capital gushing out, they too have to get with the ESG program. Especially as the average consumer becomes increasingly impoverished by disastrous economic policies, the incentive for corporations to earn market profit by pleasing consumers is being progressively superseded by the incentive to gain access to the Fed’s flow of loot by meeting the State’s “social” standards.

By increasingly controlling capital flows, the State is gaining ever more control over the entire economy.

This may explain the recent willingness of so many corporations to alienate customers and sacrifice profits on the altar of “green” and “woke” politics. It's not necessarily that they embrace the nonsense themselves (though many do); it's that the governments and their well-rewarded agents have rigged businesses' financial incentives that way.

It is no coincidence that Klaus Schaub, the preeminent champion of the “Great Reset” also co-authored a book titled Stakeholder Capitalism. The upshot of "stakeholder capitalism" is that consumer is supplanted as the economy's supreme stakeholder by The State. The sick joke of stakeholder capitalism therefore is that it “reforms” capitalism by transforming it into a form of socialism. Lenin would be laughing up his sleeve.

Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), editor-in-chief of FEE.org, and writer for (among others) The Mission, the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, David Stockman’s Contra Corner, and many other popular web sites. He wrote a weekly column for Antiwar.com.
At the Mises Institute, Dan was editor of Mises.org and launched the Mises Academy, the first ever free-market economics online learning platform.
Dan has delivered speeches for FEE, Praxis, the Mises Institute, Liberty on the Rocks, America’s Future Foundation, and more.

A version of his post first appeared at FEE.Org.

"The UN's very first charter is to maintain peace and make sure that peace is adhered to. Where is the peace?"

"[The very first charter of the United Nations is to] maintain peace and make sure that peace is adhered to. Where is the peace? Where are those guarantees that the UN needs to guarantee? [Russia’s actions in Ukraine have resulted in] the most terrible war crimes of all times we have seen since the end of World War Two....
    "We are dealing with a state that is turning the veto into the UN security council into the right to die.
    "This undermines the whole architecture of global security. It allows them to go unpunished. So they are destroying everything that they can. [The council must] remove Russia as an aggressor and a source of war so it cannot block decisions about its own aggression, its own war.
    "Do you think that the time of international law is gone? If your answer is no, then you need to act immediately.
    "The UN charter must be restored immediately. The UN system must be reformed immediately so that the veto is not the right to die. Then the next option would be to dissolve yourself altogether.”
          ~ Volodomyr Zelenskiy, addressing the United Nations overnight

"Psychologically, the U.N. has contributed a great deal to the gray swamp of demoralisation — of cynicism, bitterness, hopelessness, fear and nameless guilt — which is swallowing the Western world.... establishing the notion that the difference between human rights and mass slaughter is merely a difference of political opinion....
    "[The UN] is supposed to be dedicated to preserving peace and to protecting rights, and yet Russia, which is the worst offender against peace and individual rights, on the largest scale, is one of the charter members. That really amounts to a town’s having gangsters as part of its crime-fighting committee."
          ~ Ayn Rand, from her essay 'The Cult of Moral Grayness'

"Q: Would you favour U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations? A: Yes. I do not sanction the grotesque pretense of an organisation allegedly devoted to world peace and human rights which includes Soviet Russia, the worst aggressor and bloodiest butcher in history, as one of its members. The notion of protecting rights, with Soviet Russia among the protectors, is an insult to the concept of rights and to the intelligence of any man who is asked to endorse or sanction such an organisation. I do not believe that an individual should cooperate with criminals, and, for all the same reasons, I do not believe that free countries should cooperate with dictatorships."
          ~ Ayn Rand, from her 1964 Playboy interview

#TopTen | No. 10: McCully Dances

This year I wrote and posted 794 posts. (This is the 796th)

Of those, this from November the 3rd was the tenth most popular, which with this week’s shameful work at the UN gains an added relevance…

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McCully Dances

Murray McCully is a strategically astute forward-thinking Foreign Minister who always knows how to get things done. 

Actually, no, he’s not. As the Saudi sheep-to-sand deal has always suggested, he’s either incompetent or he’s corrupt. And as the just-released 18-months-in-the-preparation AG report into the deal has just concluded that he is definitely not corrupt (can’t be; the Attorney-General no less says so!), then that only leaves the other alternative. As one wag said yesterday, "’significant shortcomings’ is probably the best performance review Murray's had in ages."

Hearing him yesterday declare Saudi Arabia to be “the gateway for the African continent” only confirms that conclusion about his competence – also suggesting he invest in a better atlas.

McCully’s pandering to Hmood Al Ali Al Khalaf – from sending him millions of dollars, then flying over live sheep, to setting up some kind of “Agrihub” in the middle of the Arabian desert, to who knows what else? – all of this game-playing suggests less a competent minister than someone who has been well played by Mr Al Khalaf. It puts one in mind not so much of a crafty Metternich who “gets the job done” but a small-time Nigerian scammer made by a good scambaiter to be his dupe.

Something like this, with McCully being the retard with the skateboard:

 

 

[Cartoon by Emmerson]

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Tomorrow, the year’s ninth-most popular post and a question: Are you racist?

RELATED:

• “But what’s it got to do with Murray McCully and his now very public emails? Well, the little dwarf certainly has no talent, but he sure is a shifty little fuck.  Just shifty enough to make wonder whether anyone really stole them. Just the sort of devious attention-seeker who might think letting his own emails out into the wild might garner him some.”
  No, McCully wasn’t there – NOT PC, 2012
• “[In] 1967, when Israel faced off against neighbouring Arab states. In London, Paris, and other capitals people took to the streets to endorse Israel. Editorials in The Times of London, The Guardian, The Economist, and Time magazine aligned with Israel. So did notable intellectuals and academics; one group even took out an ad spelling out its rationale in the Washington Post.
      “What happened since then to bring about [the] sea change [in which the hosannas of endorsement have transformed into choruses of denunciation]? In [his book] Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel, scholar Joshua Muravchik presents a finely textured history that tells how international opinion turned so sharply against Israel.
      “The book’s account lays stress on two key developments, one political, the other intellectual.”
  The Moral High Ground, Usurped – Elan Journo, VOICES FOR REASON
• “The Israelis and the Palestinians are not morally equal: Israel is the only free country in a region dominated by Arab monarchies, theocracies and dictatorships. It is only the citizens of Israel — Arabs and Jews alike — who enjoy the right to express their views, to criticise their government, to form political parties, to publish private newspapers, to hold free elections. When Arab authorities deny the most basic freedoms to their own people, it is obscene for them to start claiming that Israel is violating the Palestinians’ rights. All Arab citizens who are genuinely concerned with human rights should, as their very first action, seek to oust their own despotic rulers and adopt the type of free society that characterises Israel.”
  Israel Has a Moral Right to Its Life – Yaron Brook & Peter Schwartz, VOICES FOR REASON

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Quote of the Day: On the United Nations

 

“The United Nations, a place where good and evil meet to pretend there's no such thing as good and evil.”
~ cartoonist Bosch Fawstin

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Helen Clark will not be UN Secretary General

 

Polls showing Helen Clark plummeting in support suggest she is looking increasingly unlikely to become head of the world’s most corrupt political organisation.

Which is what we said here a few months ago on the back of a story spread by Jim Rose: that she won’t become become head of the world’s most corrupt political organisation precisely because what the world’s most corrupt political organisation wants at its head is not competence, but a lapdog– someone so grateful to be there they’ll be happy to ignore all the bodies out the back.

Whatever you think about Helen Clark, does that sound like her?

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Helen Clark: UN must “get better” at the core job it’s never done

 

Helen Clark is still going for the top job at the only place in the world that could teach FIFA something about corruption (not being about merit, a job she’s unlikely to get), yet her speech in support of her goal yesterday tells you something about how it became that way.

“We have to get better at preventing conflict and resolving conflict,” she said in her opening address.

Just think about that for a moment: We, the United Nations Organisation, have to get better at preventing conflict and resolving conflict. Think about that for a moment while you take a small piece of paper on which you write down the very reason for which the UN was allegedly formed.

Now, hands up all of you who wrote down something like “preventing and resolving conflict.”  You know, peace? Do I have a clear majority here? It’s core job, at least what it said on the box it came in, was supposed to be preventing and resolving conflict. It was right there in all the well-wishing speeches that launched it. But that was before it began delivering helpless country after helpless country into the arms of those sitting on the UN’s board; sending Trojan horses into western democracies with names like Agenda 21, Earth Charter, Climate Change, sustainable development and declarations of indigneous psuedo-rights; sending blue-helmeted troops to the world’s most dangerous places to get shot at while unspeakable horrors happened around them; and setting up commissions on what they call “human rights” on which sit some of the biggest torturers on the planet …

You might call all of this “mission creep,” except what else could you expect of an organisation whose mission in its founders’ eyes was never perpetual peace and who had on its founding board, and regularly hosts on its podium, some of the biggest and most devious butchers on the planet. It hasn’t just lost its way. It never had any other.

To see just a small part of the problem, take that small piece of paper again and list on it all the conflicts, genocides or ethnic cleansings the UN has prevented or resolved. Still got plenty of space left? Of course you have. Its abject failure in preventing or resolving any conflict or ending any genocide must surely give pause to even the most ardent supporter of this bastion of bloated corruption. “Get better at preventing conflict?” It would have to begin doing that job at all!

“When an institution reaches the degree of corruption, brazen cynicism and dishonour demonstrated by the U.N. in its shameful history,” suggested Ayn Rand many years ago, “to discuss it at length is to imply that its members and supporters may possibly be making an innocent error about its nature—which is no longer possible.”

I wish Helen Clark well in her bid to cleanse these foul-smelling Augean stables.  It is possibly genuine. She is possibly innocent. Or, like Arthur Schlesinger, close adviser to and hagiographer of President Kennedy, maybe she too “cannot resist the feeling that the UN world is really an immense and picturesque form of make-believe” -- one in which she knows she performs well.

Why wouldn’t you want to make the most of your talents?

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Why Helen Clark will not be UN Secretary General

Why, without a miracle, will Helen Clark never become Secretary-General of the world’s most corrupt political organisation? Simply because it is the world’s most corrupt political organisation, and those deciding the question don’t want someone knowing where all their bodies are buried.

Jim Rose expains it, starting with a story told by (former Aussie PM) Bob Hawke:

Bob Hawke told us a story about a conversation he had with Margaret Thatcher on the candidature of [Hawke’s predecessor] Malcolm Fraser.
    Hawke said that Thatcher said do you really want Malcolm Fraser beating down your door every day about apartheid. She had a point.
    I [Jim Rose] took that to mean that Fraser had independent stature as a former prime minister. He could annoy powerful people because he had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
    The Nigerian chief who got the job will be so grateful for the appointment that he would not upset his sponsors [Hawke said].
    And that is why Helen Clark will not become UN Secretary General. Because she is overqualified.
    UN Secretary General is not the best job Clark has ever had. She has independent gravitas and everything to gain and nothing to lose by being an activist secretary general.
    All previous Secretary Generals were obscure foreign ministers who will be just so grateful for the big promotion. They do not have independent gravitas.
    If you look at positions such as president of the European commission, managing director of the IMF or president of the World Bank and other international appointments, they do not go to statesman.

Fair point.

[Edited]

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Inwishtigating the UN

"Don't believe half of what you read,
And none of what you hear."
~ Lou Reed

Ian Wishard and his conspiracy theories refuse to go away. I keep hearing this fading hero of tin-foil journalism still peddling his books on Newstalk ZB, so I can only presume someone somewhere must still be buying them in sufficient numbers for him to make a living. Which is scary.

Someone who does keeps recommending to me I read Wish-Hard’s most recent, apparently called Totalitaria.

I haven’t, just presuming it was his usual garbage. Which, in a sense, it is. If this review is in any way accurate, then once again he delivers not so much a smoking gun as a cloud of reeking smoke, amongst which readers are invited to set their own fire—though this time his vapid rabbit hole takes an even crazier turn than normal. Take a deep breath and discover how the reviewer describes The Wish-Hard conspiracy theory behind the U.N. Are you ready …

‘Totalitaria’ by Ian Wishart links government surveillance, Agenda 21, the Earth Charter, national education standards, and church corruption with [wait for it] Satanism in high places.

Yes, you read that right. The wrongs rorted and calamities compounded by the dumb fumblers at the United Nations is not because, you know they have most of the world’s biggest villains sitting on the board, or biggest torturers on their Human “Rights” Committee, or because dictators are given a virtual moral sanction—or even just because they’re an organisation founded on the premise that big government can cure everything--but because it’s all really a covert Satanist plot.

Wishart, a self-described conservative Christian, boldly says an occult group dedicated to the return of their deity that they privately call Satan/Lucifer and publicly refer to as Gaia/Mother Earth has, for 150 years and through a number of front organizations, been evangelizing just as hard as the Christian Church.
    The Theosophical Society, a group established by Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky in 1875, re-ignited the almost extinct religion of Buddhism as a façade for western esotericism/Satanism that has since then spread the Luciferian doctrine through universities, movies, music and literature, he wrote.
Most interesting is Wishart’s account of how the Luciferians captured the United Nations as it was set up.

The use of the word “interesting” rather than, perhaps, “bizarre,” “ludicrous” or even “hysterically funny,” gives the clue that this is a favourable review of the conspiracy trope rather than the mirth it deserves. The trope’s recounting continues with the further “proof” that:

There is no Christian chapel in the United Nations building but there is an altar to Lucifer …
Wishart points to a meditation room directly below the general assembly room in the United Nations building in New York that contains a 6500kg block of iron ore bathed in a single beams of light -- an altar to the “God of All” … described as the “Absolute Supreme.”

Described by whom, we are not told.

And I do swear I am not making these quotes up. They come directly from the sympathetic review.

Further, says Mr Conspiracy, the conspiracy extends to church leaders, including the Pope, who “as the head of the Roman Catholic Church, on October 4, 1965, prayed at that altar of Lucifer then symbolically swore the church’s allegiance to the United Nations and its general secretary,” and other “followers [who] obtained high office in the United Nations, World Bank, and other transnational agencies enabling them to manipulate international policy, Wishart wrote.” The word “breathlessly should probably be inserted at that point.

What is it all for when you pull back the curtain? Wishart’s answer:

The purpose of raising consciousness was really to hasten the return of the Coming One/Satan through an increase in planetary vibrations, Wishart wrote.

Planetary Vibrations.

You see, when you are unable to understand that ideas move people, then you’re left with little to explain how, for instance, “Agenda 21, a non-binding, voluntary action plan of the United Nations for sustainable development produced at the UN Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and the Earth Charter, an international declaration of fundamental values and principles that originated in 1987 … [have] become the guiding documents for national and local governments and bureaucracies ...”

If you understand that ideas do move people, you’ll understand then that those charters were the work of people sharing a similar philosophical outlook to those writing the guiding documents for national and local governments and bureaucracies, and so would naturally find any such charters, treaties or declarations congenial—especially of they too were lovers of big government and wished to see more of it.

No need for vibrations, beams of light, or blocks of iron. Or for blockheaded conspiracy theories about what allegedly moves the world.

The UN certainly deserves a serious investigation, not a simple-minded inwishtigation like this. But for someone immune to the power of ideas, all they have to explain the complicated old world they see out there is a conspiracy, and so begin connecting the few random dots that swim past them. But if you do find random dots are pointing you to “ the return of the Coming One/Satan through an increase in planetary vibrations,” then that is not a time to leap into print, but to place yourself instead into care. Or at least begin to question your modus operandi.

I mean, you would, wouldn’t you.

We should probably leave the last word here to Eleanor Roosevelt, who did much to set up the United Nations, but in one of her few cogent moments observed that

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

It seems fairly obvious by that standard where our tinfoil-hatted historian lies.

Property Rights of the Poor Need to be Recognised in Developing Countries

I was standing in line behind Helen Clark getting coffee just before Christmas.  To be fair I didn’t notice it was her until the starstruck barista delayed her fainting long enough to tell me who had caused her heart to flutter so. It was the head of the UN, she said.  (I felt it churlish to point out Miss Clark is actually head of the UN’s development programme and not yet the whole UN, and since I felt protective of my long black anyway I just smiled for her appreciation of how she had just been touched by greatness).

Strangely, Miss Clark didn’t turn to me to ask for advice in her present portfolio area, i..e, how to best help develop developing countries, but if she had I’d have pointed her to something like the works of Hernando de Soto, or this guest post by Peter F. Schaefer and Clayton Schaefer, advising things Miss Clark’s development agency has never (and would never) consider.

Property Rights of the Poor Need to be Recognised in Developing Countries

GUEST POST: Harmless window dressing?

Guest post by Reuben P. Chapple

New Zealand’s recent adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is not binding and lacks an enforcement mechanism. Nonetheless, this document is far from harmless.

The Declaration’s high-sounding phrases on the rights of indigenous people to self-determination, to maintain their own languages and cultures, to protect their natural and cultural heritage, and manage their own affairs, will surely embolden the Maori Sovereignty movement.

All ideas have a pedigree. The ideological underpinning of both the UN Declaration and the Maori Sovereignty movement lies in the early 20th Century writings of Communist revolutionaries Lenin and Stalin on something they called “The National Question.”

Communists specialise in creating social discord to divide an existing society into “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups. They work tirelessly to persuade the supposedly downtrodden that they have a grievance then promise to help them get what they want.

Around 1905, Lenin and Stalin noted that Tsarist Russia consisted not just of ethnic Russians, but upwards of 80 formerly tribal subject peoples, conquered by the Czars over the preceding 500 years and forcibly Russified. To expand the Bolshevik support base, these peoples were promised “the right to manage their own affairs,” “the right to self-determination,” “the right to speak, read, write, use, and be taught in their own language” etc. It is this more than 100 year-old Communist cant that now surfaces in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.