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May
25
2023

DEI Must DIE
 Jim Rickards

After taking in hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate contributions, paying millions in bonuses and buying million-dollar mansions for founders, BLM (Bolshevik Lives Matter) ran a $9 million deficit.

Cowardly CEOs eager to appease the woke mob fall for these scams every time. Could we soon be witnessing the demise of the “DEI” movement?

The letters “DEI” stand for diversity, equity and inclusion, which is the mantra of corporate and political America today.

It sounds good. Who doesn’t like diversity in experience and conversation? Who doesn’t support equity? And what’s wrong with the inclusion of individuals in larger groups and institutions? Nothing.

The problem is that none of these words is used in any common-sense way. They’re used in Orwellian fashion to mean almost their exact opposites.

In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell wrote the slogan of Big Brother’s political party as WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Today’s DEI pushers have done Orwell proud. Diversity means uniformity of thought and practice along ideological and political lines. Equity does not mean equality of opportunity. It means equality of result, which involves handicapping the most talented and taking from the most productive to give handouts to the laziest and least motivated.

Inclusion means exclusion of whites from Black dorms, exclusion of unpopular speakers from public venues and exclusion of ideas that vary from a politically rigid orthodoxy. The DEI thought agenda is being enforced by armies of inspectors and compliance officers who will fire you, demote you and denigrate you in front of your peers if you deviate from their thought control.

It’s time for DEI to DIE. It’s time to exclude these ideas from the campuses, institutions and corporations where they prevail.

Many decent-minded Americans have begun to push back against the DEI agenda but none more aggressively and successfully than Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. DeSantis has just signed legislation that eliminates DEI in higher education in the state of Florida.

This comes after DeSantis fired the president and the entire board of trustees of the New College of Florida for their DEI propaganda and replaced them with officials who value honest education and the study of the humanities.

A lot of people talk a lot about DEI but don’t actually do anything except create sound-bites. DeSantis gets things done. Let’s hope he’s not alone.

The future of education, open debate and creativity is at stake.

Related to the DEI agenda is the ESG agenda. And the main component of the ESG agenda is climate. Below, I show you how that climate agenda has little to do with climate — and everything to do with control over you. Read on.

The Green Fraud

Those yelling the loudest about climate change want to destroy the oil and natural gas industry, destroy nuclear power plant construction, shut down coal-fired plants, end coal mining, mandate electric vehicles (EVs) on very short deadlines and eliminate gas stoves in your kitchen, fireplaces and even outdoor barbecues.

They also want to build wind turbine arrays offshore and on deserts, plains and even mountains near you. They want to install solar module fields on every rooftop and open space near a population center. The climate change radicals want to increase the mining of lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, rare earths and other dangerous chemicals to feed their obsession with EV batteries.

They’re spending hundreds of billions of tax dollars to subsidize the EVs, battery manufacturing and a coast-to-coast network of charging stations to keep the EVs moving (even if they do have to stop for a charge every 180 miles).

The greenies also want to mandate “15-minute cities” where you can walk everywhere in town within 15 minutes, which means you won’t need your car to visit a doctor, dry cleaner, grocery store, pharmacy or any of the other locations we routinely visit for errands and necessities.

That may sound attractive if you chose it voluntarily. That’s not what the greenies have in mind. They want 15-minute cities as a Trojan horse to eliminate automobiles entirely and force you to ride bicycles or use public transportation. In the end, you’ll need a permit to fly to another city.

The permits will be rationed and you’ll have to put yourself on a waiting list until your turn. You can pay for your ticket with the new central bank digital currency (CBDC), assuming your social credit score is high enough and you didn’t vote for the wrong candidate in the last election.

In short, the climate change agenda is not about climate change. It’s about total political and economic control of the population. So-called climate change is an elite scare tactic to get you to fall into line and obey government orders (as most people do).

Elites claim that if we don’t radically reduce CO2 (carbon dioxide) and CH4 (methane) emissions, global warming will melt the ice caps, raise sea levels, put island nations underwater and flood the New York City subway system in 10 years or less. They’ve been making similar claims for 40 years and they’ve been wrong every time. That doesn’t stop them. Fear works.

What is new is that the climate crowd now has the political power they need to push their agenda using fear and the regulatory state to attack your means of transportation, your personal conveniences and your consumer choices.

This is being enabled by Joe Biden and thousands of bureaucrats buried in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Energy (DOE), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and scores of other agencies.

The U.S. Treasury, SEC and the Federal Reserve have even joined in by regulating loans to the oil and gas industry and requiring financial disclosures about climate change and other ESG (environment, social and governance) metrics.

Meanwhile, the World Bank (controlled by the U.S.) is being encouraged to deny loans to industries that involve carbon-based development and to steer financing toward projects approved by the climate mavens. This is called the “all of government” approach in which every agency gets involved in pushing the climate agenda, even if it’s not the primary job of that agency. The pressure never stops.

In short, the climate change debate could not be more relevant to investors. Those calling the shots in the Green New Deal (what I call the Green New Scam) will decide which industries win or lose, which projects get financed (or not), which initiatives are subsidized by the government or left to wither on the vine and which companies will feel the regulatory heat if they don’t get with Biden’s programs.

Climate change is not a sideshow. Nothing is more relevant to markets, investors and asset allocators today.

Climate change is real but it’s slow and powerful and has nothing to do with trace gasses such as carbon dioxide and methane. It’s caused by the interaction of complex systems such as sun cycles, ocean currents, wind patterns including the jet stream, volcanic activity, salinity levels (in turn caused by ocean current subduction) and other mega-systems over which humans have no control.

We’re living in a world where major forces beyond our control have been hijacked by elites to create a climate of fear to achieve their agenda of total government command over your life. It’s time for Americans and citizens around the world to learn the facts, push back on the elites and reestablish public policy based on real science. It’s time to push the flawed models, phony data and bogus warnings out of the way.

Unfortunately, the public relies on media elites and political leaders for their information. As decades roll by and scare stories are discredited time and again, public skepticism will rise and the alarmists will lose credibility.

The danger is that alarmists may pass legislation, limit choices and impose costs in the name of climate change before the public catches on to the scam. At that point, the economic damage becomes semi-permanent even if alarmism fades.

In the elites’ vision, citizens will be confined to small towns or cities for extended periods. Travel will be tightly restricted. Appliances will be downsized with no consumer choice allowed. Taxes will be imposed on targeted activities to discourage use. Education will be turned to indoctrination to raise a generation who believe in the climate lies needed to gain support for these measures (that kind of indoctrination has been underway for some years).

Welcome to the world of the green elite. It’s coercive, restrictive, arrogant and apparently not much fun. It’s a world where the elites control everything and you do as you’re told. It’s a world based on lies and fear. It’s coming sooner than you expect unless citizens can join hands, reassert the truth and push the elites back into a corner where they belong.

James G. Rickards is the editor of Strategic Intelligence. He is an American lawyer, economist, and investment banker with 35 years of experience working in capital markets on Wall Street. He was the principal negotiator of the rescue of Long-Term Capital Management L.P. (LTCM) by the U.S Federal Reserve in 1998. His clients include institutional investors and government directorates. His work is regularly featured in the Financial Times, Evening Standard, New York Times, The Telegraph, and Washington Post, and he is frequently a guest on BBC, RTE Irish National Radio, CNN, NPR, CSPAN, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox, and The Wall Street Journal. He has contributed as an advisor on capital markets to the U.S. intelligence community, and at the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon. Rickards is the author of The New Case for Gold (April 2016), and three New York Times best sellers, The Death of Money (2014), Currency Wars (2011), The Road to Ruin (2016) from Penguin Random House.

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