CHILLICOTHE, Ohio — Republican J.D. Vance, running for Ohio’s open United States Senate seat, told Breitbart News that Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) policies are “basically a massive racket to enrich” Wall Street elites.
ESG policies are a form of leftist activism in financial investing that has become the latest vector to influence the way Wall Street financial firms and corporations continue to take social and political positions that do not relate to their business, such as stances related to climate change as well as the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) agenda.
“ESG is basically a massive racket to enrich Wall Street and enrich the financial sector of the country, at the expense of the industries that actually employ a lot of Ohio’s workers for middle-class jobs,” Vance told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview in Chillicothe, during a swing through southeast Ohio to channel his Appalachian roots.
Wall Street firms, like BlackRock, sell ESG as a way to invest on specific criteria that the political Left pushes on voters and consumers. In effect, ESG investing ensures such firms can drive up energy costs on Americans by boycotting fossil fuel companies.
In Texas, officials have banned state contracts with 10 Wall Street firms over their involvement in ESG investing which has been partially blamed for skyrocketing energy prices.
Likewise, last month, 19 Republican attorneys general opened an investigation into six Wall Street firms for their involvement with the United Nations (UN) Net-Zero Banking Alliance which sets emission reduction targets in their lending and investment portfolios to reach net zero by 2050.
Vance said Republicans must not sit by and allow Wall Street firms to set the rules for the nation’s working and middle class in a variety of private sector jobs. Legislation, Vance said, is needed to take on the issue.
“As important as it is to recognize how much damage has been done over the last 30 years, there’s still a lot of good industrial capacity in Ohio that we can build on top of,” Vance said. “ESG is basically a racket to destroy what we still have so that a few people on Wall Street can make some money.”
“I’ve seen this personally. I work in the tech world [and] I have seen companies misuse this system,” Vance continued. “I don’t blame an American company for following the laws of its own country; I blame the country for not passing laws to protect American workers.”
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) has been silent on the issue of ESG investing. In his bid against Vance, Ryan has continued to rake in campaign contributions from some of the nation’s largest multinational corporations, including Alphabet Inc., Microsoft, and Comcast, all of which are involved with ESG investing.
Vance has also looked beyond ESG investing when it comes to lawmakers’ seemingly ignoring corporate America’s selling out America’s working and middle class to line their own pockets.
In the same interview, Vance called the nation’s H-1B visa program a “scam” that has allowed decades of high-paying white-collar jobs to be taken by imported foreign visa workers as qualified Americans are laid off and forced to train their foreign replacements.
Vance said the new Congress must reverse federal immigration laws on the H-1B visa program.
“Generally speaking, a lot of the H-1B abuse we see is in the interests of the people hiring the [foreign visa] worker, who can undercut the wages of Americans, but is it in the interest of the 700 Ohioans who lost their jobs? Absolutely not,” Vance told Breitbart News.
Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jbliss@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter @JacobMBliss.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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