There's been some great reporting lately on the billionaire-backed campaign to use racism to activate the conservative base against "Woke Wall Street" (an oxymoron if ever there was one), as states calculate the billions of dollars in losses that Republicans' bills would lead to if passed.
Earlier this month, for example, market-oriented CNBC'S Brian Schwartz detailed "how Trump allies and wealthy donors helped fuel the GOP fight against ESG." Of particular interest was the 1792 Exchange, a newly named group that's dedicated solely to the campaign to roll back environmental, social, and governance (ESG) guidelines for investors. It turns out that the group is a rebrand of an old group called "Constitutional Congress," and its biggest funder prior to the anti-ESG work was the National Christian Charitable Foundation, which is a dark money passthrough that provides anonymity to donors.
Yesterday, 1792 Exchange President Paul Fitzpatrick published an op-ed in The Washington Examiner that potentially signals a new, much more specific agenda for the campaign. He targets specific climate finance groups and campaigns, calling for financial institutions to cut ties with the climate finance group CERES and vote against proxy shareholder resolutions put forward by groups like As You Sow.
Two more of his demands of corporate America are to oppose "board members who push ESG," and then to stop "working with BlackRock and StateStreet to push ESG… through votes and 'engagement' with CEOs." Apparently, the people who claim to care about freedom don't want companies to be free to select board members who care about proper corporate governance, or be free to talk to CEOs about social issues that might effect the workplace, like racism.
But the fifth demand is by far the most revealing: "not blocking distributions from Donor Advised Funds to groups that are unpopular with progressives, such as those misidentified as 'hate groups' by the Southern Poverty Law Center."
Though "misidentified" would suggest that Fitzpatrick thinks the SPLC's widely renowned work on hate groups is flawed (and indeed he links to a different Washington Examiner piece suggesting as much), that's hardly a big enough fig leaf to disguise that his problem isn't with groups being mistakenly listed. After all, such a mistake would be quickly corrected by a defamation-vulnerable group like SPLC.
The fact that a core plank of the 1792 Exchange’s policy is the assertion that it should be easier to launder money to hate groups proves that the supposedly finance-minded anti-ESG campaign isn't really about protecting corporate investments. As we explained last year, billionaires use racism to mobilize and radicalize a political base that can lobby for their otherwise terribly unpopular policies.
And the 1792 Exchange's anti-freedom agenda is basically hiding in plain sight.
The group takes its name from the Buttonwood Agreement, "which established America's first stock exchange in 1792." Fitzpatrick explains that "signers included people of different faiths, political views, and even those who fought on opposite sides of the Revolutionary War" who all agreed that "such views should not interfere with honest and profitable commerce."
Now, some might be hesitant to point to a time in American history where Black people were enslaved as property as their inspiration for a better economic system. But that's just the obvious reason why believing the 1792 Exchange's schtick requires complete, deliberate historical ignorance.
The more interesting reason comes from the most easily understood description of the Buttonwood Agreement that we found online. The Agreement "was a price-fixing arrangement among brokers not to undercut each other on commissions" that "remained a feature of the Wall Street financial market until 1975, when the Securities and Exchange Commission abolished them, forcing brokers to compete in terms of price." And as you might expect, the regulation led to "greatly reduced commissions and, therefore, greatly increased volume, bringing today’s Wall Street into being."
So, a group that took its name from a price-fixing agreement is arguing that 1) the market should be free from regulations, except, of course, those requiring that investors do business with fossil fuel companies and gun makers or get shunned by the state, and 2) donors should make sure it's easy to conceal funding of hate groups.
Are these really the sorts of people you'd want to trust with your retirement fund?