Can Vivek Ramaswamy Put Wokeism Out of Business? – WSJ

The birth of wokeism was a godsend to corporations, Mr. Ramaswamy says. It helped defang the left. Wokeism lent a lifeline to the people who were in charge of the big banks. They thought, This stuff is easy!   They applauded diversity and inclusion, appointed token female and minority directors, and mused about the racially disparate impact of climate change. So, in Mr. Ramaswamy s narrative, a bunch of big banks got together with a bunch of millennials, birthed woke capitalism, and then put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption. Now, in Mr. Ramaswamy s tart verdict, big business makes money by critiquing itself.

Mr. Ramaswamy regards Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as the patron saint of wokeism for his relentless propagation of stakeholder capitalism the view that the unspoken bargain in the grant to corporations of limited liability is that they must do social good on the side.

Davos is the Woke Vatican, Mr. Ramaswamy says; Al Gore and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, are its archbishops. CEOs further down the chain he mentions James Quincey of Coca-Cola, Ed Bastian of Delta, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, John Donahoe of Nike and Alan Jope of Unilever are its cardinals.

Mr. Ramaswamy says that unlike the investigative Spotlight team at the Boston Globe, I m a whistleblower, not a journalist. But the church analogy holds strong. He paraphrases a line in the movie: It takes a village to raise a child, then it takes a village to abuse one. In the case of my book, the child I m concerned about is American democracy.

In league with the woke left, corporate America uses force as a substitute for open deliberation and debate, Mr. Ramaswamy says. There s the sustainability accounting standards board of BlackRock, which effectively demands that in order to win an investment from BlackRock, the largest asset-manager in the world, you must abide by the standards of that board.

via www.wsj.com

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