Giorgia Meloni's election as Italian PM - initial thoughts

 My current reaction is a mixture of encouragement and profound misgivings.

She was on fire in her acceptance speech and minced no words in calling out wokeness for the cultural cancer it is. I was mightily impressed that she quoted Chesterton toward the end (""Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible.")

Still, I find her problematic for reasons similar to those that add an element of wariness in the way I approach theologian Carl Truman. Like Truman, she has no use for the obliteration of the basic architecture of the universe into which progressivism has morphed. (By the way - and sorry for the slight digression - there is a fine essay on this subject, couched as look at the difference between equality and sameness, at Quillette this morning. It's by Bo Winegard, to whom I'll start paying more attention. Highly recommend it.)

But, as I am with Truman, I'm uncomfortable with some of the company she's kept over the years.

She's a go-getter, to be sure. At 15, she joined the Italian Social Movement's Youth Front. Now, the MSI had its roots in continued support for Mussolini's general program into the late 1940s, but she did go with the National Alliance when that formed and sought to distance itself from that fascist past. Her coziness with former PM Berlusconi bothers me, as does the addition of the tricolor flame, symbolizing Mussolini's remains, to the logo of her party Brothers of Italy.

But there was none of that in her acceptance speech. I suppose one reaction to that could be along the lines of "How politically savvy do you have to be to avoid any mention of your unsavory past ties in your acceptance speech?" and that's true. But I really do think her core passion is for restoring some basic common sense about matters of human sexuality and family - as well as a proper regard for the designer thereof.

She's yet another example of what bothers me about the populist drift of the Right throughout the West. A restoration of core values has gotten mixed with some impulses that I definitely can't abide by. As I've said many times before, this gives progressivism its opening to conflate it all and lump anyone who asserts basic facts about men, women and how they were designed to come together with nationalist bonehead-ism and flirtation with authoritarianism.

But the matter at hand for Meloni and whatever government she forms will be to keep Italy's debt under control and prepare for the energy crisis that will befall all of Europe this winter.

One can't help but wish her the best of luck on those fronts. On the cultural-issues front, we'll just have to see if, and to what extent, she's outgrown the excesses of her youth.

I'll just conclude with a link to Andrew T. Walker's Twitter thread about the matter. I'd particularly draw your attention to the third tweet:

Much of Twitter dot com is historians, sociologists, and pundits denouncing historic Christian claims about life, relations, and order as anti-democratic. So count me a little suspicious when cultural forces who hate Christianity invoke "far right" like a Pavlovian dog.

We can't deny her baggage, but we probably need to observe her in action in her new role for a bit to get the full story. 

The proposed SEC mandate on the ag sector is not a done deal yet, and there's an encouraging amount of pushback

 As if there weren't enough supply-chain hose-ups and factors increasing food prices already, the Securities and Exchange Commission is poised to impose new levels of cost and bureaucratic distraction on the nation's ag sector.

The SEC's pointy-heads seem to be oblivious to how this kind of thing has worked out elsewhere:

Echoing conflicts from Sri Lanka to Canada to the Netherlands, tensions between farmers and green-minded government policymakers are building in the United States, where producers are squaring off against a costly proposed federal mandate for greenhouse-gas reporting from corporate supply chains.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in March proposed requiring large corporations, including agribusinesses and food companies, to report greenhouse gas emissions down to the lowest rungs of their supply chains as a means of combatting climate change, which environmental campaigners contend imperils the planet and life on it.

This would be yet another instance of the big dogs at the top of the supply chain getting all up in the business of the small operations that continue to provide quality product at reasonable prices because they have time to focus on that instead of a bunch of resource-consuming record-keeping:

Reporting such indirect, “scope 3” emissions would require corporations to demand data on the use of fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, and other chemicals from small-scale farmers who say they lack the personnel and resources to comply. The challenge has been led by the powerful American Farm Bureau Federation and its state affiliates, whose representatives have met with SEC officials and organized their lobbyists in Washington.

“The farmers we represent are already heavily regulated at the state, local, and federal level but have never been subject to things concerned with Wall Street,” said Lauren Lurkins, director of environmental policy at the Illinois Farm Bureau. “Our farmers do not have a team of compliance officers or attorneys, and they don’t have a network of people to help them understand this. They really want to make sure they are growing crops and raising livestock and that [they] take care of the food supply.”

What's driving this is the ESG movement and the institutional investors who think it's the way to go:

The downstream data reporting is required, the SEC claims, to determine larger, publicly traded companies’ green score, called an ESG, or environmental, social, and governance rating. The greenhouse gas measurements would be made at least partly in accordance with a set of standards developed in 2011 by an international consortium of environmental groups and corporations.

While the SEC released its first climate-related disclosure guidance in 2010, the new requirements are driven by the “elevation of climate issues,” Erik Gerding, the SEC’s deputy director of legal and regulatory policy in its division of corporation finance, said in a May webinarput on by the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, an international group formed to increase reporting by companies of climate-related information.

The proposed rule is not driven by the average individual investor, but rather investment giants managing large portfolios.

“Several institutional investors who have collectively trillions of dollars and investments under management have demanded climate-related information … because of the investor assessment of how climate change poses a risk to their portfolio,” Gerding said.

Most shareholders in the U.S. prioritize traditional corporate performance over environmental and other social welfare concerns, according to a Gallup study released in February. The poll queried its Gallup Panel with $10,000 or more in equities or bonds.

In another survey, investment professionals in the National Investor Relations Institute ranked an ESG score fourth in risk to a company behind performance, crisis, and management troubles.

However, there is an encouraging amount of pushback:

Gary Gensler, the Biden-nominated chairman of the SEC and a long time progressive, said in announcing the plan that “it would provide investors with consistent, comparable, and decision-useful information for making their investment decisions.”

But the plan drew “an extraordinarily high” number of substantive comments to the agency – around 14,000 – during the 60-day requisite comment period, according to Ropes & Gray, a law firm that compiled a report on public comments submitted to the SEC on the climate disclosure proposal. Because of that, the comment period was extended an extra 30 days and closed on June 17.

Agribusiness represented 20% of the total comments received by the SEC, mostly opposing the rule. The SEC was scheduled to adopt the plan in October, but it is expected to finalize the rule later due to the volume of comments and pleas for reconsideration.

Among the comments was the promise of litigation from a group of 24 Republican state attorneys general, which cited this year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA that a federal agency does not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

“If the Commission insists on taking the same inappropriate course, we will be ready to act once again,” the letter stated. “We urge you to save everyone years of strife by abandoning the Proposed Rule.”

It's not just Republicans, though. At least one Democrat with his head on straight is concerned as well:

In a Senate hearing earlier this month, Gensler sought to assuage concern over the proposed rule voiced by Democrat Jon Tester, Montana’s senior senator and a lifelong rancher.

“If the public company says, ‘Hey, we need you … to tell us how much fuel you used, how much fertilizer you used, what your inputs were,’ and all that, it becomes an issue, especially for the little guy…” Tester said.

Gensler responded: “That’s not the intent of what we did … that’s the benefit of public comment.”

Just who are these institutional investors? Well, two of them, Ceres and Trillium Asset Management, have been around forty-plus years. They were both founded by Joan Bavaria, who was instrumental in getting this ball rolling as a "pioneer in socially responsible investing."

A network of activist companies like Ceres with large private equity and financiers on board are working to “transform” the economy over climate concerns, according to Ceres’ self-description.

In adherence, farmers will have to recreate their business model.

“Addressing these emissions will require a shift in agricultural production to more sustainable and regenerative methods…” Kate Monahan, director of shareholder advocacy at Trillium Asset Management, said in an interview this month with ESG Clarity, a website trafficking in ESG news directed at the financial sector. “It’s imperative that food companies keep improving measurement of their Scope 3 emissions’ sources to be able to prioritize actions that reduce their emissions hotspots.”

Let's hope that, even though the SEC's comment period for this proposal, which was extended for 30 days beyond the standard 60 due to the flood of response, is closed, opposition to this disastrous scheme continues to be loud and resolute.

It will increase the cost of food.

It will be tyrannical ("'transform' the economy").

It will deaden souls. 

 

 

 

 

The special master to the Very Stable Genius's lawyers: we're not going to go off half-cocked on this

 Judge Dearie apparently intends to be a professional and have his ducks in a row:

 The senior federal judge tasked with reviewing the materials seized by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate sharply questioned the former president’s attorneys Tuesday during their first hearing before his courtroom.

Judge Raymond Dearie pushed Trump’s lawyers repeatedly for refusing to back up the former president’s claim that he declassified the highly sensitive national security-related records discovered in his residence.

But Dearie bristled at the effort by Trump’s lawyers to resist his request for proof that Trump actually attempted to declassify any of the 100 documents that the Justice Department recovered from his estate. Without evidence from Trump, Dearie said his only basis to judge the classification level of the records was the fact that they all bear markings designating them as highly sensitive national security secrets — including some that indicate they contain intelligence derived from human sources and foreign intercepts.

The early tension between Dearie and Trump’s legal team was an ominous sign for the former president, who demanded the special master review the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago and who proposed Dearie — a 1986 appointee of Ronald Reagan — to perform the task. Prosecutors had offered two other names, but acceded to Trump’s choice of Dearie.

The VSG's team is patently treading water. Any reasonable person is going to conclude that Dearie can't proceed with anything without proof.   

 

Thoughts on Russia's invasion of Ukraine at six months

 As is so often the case with events that jar the dynamics of the world stage, in March, when the missiles started to fly and major Ukrainian cities underwent horrific devastation, there was a general reaction in the West along the lines of, "Wasn't sure if the Kremlin was really going to do this, but it's now pretty clear they intend to be thorough about it."

That phase didn't actually last long. Russia skedaddled out of Kyiv, leaving behind scorched tanks that curious onlookers now examine. 

Ukraine has had a fraught history since regaining independent-nation status in 1991. Yes, there's been a fair amount of corruption and unrest. And upon the election of a comic actor (whose show about a high-school teacher who improbably becomes president is really quality television) as president, much of the world wondered if Ukraine was on a path of unseriousness. 

But there's no doubt now that he's proven his mettle. He's hands-on, patriotic, savvy and courageous. Whether that will translate to the chops required of a head of state once peace is concluded (hopefully by a decisive Ukrainian victory) remains to be seen. Let us recall that British voters removed Winston Churchill from 10 Downing Street mere months after he'd helped orchestrate an Allied victory in World War II.

Speculation that Western unity might give way to burnout has not been borne out. Consider the zeal with which Finland and Sweden wanted to join NATO, and Germany's interest in bolstering its military strength.

About that presumption of Russian thoroughness: Over the summer, that gave way to a "grinding war of attrition" narrative.

In the past two weeks, that view has required recalibration. Ukraine has demonstrated that it can pull off a stunning reversal, taking back 3,000 square miles of territory and reoccupying Izyum.  The difference in morale between Russian troops and Ukrainian troops is an enormous chasm.

What's going to be necessary for this turn of events to maintain momentum is Western aid: more HIMARS systems in particular.

And we're going to have to clench our jaws and steel our spines as Russian policy influencers continue to dish out the apocalyptic rhetoric.  Otherwise, the blackmail precedent becomes more entrenched and a stable world order continues to elude us.

A side-note-type observation: Since the invasion began, I've been impressed with how much Ukrainians love their animals. It was so gratifying to see refugees at train stations and in shelters carrying, along with some clothing and personal effects, pens containing their dogs and cats. Even now, there's time for a military vehicle to stop and scoot a recalcitrant hedgehog off the road before proceeding. 

I've come to have an affection for Ukraine's national character. They love things dear to my own heart: music, food, animals. As February gave way to March, they were just sitting there, sorting our their society's issues as all societies do, when they were subjected to unprovoked savagery of a scale not seen in Europe in over 70 years. 

Which is why it's nauseating to see the likes of J.D. Vance and Tucker Carlson try to craft some kind of bandwagon onto which "national conservative" types are expected to climb. A who-cares-what's-going-on-in-Ukraine attitude requires an astounding level of willful ignorance about the stakes for a viable West as the 21st century nears conclusion of its first quarter.

It's to be expected, I guess, from their ilk, but it's dismaying in the extreme to see the Heritage Foundation, once one of America's most reliably three-pillar-conservative think tanks, getting on board to the extent that scholars are bailing over intolerance of their support for solidarity with Ukraine. 

My intuition tells me that such types aren't going to convince a critical mass of Americans to sign on to their nihilistic, cynical program. What's really going on is too clear to most of us.

There's substantive reason to harbor hope. What's called for is maintaining resolve. It's a cacophonous world, and the number of attention-worthy items that come across our radar screens is overwhelming. But on any given day of prioritizing it all, Ukraine ought to make the cut. Someday, God willing, they'll make a strong, confident and freedom-loving member of a West equipped for a challenging future. 

Different lipstick won't change the nature of the ESG pig

 Environmental, social and governance (ESG)  investing is a concept originally cooked up in 2005 at a UN conference. It's of a piece with the Great Reset initiative devised by the World Economic Forum in 2020, and which has newly crowned British King Charles III among its enthusiasts.

It's all very top-down and collectivist. Our pointy-headed betters have assessed the prospects for humankind and determined that it must be steered en masse into a course that is more "fair," "equitable," "green" and "sustainable."

A couple of months ago, I noted here at LITD how it is being used to circumvent government policy or court decisions that aren't to its proponents' liking:

 . . . now that the Supreme Court has said that the EPA overreached in trying to tell coal companies what kinds of products they could offer in the marketplace, those who want you to believe the global climate is in some kind of dire circumstance are going to use ESG as the next available weapon to assault our liberty:

Bill McKibben, the influential head of the climate pressure group 350.org, explains why the left has so promoted the ESG movement — which judges corporations’ performance based on environmental, social and governance metrics — to force companies to put on the straitjacket of unworkable climate controls.

“Convincing banks to stop funding Big Oil is probably not the most efficient way to tackle the climate crisis, but, in a country where democratic political options are effectively closed off, it may be the only path left,” he writes in The New Yorker.

What McKibben is saying is that because climate extremists aren’t getting their way at the ballot box, they will embrace the ESG approach, which is modeled after a union tactic called a “corporate campaign.” Under it, unions pressure firms to follow the union line or face damage to their company’s reputation and alienation from propagandized employees. Not willing to bear the immediate costs, many companies give in. After seeing Tesla dropped from “approved” lists of ESG companies, Elon Musk sadly concluded that ESG has been “weaponized by phony social justice warriors” and is now a “scam.”

You didn't think they were going to fade away quietly, did you? 

The bad taste in the mouth where ESG is concerned has been spreading:

A number of sustainable investing champions say it’s time for the “ESG” label to be shelved and replaced by something less likely to draw attacks from both the political right and left.

Robert Eccles, a professor who’s spent the past 12 years researching sustainability at Harvard Business School and now University of Oxford’s Said Business School, says the term “just doesn’t have value anymore. Let’s change the conversation.” 

“I’m happy to not use the term ESG,” he said in an interview, referring to environmental, social and corporate governance issues. “People are so invested now in hating ESG for reasons that don’t really have much to do with ESG.”

It turns out that defining ESG with any kind of specificity is a lot harder than using the Milton Friedman gauge of a business's health: is it showing a return on owners' investment?

Industry veteran Sandra Carlisle, who’s head of sustainability at $58.6 billion Jupiter Asset Management, said ESG remains poorly defined and inadequately regulated, making it confusing for investors and companies to understand. It’s also left investors in the dark, just when they need more clarity, says Leslie Samuelrich, who’s spent a decade in sustainable investing and is president of Green Century Capital Management.

“It’s time for the industry to explain what ESG means and what it doesn’t mean, to maintain its credibility,” she said. Samuelrich, whose Boston-based firm oversees about $1 billion, says ESG is about using relevant material factors to measure how a company handles risks. “It isn’t ‘sustainable,’ ‘green’ or ‘making an impact.”’

Meanwhile, ESG continues to take up an ever bigger chunk of financial markets. McKinsey & Co. estimates that more than 90% of S&P 500 companies now publish ESG reports. And according to Bloomberg Intelligence, ESG will this year exceed $40 trillionworth of assets. The amount allocated to sustainable investment funds reached around $2.5 trillion at end of June, research firm Morningstar Inc. says. Such figures suggest ESG is too entrenched to simply switch off. 

Before we go any further down this rabbit hole, it behooves us to consider the current situations of three countries that went all in for ESG:

Sri Lanka was the poster child for ESG investment and has suffered the brunt of these principles. Their most recent prime minister just resigned in shame, following months of protests and unrest stemming from the country committing to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and halving its nitrogen use. 

 

Ghana also took the “E” prong too much to heart, with its government agreeing to raise $5 billion with international capital with Green, Social and Sustainability (GSS) Bonds. Now experiencing runaway inflation, largely due to these GSS bonds, the country is hoping to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

 

  The Netherlands similarly adopted a new continent-wide Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) to boost ESG investment and is now experiencing one of the highest inflation rates in the European Union. This was precipitated by the Dutch government approving a multi-year $21 billion plan to sharply cut ammonia and nitrogen emissions 50% by 2030 which requires one-third of farmers to kill off their herds and shut down indefinitely.

Much has been made of late about how progressivism has shifted from a focus on class struggle to identity politics militancy, but we should take heed of the fact that its tactics for imposing its aims remain those that James Burnham noted in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution.  It was written at a time when totalitarianism was reaching fever pitch in Europe. However, a number of lefties in the West saw that herding humankind into the collectivist pen to bring about their secular vision of a harmonious world could be achieved by the creation of a revolving door through which corporate managers, government bureaucrats and ivory-tower visionaries would pass as they were needed in particular roles.

I might also add that this is yet another example of why post-America can't have nice things. The Trumpists have seized on the general public's realization that collectivist do-gooderism is a crock, and bastardized it into a lexicon of "globalist elites" and "taking care of our people" when their own prescription is nothing more than rank protectionism. Their vision of what ought to be is as vague as the progressives'.  Their strength as an influential force lies in in their ability to imbue serious public-policy and cultural matters with a yee-haw vibe and conjure images of pitchforks and torches.

The actual antidote is what it's always been: a free market informed by Judeo-Christian morality. 

But it is encouraging to see developments such as this backing away from ESG. 

Eventually, proven verities win out over bizarre schemes. It's often a twisted and rocky road to that point, and the story is never over, but it's reassuring to see that common sense isn't dead. 

 

Biden's soul-of-the-nation speech - initial thoughts

 He could have easily planted his feet on solid ground and stayed there. After all, he had an abundance of legitimization for his basic point to work with. Alas, he chose to engage in dirty pool instead.

It should have been a moment when he could look like he was doing the responsible thing. The MAGA movement has of late confirmed what has been obvious to some of us since the summer of 2015: that it is antithetical to the political and foundational framework of this nation. The figure at its center has shown himself to be completely off the rails with his insistence that either he be instantly reinstated as president a new election be held  and has shown that he's not even sharp enough not to give away the game when he mentions the classified documents being "in cartons" before FBI agents arranged them on the carpet for photographing. 

His drool-besotted leg-humpers have shown that no amount of outrageous behavior will motivate them to cut ties with him. Of course, there's the Proud Boys/Oath Keepers/4chan/Qanon level, but also pundits and politicians with a veneer of respectability that, while nearly impossibly thin, allows them to get published in venues such as The Federalist, American Greatness and Townhall and also hold high office in our nation's capitol. They have so convinced themselves - and apparently a majority of Republican voters - that they are the true stewards of the conservative mantle that attempts to point out the true lay of the land get crowded out on the public's radar screen.

Theirs is a shortsighted vision of what victory looks like. As I put it in a June piece over at Precipice entitled "In Pursuit of a Conservatism That's Not Spiritually Ugly," 

Trumpists think it’s possible to stomp every last human being who embraces collectivism, identity politics, climate alarmism or militant secularism to any degree into the dust and be done with them. 

That’s not only impossible, it’s an undesirable thing to aim for. 

Another tenet at the core of real conservatism is a belief in love that is rooted in a Judeo-Christian understanding of the purpose for which human beings were made. 

It comes down to the question of what conservatism is striving for. To couch it in terms of majorities in the legislative and executive branches of government, or eradication of DEI departments in the nation’s universities and corporations is to take a woefully shortsighted view of what it is we’re undertaking.

For one thing, assuming the kind of victory Trumpists envision were possible, what would they do with all the progressives they had stomped into the dust? These are people who have demonstrated fierce determination in pursuit of their vision, and they would not fade away quietly. We already see that with the ferocity with which they’r responding to the Dobbs decision.

We all have to live on the same planet and in the same country. We can't ignore the question of how we're going to do that.

But Biden came close to framing a mirror-opposite vision when he veered into a defense of the the progressive agenda, an addendum to his primary message that was not at all necessary:

Trump and the MAGA Republicans “promote authoritarian leaders and they fan the flames of political violence,” he said. They “are determined to take this country backwards.”

“Backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love,” he said, referencing the social issues that Democrats have looked to place front-and-center for voters this fall.

That's just plain dirty pool. Slimy, scumbag-level opportunism. Actual non-Trumpist conservatives generally put a transcendent order, a design to the universe that comes from a sovereign God, at the core of their worldview. Biden is here trying to conflate a thousands-of-years-old understanding of human sexuality and what a family is with authoritarianism and the stoking of violence. 

Then again, ol' Joe's style has always involved an ample share of opportunism.

So in a moment in which he had the chance to bring clarity to the present set of circumstances, he went instead for muddying the waters in the name of advancement of his political brand.

That seems to be all anybody knows in terms of making pronouncements these days.