Bloomberg News made no mention of its founder’s relentless ESG-tied pressure campaign as it lamented DEI defeats at John Deere and Tractor Supply.
In a July 16 article, Bloomberg News reporters Simone Foxman and Michael Hirtzer responded to a John Deere decision to abandon some of the radical DEI policies exposed by podcast host Robby Starbuck. The article completely neglected to mention that their boss has slapped ESG scores on thousands of companies in a massive push to shame them into compliance.
The Bloomberg reporters lamented that John Deere is “pulling back from diversity measures in the face of conservative criticism, the second agriculture-related company in less than a month to bend to such pressure.” After explaining the largely successful campaigns against DEI at John Deere and Tractor Supply, Bloomberg News took a swipe at John Deere by delving into a Department of Labor suit against the company.
John Deere’s announcement came a week after Starbuck posted a video exposing how embedded DEI was in the machinery manufacturing company. Starbuck denounced the company for, among other things, pressuring employees to state their pronouns, allowing men in women’s bathrooms, sponsoring a Pride event for children and segregating employees based on race and gender. Disturbingly, John Deere also provided insurance coverage for the genital mutilation and chemical castration of both adults and children.
While there were major omissions in John Deere’s statement, the company made some significant promises to become less ideological, pledging to audit “all company-mandated training materials and policies to ensure the absence of socially motivated messages.”
John Deere also denied that “pronoun identification” and “diversity quotas” were official company policy, but promised to root out these practices where they appeared. In another significant change, the company stated that “we will no longer participate in or support external social or cultural awareness parades, festivals, or events.”
The company’s investment page still has a link labeled “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion,” but this link leads to a page that has zero mentions of any of these three terms.
The tractor company’s partial capitulation follows a complete public renunciation of DEI by Tractor Supply on June 27. Foxman also lashed out at Tractor Supply for giving up DEI. Foxman prominently highlighted a call by John Boyd, the head of the National Black Farmers Association for the CEO of Tractor Supply to resign.
Neither article mentions the role of Bloomberg News owner Michael Bloomberg in pushing radical policies like those uncovered by Starbuck at Tractor Supply and John Deere. After the publication of Bloomberg’s 2022 Impact Report, the company bragged that Bloomberg had created ESG scores for 5,500 companies, making clear that this was an effort to separate the “leaders” from the “laggards” for investors.
As if this significant push to embrace eco-extremism, racially discriminatory DEI and gender theory wasn’t enough, an employee of Bloomberg made clear that these ESG scores aren’t just neutral information for investors to consider.
Katrina White, a Bloomberg Sustainable finance associate, explained how Bloomberg’s ESG scores translate into activist pressure, at a Bloomberg summit in 2022.
White noted that investors will notice when companies fail to meet “interim targets” for environmental goals before stating that her department “will be tracking” this type of information. She said, “We are going to be putting out research on this, and you know companies are increasingly going to see their stakeholders say, ‘You set this target. Where is the actual progress toward it? Um, where’s your clean energy procurement? Uh, where are your carbon offset retirements?’ Etc.”
Conservatives are under attack! Support businesses that share your values or at least understand that they serve customers and employees rather than radical ESG pressure groups such as the Human Rights Campaign.
