How Retirement Money Now Funds The Radical Movement

The middle class has reportedly never been so educated, so informed. At the same time, the same middle class has never been so blissfully ignorant. Case in point: Much of this adult cohort have their retirement savings invested in IRAs, Registered Retirement Savings Plans, mutual funds and other institutional vehicles. 

Where, as shareholders, they earn a consistent return from, among other things, dividends, stock increases and share splits. The Rule of 70 says that a few decades of growth will double your money and will render enough money upon which to retire. 

This process is all overseen by benevolent CEOs, boards of directors and investment experts boosting shareholder value. So why should anyone lose sleep or attend shareholder meetings? After all, Bank of Montreal has only missed issuing a dividend twice since its founding in 1817.

Actually there is real cause for urgency. Shareholder value, the bedrock of these investments, is now a piggy bank being robbed by outside players who use ESG, DEI and other nefarious acronyms to intimidate said CEOs, boards of directors and investment experts into doing their bidding.

That bidding is portraying the traditional shareholder model as evil capitalism despoiling society. So now we see corporations such as Disney, Amazon, Coca-Cola, Starbucks and Alphabet (among many) diverting funds from shareholders to causes obsessed by racism, sexism, climate change and a host of other grievance issues.

For many in the middle-class this all seems like a corporate bun fight, a diversion for the Scrooge McDucks of Wall Street and Bay Streets. Even as the Left bleed shareholder value from the RRSPs and IRAs of citizens, deluded citizens cheer on the progressives who are impoverishing them— as if this were an episode of The West Wing instead of The Big Short burning through their savings. 

They see hedge fund BlackRock as Robin Hood, redistributing the unseemly wealth of elites to the poor and downtrodden. Little understanding that they are funding this klepto-progressivism. If it wasn’t so sad it might be funny. But the wine moms and the Boy Scout liberals seem clued out on the real agenda.

What’s ironic is that corporate wealth has long resisted the impatient demands of bad actors. It was their resistance in the 1960s that ultimately stopped the revolutionary fervour of the Left from toppling the system. Well, those fanatical forces are back again, but this time they’ve found the keys to the vault. 

Here’s how: Liberals and their far-left allies have always been thwarted in their glorious dreams of class revolution by the inconvenience of the electorate. Voters consistently have denied radicals such as AOC or Bernie Sanders the levers of power to activate their pet grievance issues. So they aligned with media and culture industries who portrayed the cruelty of them being denied ultimate power. Class warfare became a Hollywood staple— even as Tinseltown became a blank cheque for radicals. 

In Canada and the U.S. the social-credit gambit also meant working the game through sympathetic Supreme Courts who’ve sought to make whole what the citizens want no part of. But the transformation of SCOTUS under Donald Trump scuttled this game. Suddenly the door to legitimizing unlimited abortion, admission quotas, election changes and student-loan forgiveness was slammed shut.

What to do? The solution for the politicians on the Left was to employ large money fund managers such as BlackRock, Vanguard and others to do what the electorate refuses to allow them. Going around the democratic process, these companies created social-credit scores such as ESG and DEI, ranking corporations on their wokeness. The rankings are used to judge their response on every progressive grievance aired by NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post, CBC and the Toronto Star. 

A bad social-credit score from Larry Fink at BlackRock has become a death sentence for executives or boards who balked. Employing their trillions in investments to buy up shares, the hedge funds then used shareholder meetings to whip boards and CEOs into line on the proper mix of social-media expenditures and political propriety. Next thing we saw CEOs saying that maybe shareholder value wasn’t the prime purpose of corporations.

Thus, Disney Corporation, once a bedrock of capitalist certainty under its founder and his family, transformed into trashing its history and brands to satisfy far-left agitators. See: the current iteration of Snow White in which the heroine is brown, the dwarfs look like car jackers and the prince is a ponce. 

There is hope that some of these middle-class people have awoken from their coma and are using the market to slow this trend. Anheuser Busch’s disastrous foray into trans politics, celebrating a flamboyant influencer on 365 days as a trans woman, collapsed the mighty Bud Light brand and sunk the stock price. Target, too, blundered in its cloying response to pressure for progressives. Its brand and share price are in free-fall. 

Meanwhile, Disney has admitted that tangling with Florida governor Ron DeSantis over Disneyworld was a losing proposition. It has replaced its CEO and fired a number of Woke executives responsible for Snow White. This may also have produced an unintentional outcome. Comedian Dave Chappelle’s prediction last November that Donald Trump was far from dead is suddenly looking prescient, as #orangemanbad leads the GOP polling by 30 points.

For now, however, the middle class snoozes along, content in its self-image as a caring, enabling society. While the investment managers drain their savings to fund windmills in the sky. Politicians are silent, reluctant to challenge the giant. And the media divert attention to shiny objects like Clarence Thomas’ friends. It’s go along to get along. And say bye to your savings.

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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx