Missouri Attorney General Investigates Morningstar Over ESG, Compliance With Anti-BDS Law
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt has launched an investigation into whether Morningstar Inc violated a state consumer-protection law through its evaluations of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, his office told Reuters.Jonathan Tobin: How the ‘awokening’ of the media erased the working class and the Jews
The review is two-pronged, covering ESG matters as well as whether the financial research firm violated a separate Missouri law aimed at protecting Israel from a campaign to isolate the Jewish state over its policies towards Palestinians.
Staff for Schmitt said it is the first instance of a state looking into ESG ratings products potentially breaching such laws, on the books in more than 30 US states.
“Missouri has been a leader in pushing back against woke ESG investing, and my office will continue to look out for consumers,” Schmitt — a Republican who on Tuesday won his party’s nomination for a US Senate seat — said in a statement.
Morningstar Chief Executive Kunal Kapoor said the company was evaluating Schmitt’s action.
“Sustainability introduces new choices for investors; Morningstar provides the data and insights to help investors of all types weigh those choices in their decision making,” Kapoor said in a statement.
In a pair of July 26 civil investigative demands to Morningstar and to its Sustainalytics ESG-ratings unit, Schmitt said they may have violated the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act such as by misrepresenting or omitting facts.
This was also made possible because most journalists themselves were different from their predecessors. Up until fairly recently, most members of the press came from working-class backgrounds, not elite universities. But by the 21st century, those joining top mainstream journalism outlets became almost exclusively filled with such graduates, more likely than not coming from upper-middle-class and wealthy families.
The focus on race and the acceptance of woke ideological constructs like critical race theory and intersectionality that young journalists have embraced was exemplified by the Times’ “1619 Project,” which falsified American history in order to present a view of the United States as not merely having a flawed past but as irredeemably racist. These theories aren’t motivated by a desire for greater equality as those 19th-century papers that reflected their working-class readers’ views did. CRT and intersectionality oppose equality since they see race as a permanent and insuperable barrier between people.
What Ungar-Sargon points out is that this allows elites to ignore economic inequality and “transforms economic guilt into racial guilt.” Obsessing over a problem that can’t be solved also allows the affluent to keep their status and to think it is a function of their own “superior virtue.” One of the great ironies of our age is the way that the left perpetuates inequality and undermines democracy all the while claiming to be defending these values.
In this way, the working class, which liked Trump, was erased by the racial moral panic. But as she also writes, it also accounts for the way the same liberal elites in journalism are willing to mainstream critical race theory that grants a permission slip for hatred of Jews as beneficiaries of alleged “white privilege.” In this manner, the great “awokening” in the press has also mainstreamed anti-Semitism while elite liberal Jews look the other way or ignore this tragic development.
The picture she paints of a smug mainstream press staffed by well-off members of the educated classes is a disturbing one that explains a great deal about what’s wrong with journalism and America in the 21st century. She hopes that this can be corrected by consumers of the news choosing to “starve the people making money off your emotions” and rage, and seek to understand those with different points of view and carve nonpolitical spaces in people’s lives. But as long as major media outlets are not only exacerbating our divisions but profiting from them, it’s difficult to see a path out of this abyss of wokeness.
ADL must listen to its critics
It is ADL policy then, expressed by Hershenov herself, that Muslims are "vulnerable" and "marginalized," that they need to call out Jew-hatred in their community on their own, there's nothing for the ADL to do about it, and that Jewish "Islamophobia" is a parallel phenomenon. She then cites rises in hate crimes against Muslims (third highest year) but not the much greater rise of hate crimes against Jews (68% of all religious hate crimes), many committed by Muslims.Caroline Glick: ‘Jewish leaders have betrayed, failed our community’
The ADL has been fixated on threats from the right because they are clinging to an outdated paradigm that supposes victim groups with a leftist orientation welcome Jews as allies, and they do not want to alienate those groups by criticizing them. The ADL seems paralyzed by the left's shift to woke-think, which casts Jews as undeservedly privileged and "white adjacent" oppressors who support "racism and genocide" against the "darker skinned" Palestinians. Indeed, it signed a petition supporting the "Black Lives Matter Movement" (which accuses Israel of genocide in its platform), a petition signed by violently anti-Israel (and hence anti-Semitic) groups like JVP and Anti-Zionist Shabbat.
Generals tend to fight the last war. Here the ADL has shown an adamant reluctance to analyze leftist Jew-hatred like they do, should do and have always done with white supremacist bigotry. Recently, Greenblatt has announced some dramatic changes in the ADL's attitude towards left anti-Semitism, but will he walk the walk?
We need to see that the ADL is developing a genuine strategy to combat modern anti-Semitism in all its forms, not just creating some catchy buzzwords. Will Greenblatt re-educate ADL staff about leftist, Islamist and black supremacist anti-Semitism? Will he revamp ADL workshops to include these forms of Jew-hatred, instead of focusing almost exclusively on the threat from white supremacists? Will he take action based on his newer understanding about the left? Will the ADL, for example, seek to have frank discussions with black pastors about black anti-Semitism and urge them to educate their congregations? There is so much to do, and so much ADL can do.
But until the ADL alters its strategy and begins to educate the Jewish community, and the black, gay, trans, feminist, Muslim and Hispanic communities, about the rise and dangerous nature of modern-day Jew-hatred, they deserve all the criticism they are getting, and more.
834 views Premiered 23 hours ago Jewish community leaders have “betrayed and failed” their constituents, according to Avi Goldwasser of the Jewish Leadership Project. He says they are either “cowards or delusional or both.”
In a conversation with his colleague, Charles Jacobs, and Caroline Glick on this week’s “Mideast News Hour,” Goldwasser stresses the leadership’s unwillingness to confront the problems facing the Jewish people.
They also talk about the challenges leaders face - their fears of both losing their jobs, harming relations with donors and simply not knowing what to do.
Jacobs says that when anti-Semitism rises, a lot of people run away - including Jewish leaders.
“They're paralyzed,” according to Jacobs. “They're like deer in the headlights. The train is coming, and they are stuck.”