It's a war on all fronts, and I'd be surprised if BlackRock's Larry Fink isn't leading this one

nose under the tent? hell, the camels already IN the tent.

Wall Street rails against SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s regulatory agenda

If, like BlackRock, you have $10 trillion to play with, extra costs won’t hurt you, but your smaller competitors will get hammered. I rather suspect that’s the point.

WASHINGTON—Wall Street is attempting to derail Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler’s agenda by challenging economic assumptions underpinning dozens of policy proposals.

Brokerages, hedge funds, private-equity firms, mutual funds, high-frequency trading firms and public companies have argued in comment letters filed this year that the costs of many of the proposals would outstrip the benefits, and that the SEC’s studies of the issues are flawed.

Mr. Gensler is pursuing what lawyers and former regulators say is the SEC’s most aggressive agenda in decades, an effort that could upend established and lucrative business models. It includes requiring public companies to disclose information related to climate change, bringing more transparency to private-equity and hedge funds, imposing stricter rules for investment products advertised as environmentally or socially responsible, and overhauling the way stock trades are executed.

But wait, there’s more!

Picking on Wall Street may be good sport, but these ESG – Environmental, Social, and Governance — rules are aimed at the entire business structure of America, and will effect everyone. For instance, ESG compliance costs for large agricultural operations will be passed on to consumers, and will kill small farmers. The largest owner of farmland in the United Sates (270,000 acres out of 900 million, so he’s got room to grow, so to speak) , Bill “Davos” Gates may be fine with that; crushing small fry and bringing them into the mothership is the Microsoft business model, and Bill Gates remembers. Other people are alarmed, putting it mildly:

Farmers would be forced to give onerous climate data to public companies under SEC's proposed ESG rule, lawmakers warn

More than 100 House members from both parties are attacking a proposed Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rule that they say will put "unworkable" regulatory requirements on small farms. 

In a letter led by Rep. John Rose, R-Tenn., the lawmakers said a proposed rule for "Enhanced and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors" could block farmers from working with public companies. 

"To do business with public companies, small farms would be required to disclose a significant amount of climate-related information," the letter, sent to SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, read. "But unlike large corporations, small farms do not have full-scale compliance departments."

The proposed rule is part of a recent trend on environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing, in which investors evaluate those criteria in addition to a standard data on business performance. 

According to the SEC, the proposed rule in question would "require registrants to include certain climate-related disclosures in their registration statements and periodic reports, including information about climate-related risks that are reasonably likely to have a material impact on their business, results of operations, or financial condition."

The American Farm Bureau Federation, which is supporting the Rose-led letter, says that farmers and ranchers would not be subject to directly reporting climate information to the SEC. But the requirement that companies report their "Scope 3" greenhouse gas emissions, both upstream and downstream in their supply chains, would effectively force farmers and ranchers to track that data, the Farm Bureau said.

Therefore, the SEC would effectively be banning farmers and ranchers from participating with major sectors of the U.S. economy unless they spend significant time and resources tracking environmental data, according to the Farm Bureau.

So that’s agriculture, but farmers are just the tip of the iceberg here, because large, SEC-reporting companies will have to demand the same “Scope 3” data from the tens of thousands of small businesses selling components and services them. Can’t do it, Mr. Businessman? Sell yourself to General Motors — surely they’ll pay you a fair price despite it being a fire sale — and you will be happy

ESG rules are nothing less than the beginning of the imposition of a Chinese Social Credit System that will govern the behavior of every business, and from there, every individual. Already, Facebook and Twitter are demonetarizing businesses by kicking them off their platforms for holding the “wrong” opinions, and banks and credit-clearing services are refusing to deal with businesses — gun manufacturers and dealers are just two recent examples — now add ESG rules on top of those controls, and the more perfect society is one dangerous step closer to achievement.