Live from Music Row, Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael in studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, there was a great column in The Wall Street Journal Headline: The 1916 Project on Hulu Vindicates Capitalism. And what the article points out. If you think about what The 1619 Project alleges, it alleges certain things that are false, but it also says certain things that are actually factually true.
And if you think about what they claim to be factually true supports their side, it actually doesn’t. So let me give you a few examples that are cited in this article. I’m doing some quotes here throughout the commentary. The article starts by saying the series gives many examples of government intervention that undercuts free markets and property rights.
Eminent domain, racial redlining on mortgages, and government support and enforcement of union monopolies figure prominently, and this is in The 1619 Project’s Hulu documentary. The final episode opens by telling how the federal government forcibly evicted black residents of Harris Neck, Georgia during World War II to build a military base. The army gave residents three weeks to relocate before bulldozers moved in.
After the war, the government refused to let the former residents return. Violating their property rights is the opposite of market capitalism. And this was by the way, under FDR. The federal government took a whole bunch of black people in Georgia and just told them got three weeks to get out of there.
And then after the war was over, they wouldn’t give them their property back. That is the government doing that to black people, not the free market. The series also highlights the noxious role of the FHA in redlining. The FHA discriminates against minority neighborhoods by classifying them as too hazardous for lending.
The writers could have strengthened their case by citing Richard Rothstein’s 2017 book The Color of Law. And in that book, he points out that in the 1930s, once again, under FDR and the completely Democrat-controlled federal government, the FHA redlined and would not let private lenders with any federal support at all loan money into areas that were black neighborhoods.
Economic historians have long known about discrimination against white-only labor unions. Jimmy Carter’s Labor Secretary, Ray Marshall, a labor economist, chronicled the discrimination in his academic work. The Wagner Act of 1935, once again, FDR and the Democrats gave white unions bargaining power under federal law over unions that were mixed, black unions, or black-owned companies were discriminated against.
The series recognizes the discriminatory effects of FDR’s legislative agenda once again government, which depended on the Democrat machine that operated in the Jim Crow South. The narrator states that the New Deal represented the first affirmative action policies for white people. We couldn’t have said that better, is what the story says now.
But the point of all this is that even with all of this evidence showing that the true discrimination against black people is always institutional in the form of government policy that hurts black people, we can move forward to today and look at our educational system and how black children are forced to go to terrible schools, these are in Democrat control cities, usually in Democrat control states, and under federal policy. And under Biden, it’s getting worse by the day.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Wall Street Journal Sign” by BrokenSphere. CC BY 3.0.
Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Roger Simon in studio to comment upon the State of the Union address and America’s love affair with money at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party.
Leahy: We welcome to our microphones because it is Thursday, February 9, 2023. It’s a Thursday at the 7:00 a.m. hour. It means it’s time for my former boss at PJ TV, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and great novelist.
He’s got a new book coming out called American Refugee, one of those popular columnists at The Epoch Times. And, of course, all-star panelists here, Mr. Roger Simon. Good morning, Roger.
Simon: I do it on Thursday. It must be Belgium.
Leahy: There was a movie. If it’s Tuesday, This Must be Belgium. Is it Thursday?
Simon: I can’t remember. Anyway, one day or another, it was Belgium.
Leahy: You had a piece at The Epoch Times about your reaction to the State of the Union address. What is that reaction?
Simon: Well, some of it is inevitable. First of all, the state of the union is always boring. Let’s be honest. Really boring.
Leahy: Can I give you some credit? Do you know what is the most fun part of when a speech comes on? You know this. You founded PJ Media. And you know Steven Green, right? He has this great thing called Drunk Blogging.
Simon: Yes.
Leahy: It’s the best way to watch. He drinks, I don’t know, whatever he drinks. And, of course, the comments get riper.
Simon: He makes very good old fashions.
Leahy: Yes.
Simon: I was once at a thing where he made old fashions for everybody that showed us his technique and blah, blah, blah. It was very good.
Leahy: Very good.
Simon: But he’s not really a drunk.
Leahy: I know.
Simon: That’s the good thing about him. It’s not a good thing to be. Anyway, that’s my advice for this morning. But besides the fact that it’s always a boring subject.
Leahy: Always.
Simon: The most important thing in the entire world was deliberately missing from the SOTU. And it was the five-letter word China. (Chuckles)
Leahy: Yes.
Simon: Somehow or another, our esteemed president overlooked it. And the reason is very obvious. China has made a fool of him and also has bought him and then most recently flew a giant balloon all over the United States, and he didn’t do a damn thing about it. And we don’t know, and we’ll probably never know because we are lied to by our intelligence agencies at all times. What exactly did the Chinese learn from their experience?
Leahy: We’ll never know. And I think his speech dragged on for the longest hour and a half of my life. And I think what, he had maybe 60 seconds of that on China, or not even that.
Simon: Not even that.
Leahy: It was like 30 seconds.
Simon: Right. He had to have something because people like me and you and anybody who was slightly awake would have noticed China is not only the elephant in the room. They own parts of Tennessee, not to mention the rest of the United States.
Leahy: Not only are they flying over our military bases and our air bases, but they’re also buying farmland right next to it.
Simon: Yes. All over the place, though. In Montana, around those bases, but all over. They’re buying it here.
Leahy: Yes. I’m reminded when I look at this. What was it that Nikita Khrushchev said? We will bury you, and you’ll sell us the rope to hang yourselves. Or something like that?
Simon: Something like that. Then he banged his shoe. But I’m afraid he may have been right. This is the sad truth. We better do something about it. One thing is to kick this guy out of the White House because the term that is used for this is elite capture.
If the audience has heard this term, it’s an interesting term because that’s what the Chinese do. They buy our scientists, professors, politicians, and anybody they can because they know the great weakness of Americans I hate to say this, is that we like money.
Leahy: Out for the almighty dollar. Well, that’s capitalism.
Simon: It’s capitalism. But I think we’re a little bit too hungry for it sometimes. The Chinese have recognized this, and they take advantage.
Leahy: Did you know they’re buying Private K-12 military schools around the country? Did you see that? Because they want to sort of, get these kids in junior ROTC and then send them to West Point and turn them into, you know, embedded Chicom operatives within our military.
Simon: General Milley is that way already.
Leahy: You know why. Because he went to Princeton. (Laughter)
Simon: Not Dartmouth or Harvard.
Leahy: That’s right.
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Joe Biden” by Joe Biden.
Live from Music Row, Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed CEO Alfredo Ortiz of Job Creators Network to the newsmaker line to talk about his rise from poverty, the values his parents instilled, and how the American dream is attainable for minorities despite the Democrat narrative.
Leahy: On the newsmaker line right now, our very good friend, the CEO of the Job Creator Network, Mr. Alfredo Ortiz. Welcome, Alfredo.
Ortiz: Hey, good morning, Michael. Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor.
Leahy: It’s great to have you on. You wrote a book. Not exactly what’s going to get you on MSNBC. The title of the book is The Real Race Revolutionaries: How Minority Entrepreneurship Can Overcome America’s Racial and Economic Divides. You’ve got a personal story about your parents and how they came to America. I think that is a good starting point on this.
Ortiz: Yes, absolutely. I don’t necessarily think I’m going to be on this year’s White House Christmas list for some reason. But look, I push back on a narrative that long has been true from the left, which is basically that we need more government intervention, really, to try to break the racial and economic divide.
But I know firsthand that entrepreneurialism and capitalism really is the way to go. And if you think about the inflow of immigrants, there is no outflow of immigrants from the U.S. to other parts of the country.
It’s always inflow because they know best that this country is a land of opportunity where the American dream is possible so far if the government just gets out of the way and lowers taxes and lowers regulations.
But as I said, I know firsthand what it was like I grew up in Chula Vista, California. We were quite poor. My dad was a tailor. My mom was a housekeeper. I remember on trash days, my mom and I would pop into pop into our car, and we’d drive around and we’d get aluminum cans and newspapers and those trash cans, and we’d take it over the YMCA, cash it in, and that was her grocery money for the week.
And then to make ends meet, she would also do craft sales and bake sales. That’s why I always say that she was the first and best entrepreneur that I ever knew.
Leahy: Your parents came from Mexico City a little over 50 years ago. They’re no longer with us, but they had some values that they shared with you. Tell us about those values.
Ortiz: Yes, absolutely. The values really are hard work and the idea that, frankly, you can do anything if you have a vision and you have a belief and you have a dream. You can work hard and get there. And that was one thing that I remember.
There was a time when the USDA would hand out surplus eggs, bread, milk, and cheese to lower-income folks and our church was actually a distribution point, Michael. And we were the ones that would help receive the truck. We would set it all up, and only at the very end would we collect ours.
Because my mom always believed that if you’re an able-bodied individual, even though you might not be able to have an income, to have a life you necessarily want, and you do need some government help that you can work for that and you can contribute to society in some way, shape, or form.
Leahy: Tell us about your personal career. You grew up poor in Chula Vista, California. Your parents were legal immigrants from Mexico. How did you get into and become an entrepreneur?
Ortiz: Wow, it was quite a path. First of all, truly, I have to give credit where credit is due and thank God for the wonderful path that he laid in front of me. But of course, my mother and all of her hard work and sacrifices. But I was the first one to finish high school, the first one to finish college and grad school.
And again, those were educators that believed in me, and that helped me along the way. But then I went into the corporate world, and I worked mostly in consumer product goods, marketing, market research, finance, and consulting.
I have my own consulting firm, which was in Atlanta, and I sold that to a former Coca-Cola executive. And then I also have my own construction company in Atlanta. I had two small businesses myself, and I know exactly what it is, like I say, to sign the front of a check and the back of a check.
Leahy: In the spring of last year, you testified in the House of Representatives and the Ways and Means Committee, and you argued that minorities can in fact, overcome racial economic gaps through entrepreneurship.
The Democrats didn’t like that message. Stacey Plaskett from the U.S. Virgin Islands, a delegate there, tell us what she said about your testimony.
Ortiz: (Chuckles) Yes, it wasn’t received well at all by the Democrat members who said they were troubled by the rhetoric and claimed I was inappropriate and ignorant to actually argue that minorities can overcome their circumstances through entrepreneurship even though I was sitting right in front of them.
Leahy: So hold on. You’re a minority. You’re Hispanic.
Ortiz: Yes.
Leahy: And so you overcame poverty through entrepreneurship. How do the Democrats call that inappropriate?
Ortiz: Inappropriate and ignorant. Please don’t forget that word ignorant.
Leahy: Look, there are a lot of words I could use to describe you, Alfredo. Ignorant is not one of them. Oh, man.
Ortiz: Michael, I tell you, I was pretty peeved, I have to tell you. And I pushed back. I asked for an apology, which I didn’t get because she claimed that she wasn’t talking about me oh, no. Even though I was the sole Republican witness at that hearing. I’m like, who else are you talking about?
So it was pretty interesting. But I was glad I pushed that back, because this is, I think, a narrative that we really have to have to keep pushing back on. It’s not just kind of a belief that I have. I got to read this piece of data.
I have a lot of data points in the book, which hopefully people go to Amazon and it’s available on Kindle and paperback. But we dug up a Congressional Black Caucus Foundation study that found that the median net worth for black business owners is 12 times higher than for black non-business owners.
In other words, black entrepreneurs more than eliminate racial income and wealth gaps, earning and saving far more than median white households. Interesting fact? Don’t you think?
Leahy: It is. Has CNN invited you on to talk about this yet?
Ortiz: No, they have not. And I have a funny feeling that they’re probably not because again, this is a narrative that they do not want to be put out there because again, they want that sense of victimhood and that reparations for the racial divide is the only way out and more government.
And so obviously this is counter to all that because this talks about entrepreneurialism capitalism, hard work, the American dream look, everything that they actually detest, we really embrace in this book. And so it’s a great read, I think, and I encourage people to go pick it up.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Alfredo Ortiz” by Alfredo Ortiz. Photo “The Real Race Revolutionaries” by Amazon. Background Photo “Small Business” by ELEVATE.
Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Senior Fellow at the Real Clear Foundation, Rupert Darwall to the newsmakers line to discuss his recent article and defines the design of ESG.
Leahy: We are delighted to welcome to our newsmaker line from across the pond, Rupert Darwell, a senior fellow at the Real Clear Foundation. He just released a study on capitalism, socialism, and a thing called ESG. And if you haven’t heard about it, you got to listen up. It’s very important what he’s written. Rupert, thanks so much for joining us this morning.
Darwall: It’s my pleasure, Michael.
Leahy: ESG, it sounds like a food additive, but it’s much more dangerous. Tell us, what does ESG mean? And why should we care about it?
Darwall: ESG is environmental, social, and government. It’s a form of investing. It’s meant to be for the clean, moral, pure types that want to make the world a better place. And it’s a bit of a con, really, because what it says on the outside is ESG investing, you’re doing well by doing good.
So you’re going to make more money by doing the things that are going to make the world a better place. But actually, it’s all about that at all. It’s politics by other means. It’s the politicization of business and investing. And you’ll say goodbye to those higher returns because that’s just sales chatter.
But fundamentally, it’s about turning capitalism into something very, very different. And it’s also about political power. It’s about giving financial oligarchs on Wall Street and in the big state pension funds like CalPERS in Sacramento and the Neivers New York pension funds, enormous amounts of political power of business.
Leahy: Yeah, that’s exactly it. We’ve noticed, of course, I guess the publicly traded corporations, I don’t know, 90 percent of them seem woke beyond repair. They’re always preening about some moral issue, and it’s just highly destructive it seems to me. When did this really start being a thing?
Darwall: Well, there was a phase of it, I think, in the 1970s because Milton Friedman wrote a fantastic article saying the role of business is judged by how much money it makes for shareholders. It’s about profit. Because if you’re a good business creating and innovating things in the market that customers want, you’ll do well and that kind of thing.
It kind of then went through the 80s and 90s and then receeded. But it’s really come back with a vengeance now. And you may remember, a couple of years ago, the Business Roundtable issued that 181 CEOs signed the Business Round Table statement on stakeholderism.
The businesses are meant to serve a wide variety of interests and demoting the stockholder. So it’s really come in very powerfully. And, of course, the so-called climate crisis, this existential threat to life on earth kind of thing, businesses have got to emit zero. So it’s really kind of taken business and particularly financed by storm might say.
Leahy: I don’t know what your background is other than your finance guy in London and you write about it. I’m a graduate of Stanford Business School. I have an MBA from Stanford way back when. And what I’ve noticed is the ideas that are taught in business schools today seem much more socialist at the highest level than they were when I was in school.
Tell me what you think about this. You have a generation of left-wing socialists now that are influencing these hedge funds like Black Rock and are serving on corporate boards and are in the marketing departments and the finance departments of Fortune 500 companies and they’re forcing that ideology that they’ve grown up with upon these publicly traded companies. Do I have that right or is there another element to it?
Darwall: I think that’s a very important aspect of it. I would also point to there’s also kind of a revolving door between the corporate affairs department of large corporations. At the end of the Obama administration, you saw a load of Obama administration officials exiting the federal bureaucracy and jumping into the C-suites of corporations.
For example, you mentioned Black Rock. One of the Black Rock guys is now a very senior economic advisor in the Biden administration. So it’s kind of this revolving door. It’s this intertwining of business and politics. And in my view, the business of business, the business of business is business. It’s not politics. It’s not politics by other means.
But what we’re seeing is polity of businesses becoming armed tools of political agendas, which I think is very dangerous for democracy, because these questions should be decided through the ballot box and through the Constitution.
The United States has a brilliant, perfect Constitution, if you like, of representative democracy. And the second danger to capitalism because as businesses become woke, they become less innovative and doing less of driving the things that make living standards rise and which makes capitalism the greatest economic system there’s ever been.
Leahy: The title of your study is Capitalism, Socialism, and ESG. But I look at this interconnection between the very large, publicly-traded corporations and government and politics. And to me, the ism that comes to mind is more a form of fascism. What’s your thought about that?
Darwall: Corporatism, because both socialism in its extreme form and fascism, but they both see that the political ideology must trump everything and every aspect of society. And particularly economic ones should be the tools of the state.
Yes, there is. You are absolutely right. It’s a form of corporatism. It’s very nasty. It’s unrepresentative, as I say, it’s about usurping, the Democratic prerogatives of the people through the ballot box.
Leahy: The other element of this to me, for free markets and capitalism to work, the capital markets have to work for all sizes of companies. Large companies and small companies. And of course, startup companies, small companies, entrepreneurial companies, that’s where most innovation does occur.
It seems to me that the rise of ESG, environmental, social, and governance standards among larger corporations has kind of made the capital markets much more difficult for small businesses and those that are providing innovations. Do you see that as well, or am I just looking at it from a small business lens?
Darwall: No. I think what happens is that large businesses call for large woke businesses if you like. When they embrace this agenda they say, well, our business model could be under threat from startups, therefore, because we’re doing what the politicians want and because what Democrats in Washington want, we need protection from startups.
Inevitably you get distortions in markets. You have you know what economists call rent-seeking behavior and businesses trying to protect themselves from businesses that are unencumbered by ESG and are free to perform as they want. I think you’re absolutely right. It’s a big threat to the layer of new businesses which really have driven growth and innovation.
Leahy: The other thing is to look at alternatives to ESG. Is this just a huge group think among hedge funds and Fortune 500 companies? Is there anybody in that world that you see right now that is not embracing ESG? And what consequences are they facing?
Darwall: I would say corporate CEOs are very exposed to proxy battles. If they put their head above the parapet, they’re likely to have a shareholder and stockholder revolt at the next annual general meeting. So they’re quite nervous individuals.
They have to go with the flow. The greatest economist of capitalism was Schumpeter. He wrote that an incredible book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. And in that, he described the publicly traded corporation as capitalism’s vulnerable fortresses for exactly this reason in that you have a split between ownership and control.
But I think the ESG thing because it’s such a distortion of the capital markets, there will be people who come in and contrarian investors who can make lots of money out of the fools who follow the ESG sales pattern. Because when you have people investing for non-financial reasons, they make mistakes.
They’re the easy ones you can pick off. I think there’s an aspect of it that this is set up so that more savvy investors at some point will make a great deal of money from the investors chasing the fools gold of ESG investing on the basis that they’re going to do well by doing good, which is, as I say, is complete junk.
(Commercial break)
Leahy: Rupert, you mentioned before that ESG actually doesn’t perform well financially, and it’s a bit of salesmanship, if you will, for the left. And you mentioned that perhaps some more savvy investors will come up with contrarian views.
I just sent you an email that includes some information about just such a group based here in Nashville, as it turns out, called 2nd Vote Advisors. And basically, they manage funds and they have private funds that are exchange-traded funds.
One is focused on pro-life. The other is focused on Second Amendment-type issues. They say that without 2nd Vote Advisors as a counterweight to existing asset managers, a progressive ESG agenda will continue when investors can rest assured that we will never vote proxies in support of ESG shareholder initiatives. I don’t know if you’ve heard of 2nd Vote Advisors, but it’s almost as if you predicted they would come into existence.
Darwall: It does sound like that. The smart investors will. When I say smart investors, investors that have got their feet on the ground, and they’re the best ones will see this as an opportunity. Because what will happen is that they will dump lowly rated ESG stocks, which means that they’re cheaper for others to buy.
There’s that thing that Ben Graham, the Warren Buffett guru, said, in the short term, a stock market is a voting machine, and in the long term, it’s a weighing machine. And at the end of the day, what will happen is it will be the cash flows that companies generate. The ESG investing movement is creating a massive investment opportunity for smart investors.
Leahy: But besides 2nd Vote Advisors, is there anybody promoting these contrarian options to ESG investments?
Darwall: That’s one of the things that’s needed to happen because what you’ve got is the big three index providers, ETF index providers led by Black Rock. You’ve got State Street and Vanguard. Those big three, which Black Rock is the largest asset manager in the world have gone woke.
Larry Fink is leading the charge on ESG, climate, and on stakeholderism. He has threatened encumbered management to vote against them if they don’t bow to the God of ESG. That means that if you don’t subscribe to that view of politics and that is what it is, it is essentially politics and ideology, you need to find the ETF provider who will vote your proxies the way that you want and not the way Larry Fink wants.
I think in time you will see alternative providers. The market should respond in the way that people who want politically free investing can have that demand satisfied. But as yet, I haven’t seen those ETF providers come over the horizon. America is still the most dynamic economy in the world, the freest economy in the world, and that over time that will happen. There will be a market reaction against this.
Leahy: How is it that a guy like Larry Fink, who is, in essence, a financially sophisticated left-wing ideologue, how is it that we have so many guys like that now?
Darwall: He was a bond trader who correctly spotted the diverse portfolio and index investing. These are both low costs and over time give very good performance. And he’s ridden that. And now he’s made as much money as he can ever hope to.
And he’s got the whiff of political power in his nostrils. And sitting in as chairman and CEO of Black Rock, he has the best of both worlds of having immense financial power on Wall Street and also access to every political leader he ever wants. So there is a lot of that.
There’s something that he said. Every year he writes to corporate CEOs just telling them what to think. And last year he wrote to them and said all this disclosure stuff, ESG and climate disclosure, and so forth. He says the goal cannot be transparency for transparency’s sake.
They normally say, well, the market needs more transparency and more data. Then he went on to say disclosure should be a means to achieving more sustainable and inclusive capitalism. Now, that is politics. That is pure politics and nothing to do with boosting investor returns or anything like that.
This is the guy acting as a politician wielding political power. The proxy votes that are embedded in ETF index funds, he’s stripping the proxies out of them, and he’s casting them according to his ideological prejudices.
Leahy: The founders, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, didn’t agree on a lot. But one thing they did agree on that if an aristocratic manufacturing class ever arose in America, it would be bad for the constitutional Republic.
We have now this aristocratic leftwing financial class, and they have no constraints. I think what has arisen here with guys like Larry Fink is exactly the kind of aristocratic modern feudalism that Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison would have absolutely loathed.
Darwall: I absolutely agree with that. These Wall Street oligarchs are essentially usurping, the prerogatives of the Democratic and constitutional political state. That’s exactly what’s going on. This is a parallel government that is not really accountable to anyone and certainly not accountable to voters. When Larry Fink talks about inclusive capitalism, he’s actually talking about exclusive capitalism, insider capitalism.
Leahy: Exactly.
Listen to the full interview here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
