Tag Archives: bad faith

Anti-ESG Activists Come To Intel

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A shareholder proposal asking Intel to square its business in China with its ESG commitments looks like a Trojan horse.

The proposal (Proposal 7, p. 130) argues that “Intel’s environmental promises and human rights commitments are belied by its cozy relationship with China, a country that is controlled by the dictatorial and inhumane Chinese Communist Party.”

Doing business with China, which is the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world and which commits genocide against ethnic minorities – [sic] runs counter to everything that Intel claims to stand for. It is therefore critical that the Board commission and publish a third party review that includes experts who are fully aware of the dangers that China poses to ensure that Intel’s actions as a company live up to its words.

It’s brought by the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative organization that has been around since the Reagan era, with longstanding ties to the American Legislative Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network. The Center also counts among its allies the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), which last year scored a small victory at 3M when one of its proposals on China and human rights garnered an impressive 12 percent support. Intel is a new target for these groups, who claim to be outraged by the company’s about-face apology on Xinjiang in 2021 as well as its sponsorship of the 2022 Olympics.

These days, the Free Enterprise Project is (predictably enough) all about “Woke Capitalism,” a product of “the Left’s Radical ESG Agenda” that will result in “the leftist capture of American corporations.” Or, as they put it in their 2022 Investor Value Voter Guide, “the ESG boosters, both in and out of C-suites, want to make our lives poorer, less reliable and less safe, while enriching the enemies of the West, for no possible good outcome except their own self-aggrandizement.” This is the reasoning behind their opposition to everything from DEI to decarbonization.

This year’s Proxy Preview from As You Sow includes an entire section dedicated to bad faith proposals that sound an awful lot like this one and are in reality “anti-ESG.” The Free Enterprise Project and its allies tend to copy

verbatim the resolved clauses of their ideological opponents, or use language in resolved clauses that makes the resolutions appear to support sustainability objectives—although the rest of the proposals cite right-wing opinion pieces and argue against their purported goal.

The objective is to find a point of leverage, call out corporate hypocrisy, and demonstrate that ESG commitments are a costly and destructive diversion of company resources.

When it comes to human rights in China, right wing activists see that this strategy can get results: “this human rights issue – involving both slave labor and genocide of the minority Muslim Uyghur population at the hands of the CCP – animates factions from both the political right and left.” That’s from the Free Enterprise Project Investor Value report, cited above. As You Sow concurs:

The ideas in anti-ESG resolutions have no traction with investors—nor with many companies—and on average earn 4 percent support or less. The sole exception concerns doing business in China, where the left and right agree that China’s authoritarianism is deeply problematic, as is its persecution of the Uyghur people.

That “exception” helps explain the self-righteous, combative tone of the Free Enterprise Project proposal, and the copy-paste approach they and the NLPC have taken for this year’s proxy season:

Proxy Monitor data showing human rights proposals submitted by the National Center for Public Policy Research and the National Legal and Policy Center.

The question before Intel shareholders is what practical effect voting for this proposal might have. The board of directors opposes it, for all the usual reasons, so it is unlikely to pass; but it could garner enough support to qualify for re-submission. That would bring the Free Enterprise Project back again next year.

More importantly, the proposal would require that Intel engage “experts who are fully aware of the dangers that China poses.” Those are not necessarily human rights experts or even China experts, but people who qualify as experts because they are “fully aware” — that is, ideologically aligned on China with the National Center for Public Policy Research. Think Peter Navarro (or worse): that’s who would be engaging with the company, and whose views the company would “publish.” This doesn’t sound like a constructive way to push the company to raise human rights standards (or improve its business performance); it just sets the stage for right wing bluster, fake outrage, and ideological preening.

It is difficult for me to vote against any measure that asks companies to do more in the area of human rights, and I am disappointed by the Intel board’s boilerplate response. They could do so much better. But in this case I am voting with them and against Proposal 7.

Update. The proposal received 4.31 percent support at the 11 May Annual Stockholders’ Meeting, falling short of the 5 percent needed to qualify for re-submission next year. For more on Trojan Horse proposals, see the brief write-up in this 2021 report (page 59) from Glass Lewis, which I had not read before I wrote this post.

A Piece of Legislative Mischief

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Something else worth noting happens toward the end of this video clip, when Stauber tries to plant a green flag. “If you are at all serious about emissions reductions, you will vote to support H.R. 1. We need to pass H.R. 1 for energy independence and critical mineral dominance.”

There has already been plenty of commentary around the misleading claim that this bill would reduce emissions. Common Dreams published a pretty good rundown. Opponents have labeled H.R. 1 the Polluters Over People Act; the Center for Western Priorities notes that it would reverse many of the Inflation Reduction Act’s reforms to the onshore oil and gas leasing program; and as for the notion that this bill is “serious” about the energy transition, Chuck Schumer called that “laughable,” and declared this “wishlist for big oil” Dead On Arrival in the Senate.

Equally specious is the Trumpian claim that this legislation is a formula for “critical mineral dominance.” This US Geological Survey presentation on global distribution of critical minerals or these maps from The Wilson Center suggest just how infeasible that is. Misleading claims and rhetorical swagger on this score can lead to bad policy at home and serious missteps abroad.

Take a closer look and it’s clear that this is an act of legislative mischief. The stated legislative purpose of H.R. 1 is to “lower energy costs by increasing American energy production, exports, infrastructure, and critical minerals processing”; but when it comes to critical minerals the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact, the piece of H.R. 1 Stauber wrote (the not-so-subtly entitled  Permitting for Mining Needs Act, or Permit-MN) would do nothing to help secure “critical minerals dominance.” Instead it would effectively do away with critical minerals.

Permit-MN goes through 30 U.S. Code § 1607, the “Critical Minerals Supply Chain and Reliability” section of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and at every opportunity strikes the word “critical” from the books. It changes the title of the section to “Minerals Supply Chain and Reliability.” It removes the word “critical” from “each place such term appears” in the Sense of Congress section. That section currently reads:

It is the sense of Congress that-
(1) critical minerals are fundamental to the economy, competitiveness, and security of the United States;
(2) many critical minerals are only economic to recover when combined with the production of a host mineral;
(3) to the maximum extent practicable, the critical mineral needs of the United States should be satisfied by minerals responsibly produced and recycled in the United States; and
(4) the Federal permitting process has been identified as an impediment to mineral production and the mineral security of the United States. [emphasis mine.]

Sense becomes nonsense. And Permit-MN makes the same move in subsequent sections, striking the word “critical” wherever it appears. In other words, H.R. 1 would extend the special legislative consideration given to critical minerals, because they are “fundamental to the economy, competitiveness, and security of the United States,” to any and every mining project.

Permit-MN has already won Stauber some favorable local press but it only makes a mockery of serious concerns about national security and the energy transition. What really counts here is not the public interest, or making responsible industrial policy to meet the country’s critical mineral needs, but the immediate financial interests of mining companies. And if this is an indication of the reckless permitting reform we can expect from this Congress, then we are better off leaving things as they are.

Serious Conversations, 12

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In a brief Twitter essay on Richard Spencer’s claim that the Nazi salutes at his “Hail Trump” speech were “clearly done in the spirit of irony and exuberance,” New Republic editor Jeet Heer quoted a few sentences from Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew that resonated with some of the writing I’ve done on the conversational stance and what makes a conversation serious (especially this post and this one). So I went back to Sartre’s 1944 text and read for context.

Here, our “post-truth” crisis looks more like a raging pandemic of bad faith:

How can one choose to reason falsely? It is because of a longing for impenetrability. The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that his reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may supervene to cast doubt on it. He never sees very clearly where he is going; he is “open”; he may even appear to be hesitant. But there are people who are attracted by the durability of a stone. They wish to be massive and impenetrable; they wish not to change. Where, indeed, would change take them? We have here a basic fear of oneself and of truth. What frightens them is not the content of truth, of which they have no conception, but the form itself of truth, that thing of indefinite approximation. It is as if their own existence were in continual suspension. But they wish to exist all at once and right away. They do not want any acquired opinions; they want them to be innate. Since they are afraid of reasoning, they wish to lead the kind of life wherein reasoning and research play only a subordinate role, wherein one seeks only what he has already found, wherein one becomes only what he already was. This is nothing but passion. Only a strong emotional bias can give a lightning-like certainty; it alone can hold reason in leash; it alone can remain impervious to experience and last for a whole lifetime.

The anti-Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti‐Semites, all of them absurd: “I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc.” Never believe that anti‐ Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.

Those wishing to read more can download a PDF of Sartre’s text — in the translation by George J. Becker, with an introduction by Michael Walzer — here.