Republican presidential candidate and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy claimed financial investment giants BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard "represent arguably the most powerful cartel in human history."
"They’re the largest shareholders of nearly every major public company (even of each other) & they use *your* own money to foist ESG agendas onto corporate boards - voting for ‘racial equity audits’ & ‘Scope 3 emissions caps’ that don’t advance your best financial interests," Ramaswamy wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Sunday.
"This raises serious fiduciary, antitrust, and conflict-of-interest concerns. As President I will cut off the real hand that guides the ESG movement - not the invisible hand of the free market, but the invisible fist of government itself."
Fox News Digital reached out to BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard for comment Monday.
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Ramaswamy recently surged in polls, meeting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in second place behind former President Donald Trump in the competition for the 2024 GOP nomination.
In his post, Ramaswamy included a clip of his speech Thursday at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, when he was asked by an audience member about his writings on "stakeholder capitalism."
The speaker asked how Ramaswamy feels the U.S. should "balance maintaining its soft power" with respect to relationships with global institutions like the World Economic Forum (WEF), while still representing America's own economic interests on the international stage.
"My practical answer is if it comes in an acronym — FTC, SEC, FBI, DOJ, WEF, WHO, NATO, UN — we may have good reasons to be skeptical of the purpose of any acronymized institution. I say that only half flippantly," Ramaswamy responded.
He was criticizing the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the FBI and the Department of Justice and the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations.
"The truth of the matter is what’s at stake in the debate over stakeholder capitalism – this idea that businesses and multilateral institutions should look after not only their own institutional purpose but also should solve other societal problems at large from global climate change to systemic racism in the west. It’s really a 1776 question actually," Ramaswamy said, referencing the year the Declaration of Independence was signed.
"Because the basic premise is that 'We the People' cannot be trusted to solve existential questions like climate change. That we get it wrong," he said. "They say that ‘We the People’ can’t be trusted with those questions, so business leaders and government leaders and three-letter acronym institutions have to work together, dissolving the boundaries between the public and private sector, dissolving the boundaries between nations to work together toward the global common good.
"We fought a revolution in 1776 that said no to that vision. We said that, for better or worse, and this is the crucial part of that, for better or worse, the way we do it on this side of the Atlantic, on this side of 1776, is that we do trust the people to sort out our differences through free speech and open debate in the public square where every citizen’s voice and vote counts equally.
"What we see today is that old ugly monster rearing its ugly head again. That old-world European version that distrusted the public. That’s what’s at stake, our sovereignty itself. From the WHO to the U.N., it is fundamentally skeptical of sovereignty, especially the sovereignty of a nation founded on rejecting that monarchial vision," he added. "And I think the deeper question to ask is not what comes from the outside that causes us to cede our sovereignty, but what is it inside each of us that makes us want to bend the knee?"
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Ramaswamy further argued how stakeholder capitalism or environmental, social and corporate governance — known by the acronym ESG — are "impeding on the sovereignty of the United States."
"We have to fill that vacuum of purpose with our own vision of what it actually means to still be a citizen of this nation, not some nebulous global citizen fighting climate change, no, a citizen of the United States of America, and to say that is true. That means something to me, and I will stand for my sovereignty and the sovereignty of my nation," he said.
