“This is the worst woke story I’ve seen,” Fox Business host Larry Kudlow said about Bank of America’s use of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics against its own customers.
Kudlow made his comments during a Friday interview on his WABC radio show with Breitbart Economics Editor John Carney. The topic of discussion was a Breitbart report about the “Bank of UnAmerica” ad campaign launched by the advocacy group Consumers’ Research highlighting Bank of America’s ESG agenda.
“There’s this tremendous story up on Breitbart about Bank of America’s wokeness,” Kudlow said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s, I guess, the second largest bank in the United States monitoring your purchases, tracking your emissions, helping fund abortions, attacking your Second Amendment rights, and forcing environment, social, and governance metrics (ESG) to potentially lock individuals and businesses out of key banking services.”
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Carney explained that Bank of America sees these efforts as part of the bank’s “social responsibilities,” particularly with regards to environmental issues. He noted that in a report last September, the bank’s officials revealed that they are not only tracking their own carbon emissions, but also the carbon emissions of their large corporate clients, especially auto and energy companies.
“The way Bank of America thinks about it is this is the emissions they are financing. And they want to reduce those over the course of the next couple decades to net zero as well,” Carney said. “They use very Orwellian language. They say they want to inspire and enable customers to do this. But, of course, when the second largest bank in the country is telling you that they’re tracking your emissions, what’s going to happen? It means that you say, okay, my financing will be easier to obtain if I have lower emissions. And, frankly, this should be really troubling to people like you and I who believe that we really need to unleash America’s energy capability. If you have a bank like Bank of America saying, ‘We’re not really on board with that,’ it doesn’t matter if we get the permits out if you can’t get financing to build the infrastructure needed to extract oil and natural gas out of the ground.”
Consumers’ Research—whose “Bank of UnAmerica” ad campaign features two national television ads, a Times Square billboard, mobile billboards, and a website—has also highlighted the damage these policies will have on the nation’s energy resources.
Bank of America’s “multibillion dollar lobbying efforts helped stagnate our economy and crippled domestic energy production at the behest of the UN’s climate cartel known as the Net Zero Alliance,” Consumers’ Research executive director Will Hild explained in a statement.
Carney applauded Consumers’ Research’s efforts in bringing attention to these practices and noted the irony that woke corporations like Bank of America no longer seek to accommodate their consumers but instead seek to dictate to them.
“Companies used to spend a lot of money to figure out ‘What do our customers want.’ Here, we have something very different. It’s them saying that they basically evaluated ‘What do we want to make our customers do.’ And that’s what’s happening here,” he said.
Carney added that the bank’s woke policy also extended to social issues like abortion, with Bank of America subsidizing the abortion-related travel for employees who live in states that do not permit the termination of a pregnancy right up to the moment of birth.
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan attends a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on January 22, 2019. (Jason Alden/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Kudlow also mentioned Bank of America’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training for its employees, in which “employees are lectured that the United States is a racist nation that is built on white supremacy. And in particular, white employees are instructed to confront their, quote, white privilege.”
“Really? This is a bank. Really? Honestly?” Kudlow asked incredulously.
“It’s almost like a communist reeducation program, frankly, like where they’re doing struggle sessions and they talk about decolonizing your mind, ceding power to people of color,” Carney added, likening these policies to the implementation of critical race theory by a corporation upon its own employees.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this story, Carney explained, is the realization that Bank of America has taken a side in the woke culture wars.
“One of these things would be bad enough. Seeing all of them together is really troubling because it looks like Bank of America is taking sides in a culture war,” he said. “And, frankly, if I was the board of Bank of America, I would want to talk to [Bank of America CEO] Brian Moynihan and say, ‘Hey…why are we declaring ourselves on one side of this culture war?’ It is not working out for companies like Anheuser-Busch and AB InBev who makes Bud Light; [their] sales have plunged. It’s not worked out for Target; they’ve suffered tremendously. If I were the board of Bank of America or the shareholders, I would demand some explanation about what level are these decisions being made [and] who has okayed them.”
“There are some great people on the board of Bank of America. I don’t think they’re aware of all of this, frankly. And I think they should start asking questions and pushing back on it,” he added.
For more information about Bank of America’s ESG and DEI agenda, visit Consumers’ Research’s website.
Rebecca Mansour is Senior Editor-at-Large for Breitbart News. Follow her on Twitter at @RAMansour.
