The woke culture is being dismantled limb by limb

They just lost a big case surrounding ESG principals in finances

A federal judge ruled Friday that American Airlines' pension fund had violated the law by making investment decisions using criteria other than the interests of the plan beneficiaries. The decision by Judge Reed O'Connor, a George Bush appointee serving the Northern District of Texas, comes from a decision by American Airlines management to allow the pension fund to be managed by BlackRock, which in turn used Environmental, Social, and Governance principles rather than financial performance to guide investment.

Yeah, nothing like having your retirement funds invested with an eye on which companies are more woke, rather than which companies are more likely to make you money. You cannot pay your retirement expenses with good feelings about which companies someone else likes.

I can understand why BlackRock (the devil as some investors like to call them) would offer to invest in ESG and I understand that there is going to be a woke market for that. Some people will be willing to sacrifice their own private investment returns for the sake of feeling good about the companies they invest in. But this is not something you should be allowed to force on someone who doesn't want to invest woke.

For a retirement plan where people are likely looking at limited options, those options should not be exclusively woke ESG investment portfolios and if there are ESG investments involved, then it should be clearly explained what it means. If they want to offer it as a choice? By all means. But to either invest ESG without telling the investor you are doing so, or not offering other options, that should be clearly outside of the boundaries of ethical investment management.

Obviously according to this judge, it is not just unethical, but it is illegal under the law. I look for ESG investment to go the way of corporate DEI programs. Will it completely go away? Nope. But people will start to be able to pick and choose which companies they want to invest in, buy from, and work for. I suspect that those who choose the alphabet route will still be around, at least for a while. But since there is only so much market for it, the amount of these companies will only continue to dwindle.