Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to Intersection of Faith and Culture. It's a WallBuilders show. We're taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. You going to keep it short because we've got a great presentation to share with you from the Pro-family Legislators conferences. Justin Haskins We're going to be talking about ESG. Big tide is turning, folks. So you're going to like this. Let's jump right in. Here's Justin Haskins at the Pro-family Legislators conference. 

Justin Haskins [00:00:29] We have a lot of problems that still need to be solved. One of those problems is something that some of you in the room have heard of, but many of you have not. This presentation is just one part of the research that we've been doing for a very long time about that. This is an incredibly important issue. I think it is the most important issue facing the country, at least one of the top 2 or 3. And many of you have never even heard of it. But it's that important. Okay. So let's just get straight to it. 2020. Covid and the emergence of the Great Reset Movement. Elites from all over the world gather together to figure out a way to push the reset button on the global economy to rewrite social contracts. This is the birth of the modern ESG movement. Social credit scores. This is where BlackRock and all of these big financial institutions start coming to the fore. What they dreamed up in 2020 is now becoming a reality, regardless of whether Donald Trump. Well, now we know Donald Trump won the election. It doesn't even matter. This is going to happen unless we fight back against it. And here's how. In May, after years of negotiations, the European Union passed a law. It's a really great name. It's called the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. Okay, See SDD, it sounds incredibly boring, but it's not okay. The CST requires large businesses headquartered in the European Union to as well as large foreign corporations. Large foreign corporations, including American corporations that do business in the European Union above a certain threshold. And I'll talk about that soon. To adhere to these massive ESG left wing social credit scoring systems, not just within their their specific business practices, but in their products and their services, not just in the European Union, but all over the world. So if you are a large corporation that does business, American corporation that does business in the European Union above the threshold, you have to adopt these left wing social credit scores. You have to impose them throughout your entire business set of business operations and in the process transform the entire global economy as a result of it. But in this particular case, we're talking about Americans. So what are these social credit scores? What do they look like? While the law is vaguely written on purpose so that EU member states can adopt their own version of this ESG left wing social credit scoring system that they're imposing on companies, again, American companies. These individual nations are responsible for enforcing these ESG rules. The CSR that we're talking about here, this law in the European Union. It creates a regulatory floor, but not a ceiling. So in other words, an EU nation has to do at least what this CSA law says. But they could do even more. It could be even crazier than what we're going to talk about here. So what's in it? What sorts of things do they have in there? Well, this is just a very basic outline. There are many things as well. Over 100 pages. Lots of vague language. There are all sorts of guarantees for unionization and collective bargaining. This is going to be imposed on American companies. All kinds of things about the W.H.O., health care standards and disease prevention. Of course, they have a very specific understanding of what that means. It doesn't necessarily comply with what we agree with children's education requirements, a full transition to a green energy economy. We're talking windmills and solar panels. This alone has the chance to completely destroy our economy. It gets worse. Requirements for Company Climate transition Plans. Every company that's considered a covered company, regardless of where they're headquartered, will have to create a climate transition plan and submit it to EU bureaucrats. I mean, American companies have to do this telling how they're going to make this transition a mandate for all companies to go net zero globally by 2050. Reduction in water and land use. Halting and reversing biodiversity loss. Those are the words that are actually in the law. How how do you reverse biotech? What does that even mean? Plant trees? I don't know. But that's what they're requiring. American businesses, the biggest American businesses that operate in the European Union. To do that all throughout the world, including in the United States. Then there's vague, sweeping social justice provisions. And I'll give you an example of that soon. Bans on, quote, disinformation related to climate change and energy. Now, think about how this might apply to a large, big tech company like Google or Apple. If they're not allowed to have this information, which is basically any sort of climate realism view. Almost everyone in this room would agree with. They're not allowed to have it in their businesses. Well, then, I mean, you're talking about eliminating most of the conservative media on all social media, on all social media platforms, on all big tech platforms, Google, etc.. The imposition of EU and other international agreements on these covered companies. So there's a whole bunch of EU international agreements that are in this law. All of these agreements we're going to get to him in a second are going to be imposed on American companies. So this law actually forces American companies to fall underneath a bunch of U.N. and EU agreements have nothing to do with America. No one here agreed on this. Now, the one thing they love to point out and focus on in the media is the prohibitions on child and slave labor. She's a good thing. That's pretty much the only good thing that's in it. So let me give you an example of social justice. This is a direct quote, depending on the circumstances. Companies may need to consider additional standards. For instance, taking account of specific contexts or intersecting factors. That means intersectionality, including, among other things, gender, age, race, ethnicity, class, caste, education, migration status, disability, as well as social and economic status as part of a gender and culturally responsive approach to due diligence. Companies should pay special attention to any particular adverse impacts not treatment, but effects on individuals who may be at heightened risk due to marginalization, vulnerability or other circumstances individually or as members of certain groupings their communities. All large American companies that operate in the European Union will have to do this. Whatever this means, the EU bureaucrats get to decide in each individual nation what this means. This is insane. Then there's a whole bunch of international agreements, as I mentioned before, that are going to be put into this. This is the list I had to go. We had we had a researcher go in and count them all up. There's 89 agreements there. All of these agreements now imposed on large American companies. So what is a covered company under the law? Who are these companies? There are businesses that are based in the European Union. They have at least a thousand employees and a net worldwide turnover, which is sort of like total revenue, greater than €450 million, which is about $500 million. Or a company that's outside of the European Union that has €450 million of net turnover in the European Union. So we're talking big companies, American companies included, that operate inside the European Union, doing at least $500 million of revenue, not profit revenue. So what are some examples of what we're talking about? Maybe there's only a few companies that know there's many hundreds, perhaps thousands of companies that fall under this. We have verified these specific examples Apple, Microsoft, Cargill, Ford, Google, McDonalds, Meta, Cisco Foods, Amazon. And there's tons more. But just these listed here, If all of them have to adopt left wing social credit scores and then impose them throughout the entire the America throughout their all their operations globally, what is that going to do to our economy? What is it going to do to our society? Just this alone? Let's give a very specific example just to help illustrate what this might look like. Cumulus Media says that YouTube is the largest podcasting platform in the world, 31% market control. Spotify is two with 21% of the market. Apple is third with 12%. The add all that up, it's way over half. Okay, so podcasting, radio market, a podcasting market and the digital distribution of radio, we're talking about over half of that is controlled by three companies. All of these companies are covered. All of them. Which means the vague social justice language we talked about before, the disinformation ban that we talked about before. All of that is going to be imposed on these companies, which means if you a radio show and you are on one of these platforms and all of the major radio shows in the United States, conservative radio shows, for example, all the big podcasts you can think of like Joe Rogan, all of these people would be covered under this law. So they're not going to be able to exist on these major platforms or they're going to have to change your shows. Glenn's radio show is one of them. He's on all three of these, but he's in clear violation of the rules. So these companies will have to get rid of his show as well as a whole bunch of other shows. Now, what if they don't? What happens if American companies don't comply? This is insane. This is what happens. Businesses that fail to meet the requirements will face financial penalties of, quote, not less than 5% of the net worldwide turnover of the company in the financial year preceding that of the decision to impose the fine. Now, what does that amount to? For large multinational corporations worth billions and billions of dollars. In Apple's case, we did the math. It's $19 billion for one violation. $19 billion. It gets even worse. Not only can they find you and issue other sorts of penalties, but activist groups and individuals are allowed to sue these companies for violating the law and claim damages to things like the environment or some endangered species somewhere or some other ridiculous thing. And then they can collect damages on behalf of the so-called injured parties. And who gets to decide all of this? Well. Some left wing European court. It's not tried in America. This is, again, insane what we're talking about here. Now, all of this is terrible. On its own. On its own. It's terrible. But it gets worse. The most important part of this law is not that it imposes these requirements on the largest, most iconic, most important companies in America. It's that it requires those companies Apple, Microsoft, Google, McDonalds, Ford, etc., Cargill, to impose those ESG rules on almost all or many of the companies that they do business with, too. No matter how large they are or whether they do business in the European Union at all. So if you are a subsidiary, one of these companies or a business partner of one of these companies, you will also have to comply with this left wing ESG social credit scoring system. Now, how do they do this? Through contract assurances? The EU says that these large companies that are covered by the law have to force these smaller companies to sign contracts that say that they're going to do all of these left wing things. And if they don't, then they have to stop doing business with them, thereby effectively killing all sorts of small businesses. So there everyone's going to go along with this. They have no choice. Now, this is pretty ingenious when you think about it. Diabolical evil. Yeah, but I mean, ingenious. I want to walk you through an example, a specific example of how this would work. Let's talk about Cisco Foods. Okay. Cisco Foods is one of the largest food distribution companies in the world, but especially in the United States. It provides tons of food to restaurants, schools, hospitals, other businesses. It does massive amounts, billions of dollars of business a year. They have a subsidiary called the International Food Group. This operates inside of the European Union. In particular, they do a lot of business in France, $1.6 billion of revenue in 2023, which means it's a covered law under the C D, a covered company. Okay. So Cisco Foods is a covered company. So all the operations that they do in the United States has to comply with these left wing ESG policies. Okay. According to Cisco's 2023 annual report, their supply network included a whole bunch of large corporations think Nabisco and PepsiCo and all of these other companies. Many of those companies are going to be forced to comply directly anyway. The really crazy thing is it also includes, quote, specialty and seasonal products from small to midsized producers to meet a growing demand for locally sourced products. Our locally sourced products, including include produce, meats, cheese and other products. Now, what does this mean? This means that if you are a dairy farmer in Wisconsin that sells to Sysco foods so that they can provide cheese or dairy products to some restaurants somewhere so that they're locally sourced. You have to comply with a left wing ESG social credit scoring system from the European Union. And if you don't, then Sysco will get rid of you. Why? Because they don't want to pay $2 billion in fines or something like that. 

Justin Haskins [00:16:11] Think of all the companies that'll be caught up in this in just in the example of Cisco, the plastic manufacturers and distributors that wrap up the food for Cisco, transportation companies that deliver on behalf of Cisco consultants, marketing and design firms, technology companies, energy companies, third party warehouses, the mechanics who work on the cars for Cisco. Where do they buy their tires? These are all business partners, so all have to comply. This is the transformation of society. Think of all the companies. This is just this is just a sample. Think of all the businesses that all of these different companies work with Apple, Microsoft, Cargill, Ford, all the transportation companies, all the warehouses, all of the marketing firms, all of the small farmers that do business. If you're a potato farmer that sells potatoes to McDonald's and you're in Idaho, you have nothing to do with the European Union. Too bad you have to comply with this left wing EU ESG system. So what are we supposed to do about this? Because this is an incredibly complex system and problem. Well, the first thing I want to point out is that voters, generally speaking, when asked about this, they don't like it. Americans don't want this. We conducted a survey in July 2024 with Rasmussen Reports massive survey, 2400 likely voters. And we asked them, would you support a US federal or state law that would protect American companies from being required to comply with the European Union's new supply chain law? And what we found was about half said that they would support fighting back against it. 38% said somewhat or strongly opposed, 14% not sure. So support was 11 percentage points higher than opposition. That's very, very good. Not sure is high. That makes sense because no one's ever heard of it. So you would expect that. But when people find out about it, generally speaking, they're opposed to it. When you look at the the breakdown of Democrats, Republicans, independents, you see that every single group supports fighting back against this law. So voters don't want it. This is likely voters. Remember, two voters do not want the CCD. Legislative solutions. Because of the issue's complexity and because we're dealing with international trade. The federal government ideally would be involved. Now, when I put this together, I wasn't sure who was going to be running the federal government. Thank God we've got a guy in there who probably will want to do something about it if he knows about it. Okay. So what we need is for the federal government to go to the EU and say, we're not doing this. Okay. There's a whole bunch of ways that that can happen and a whole bunch of reasons for why the EU should listen to us. First of all, we don't need the EU. The EU needs us. This is totally backwards. This makes no sense. We should be telling them what to do. Why are we adhering to their crazy left wing policies? This makes absolutely no sense at all. The only reason it's gotten this far as it has is because the Biden-Harris administration, good riddance to them, wanted this. They're in favor of ESG. So they're they're all about it. So the EU did it and they pushed it through in May of 2024, just before the election. Why is that, you think after years of working on they finally got it done just before their EU elections where a whole bunch of left wing people got thrown out of their parliament. Why? Because the writing was on the wall. It's now or never. So they threw this in here as a last ditch attempt to stop Donald Trump, to stop America from coming back, to stop the free market forces that are working their way through the European system. They're moving further to the right. They're in Europe as well. So we need to put pressure on them financially. They need us desperately, not just for our products and services, but they need our money. Last I checked, there's a war over there happening right now. Where's the money for that war coming from? So let me get this straight. We've got a war in Europe. It's costing ungodly amounts of money that we're paying for. Not Europeans. Right. And we're paying for it. We're sending weapons over there. We're helping train Europeans to defend themselves. Okay. Regardless of what you think of that, is it fair that we spend all of this money, we devote our military efforts to them, and then they turn around and tell our citizens how to live their lives? This is insanity. Insanity. And it's only allowed to happen because we have a left wing socialistic government in power right now at this very moment. But not for a much longer. So what can states do? Well. The most important thing. I've talked to congressional offices about this. I've talked to people who are very well-connected in Washington, and this is what they need. What they need is for massive pushback against this in the states. They need states to say to the federal government, you got to do something about this. Our businesses are going to be killed by it. They need trade associations to step up and say, you know, the ranchers, the farmers, the manufacturers, etc., this will kill us if you allow it to happen. You got to do something about it. That's what they need. And I think that you folks in the room here today are just the people to do that. So obviously, there's a lot of information here, a ton of information. I want to leave you with one last really important thing that's not on a slide. But it's absolutely vital. We recently learned that there's another provision buried in the law that makes this even crazier than everything that I've described so far. There's a requirement in the law that says. That if you are a large business and you go to what they call a small or medium sized enterprise and SMEs, which is really, you know, they could be doing millions of dollars in revenue and be considered in SMEs. And you say, sorry, but you know, you're going to have to comply with these left wing ESG social credit scores. It doesn't matter where this company is. It could be in America, could be in Mexico, it could be anywhere. Africa could be anywhere in the world. And you go to them, you say, we're sorry, but you have to comply with this. We don't really want this, but you have no choice. And they say, you know, we would love to have like more trans people on our board of directors, but like, we're not going to do that or we can't do it. Or we would love to have solar panels power this Chinese manufacturer. But what will go under if we do that, if they make the argument that they can't do it for financial reasons, then what the law says, what the code says is that the large corporation is supposed to pay or finance or in some way help this small or medium sized enterprise make the transition. Now think about this. This means large, wealthy American or Western companies going to some Colombian coffee farmer who says, I can't do this sorry, coffee beans, You know, they're growing coffee beans. I can't afford to do these policies about land use and water use. And so I'm not going to do it. So then this American company will have to pay for it. And where does that money come from? From the corporation. Out of the goodness of their hearts. Of course not. They're going to pass that along to American families. And regular people are going to be paying for this ESG social credit scoring system, transformation of the entire world. We're talking about untold trillions of dollars in future spending and all on our backs. Why? To appease some left wing ESG bureaucrats who we didn't vote for. Now, how does this make any sense? It makes none. I want to remind you all in the room here tonight that electoral victories without important actions that follow those victories are totally meaningless, totally and completely. They might make us feel good for a little while. And that is it. Our freedoms are at stake. The health of our economy is at stake. Our sovereignty, which is what this issue is primarily about, is at stake. Our right to chart our own destiny as a nation is now in greater peril than it's been in decades. As a result of this, despite Donald Trump winning, because all of this happens unless we fight back. If we just don't do anything, it happens anyway. It's not enough to say, well, we won't go along with it. Too bad it's already happening. So if we don't take the opportunity that we have before us right now to fight off the EU's attacks on our liberty, then we, all of us, including the people in this room, we are partially responsible for what happens next. I can't live with that. And I hope you can't live with that either. So. The time for talking and campaigning has ended. It's done. It's over. We won. Great. The time to take our country back has come. I hope you'll join me in the coming years and months as we do it. Thank you. 

Rick Green [00:25:47] Alright  folks. That's all the time we got for today. Hope you enjoyed that talk from Justin Haskins. If you want more of the pro-family legislators conference presentations. Go to our Web site, WallBuilders Dot Show. And over the last few weeks, we've been sharing as many of those as we can. It's a great opportunity. Once a year, these legislators come from all over the nation. We had a massive crowd. This time it's just it was just so encouraging to first of all, to see so many legislators that are pro-family and that are doing good things in their states. But then to hear from folks like Justin tomorrow, we're going to hear from Jacobo Lyons. I mean, there's just so many things happening that we share with these legislators, and then they go back and make things happen in their particular state. So be encouraged. Check out the website today WallBuilders.show. Listen to some more of this program. Share them with your friends and family. I'm Rick Green, America's Constitution coach, David Barton, Tim Barton, we all appreciate you so much and we encourage you to share this as we're heading into the end of 2024 and get ready for a big 2025. Get trained, get prepared, get equipped. Go to wallbuilders.com to learn more today. Thanks so much for listening to the WallBuilders show.