Vivek Ramaswamy

Book title and author: Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence Download by Vivek Ramaswamy. Review date 5-22-24

Why I picked this book up: Vivek Ramaswami continues to support Donald Trump after dropping out of the run for US presidency. I’ve recently listened to more of his YouTube posts where he continued to impress me with his thoughts on history and how it informs modern thought. This is his second book I have reviewed.

Thoughts: The New York Times bestselling author of Woke Inc. makes the case that the essence of true American identity is to pursue excellence unapologetically and reject victimhood culture. Hardship is now equated with victimhood. Outward displays of vulnerability in defeat are celebrated over winning unabashedly. The pursuit of excellence and exceptionalism are at the heart of American identity, and the disappearance of these ideals in our country leaves a deep moral and cultural vacuum in its wake. But the solution isn’t to simply complain about it. It’s to revive a new cultural movement in America that puts excellence first again. Leaders have called Ramaswamy “the most compelling conservative voice in the country” and “one of the towering intellects in America,” and this book reveals why: he spares neither left nor right in this scathing indictment of the victimhood culture at the heart of America’s national decline. Following the success of his instant bestseller Woke Inc., Ramaswamy explains in his new book that we’re a nation of victims now. It’s one of the few things we still have left in common–across black victims, white victims, liberal victims, and conservative victims. Victims of each other, and ultimately, of ourselves. This fearless, provocative book is for readers who dare to look in the mirror and question their most sacred assumptions about who we are and how we got here. Intricately tracing history from the fall of Rome to the rise of America, weaving Western philosophy with Eastern theology in ways that moved Jefferson and Adams centuries ago, this book describes the rise and the fall of the American experiment itself–and hopefully its reincarnation. I like how Vivek lays out his books with legal history, social development and politically conservative stance. I was not sure if he is more conservative or librarian? I learned in this book he became conservative a kid as an opposite position as his liberal father. There he also based it on his dad’s dislike of Justice Anthony Scalia’s conservative positions.

Why I finished this read: Vivek seemed to me to not want to assume things without evidence even though to me it seemed as if Biden did still the 2000 election with the huge boxes of blank ballots I saw the summer before the election then the shutdown I’d ballot counting, the not allowing both Republican and Democrat people watching the counting and the drastic change fro Trump winning to losing when I woke up but I have no evidence. I also like reading Sowell and this book had a lot of interesting financial information.

Stars rating: 5 of 5 stars because he seems unswayed not claims with no specific evidence of how things appear but wants to base his decision base on the legal way we decide things in the USA. I recommend buying this book.… (altro)

Book title and author: Woke Inc Inside Corporate Americas Social Justice Scam - Vivek Ramaswamy published 8-17- 2021 reviewed 2-28-24

Why I picked this book up: Vivek ran for president in 2024. He is clearly intelligent, is a fast thinker, logical and speaks well. I like him.

Thoughts: AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! A young entrepreneur makes the case that politics has no place in business, and sets out a new vision for the future of American capitalism. There’s a new invisible force at work in our economic and cultural lives. It affects every advertisement we see and every product we buy, from our morning coffee to a new pair of shoes. “Stakeholder capitalism” makes rosy promises of a better, more diverse, environmentally-friendly world, but in reality this ideology championed by America’s business and political leaders robs us of our money, our voice, and our identity. During his campaign he often owned founding multibillion-dollar enterprises, led a biotech company as CEO, he became a hedge fund partner in his 20s, trained as a scientist at Harvard and a lawyer at Yale, and grew up the child of immigrants in a small town in Ohio. Now he takes us behind the scenes into corporate boardrooms and five-star conferences, into Ivy League classrooms and secretive nonprofits, to reveal the defining scam of our century. The modern woke-industrial complex divides us as a people. By mixing morality with consumerism, America’s elites prey on our innermost insecurities about who we really are. They sell us cheap social causes and skin-deep identities to satisfy our hunger for a cause and our search for meaning, at a moment when we as Americans lack both. This book not only rips back the curtain on the new corporatist agenda, it offers a better way forward. America’s elites may want to sort us into demographic boxes, but we don’t have to stay there. Woke, Inc. begins as a critique of stakeholder capitalism and ends with an exploration of what it means to be an American in 2021–a journey that begins with cynicism and ends with hope.

Why I finished this read: Vivek Ramaswamy drew me in with his sharing of personal information. He used a lot of economics/business, legal, social an pragmatic wisdom. He sees beyond the basics, points out great and useful information.

Stars rating: 5 if 5 stars… (altro)

ESG (Environment, Sustainability, Governance) is a scam, says Vivek Ramaswamy. Of course it is. That is self-evident. But in Capitalist Punishment, he claims that ESG is the biggest swindle of all time. That takes some serious explaining.

The purpose of ESG is to give companies and institutions ratings on how they are doing in those three categories. Ramaswamy says ESG boils down to “corporate executives should direct and coordinate the interests of all society’s members.” He positions it as The World Economic Forum at Davos running the world for its billionaire members’ financial benefit.

Meanwhile, the US government is stepping up demands for those ratings to drive environmental policy (instead of passing laws to do so). This causes obvious conflicts, as company presidents have to mouth the platitudes of environmentalism and sustainability, while also searching for more fossil fuels to burn.

That is bad, of course, but then Wall St piled on to rake off unimaginable profits from it too. The big three investment fund companies (Blackrock, State Street and Vanguard) started renaming their funds ESG or Sustainable. They didn’t necessarily change the securities the funds owned, just the names of the funds. Garden-variety lies. Then they started bleating to the public about how environmentally conscious they were. More lies. They began claiming investor returns would be higher by doing good. Laughable lies.

Readers might think that simply changing the name would not have any effect on performance and therefore profit. But ESG turned out to be a license to double the management fees for those funds. Again, with no change in the funds themselves. (Like fake organic produce: change the label, hike the price.) Failing funds suddenly began raking in massive new deposits. And at their scale – the big three speak for stock and debt worth nearly half the GDP of the world – a fraction of a percentage point is worth billions every year.

Worse, people who bought some of those regular funds, suddenly found themselves in ESG funds and did not want to be. And worse still, others bought ESG funds thinking they would be part of the solution. Instead, their pension or 401(k) money went to policies abhorrent to them (with the bonus of de facto corporate management of life around the world). The result is the biggest windfall in history.

The value Ramaswamy adds to this cauldron of deceit is its legality, or lack thereof. Among the endless laws regulating Wall St., there are statutes that require Wall St. to have a single goal: maximizing customer returns (The sole-interest rule). This means no distractions from making the most money for their customers. But ESG does not make money for companies. It costs them foregone profits and so lowers payouts.

This forced focus shift is therefore strictly illegal. Yet it is mandated by the federal government. Everyone is contorting to fit into this new model, but it is literally impossible, as well as clearly illegal.

This makes Ramaswamy’s main point constitutional, an excellent place to base an attack. Financial managers have a fiduciary duty to investors. Financial managers have no business managing other businesses they patronize. Investors should rightly fear when financial managers claim to devise global social policies. Great point.

A second great constitutional point of his is that buyers cannot be forced to join in if they don’t like the investment for moral or religious reasons. And yet, this is exactly what is going on, bigger than ever before. Customer money is being used in a global campaign to restructure the world. That was never the deal.

ESG leads to self-contradictions. On one level, for example, it means convincing Agriculture to adopt sustainable practices in producing their palm oil. At the same time, Wall St. rails against nonsustainable sources of palm oil as companies clear whole rainforests to grow this one species of tree.

On another level, Wall St has to lie to some of the biggest companies in the world, that they love to see profits rise and they wouldn’t dream of telling them how to run their business. Yet later that same day, they might testify before Congress that their primary concern and highest priority is using their financial leverage and sheer size to get management in line with ESG, globally. Choose the lie you prefer.

More hypocrisy comes in the ”protection racket” (as Ramaswamy calls it) where the official ESG ratings for every company come into play. It reeks of the same corruption as in rating corporate debt. Subscribe or your rating might not come out so well. There are no fixed rules, so one ratings firm can rate a company completely differently from another. Regardless, both rake in big bucks annually to keep rating them. Ramaswamy cites Facebook, which is rated in the top four percent by one rating firm, and the bottom one percent by another. “Reliable” does not leap to mind for ESG ratings.

So this whole ESG approach is apparently just wrong, morally, legally, and constitutionally. Elected government should be the body implementing such policy, not Wall St.

I have three criticisms of Capitalist Punishment. First, Ramaswamy sees fit to be snide. He loves to insert unhelpful jabs at President Biden or Senator Bernie Sanders, for example. He describes the long term drop in fees and how it has added wealth to union pensions: “Bernie would be proud, if he understood it.” There’s plenty of place for that, but this is supposedly a serious exposé, fully end-noted and verifiable. Or is it?

My second objection is it transpires that Ramaswamy has recently started his own firm to compete directly with Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard and Invesco. That makes this seemingly legitimate legal argument into a long commercial for his better-value, really non-ESG funds. That’s a problem. He saves this disclosure for the end of the book. Had he been up front about it, it would have changed everything, maybe for the better as he could be an “expert.” Hiding it until the end, not so good. Can you trust anything from this Wall Streeter?

But three, that is nothing compared to what he did next. Just a month after I wrote this this review, Ramaswamy announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. It just taints the book beyond redemption. Now the attacks on Bernie Sanders et al look very different. I feel used for having agreed to review this screed - now clearly biased in aid of his presidential campaign.

The book ends with fireworks, as Ramaswamy takes on Larry Fink, head of Blackrock and one of the richest men in the world: “In my opinion, Fink masterminded the largest financial scam in modern history. His fraud is on a scale at least three orders of magnitude greater than that of Sam Bankman-Fried, impacting tens of millions of people in the United States alone. Yet rather than jail time, he’s been rewarded with a board seat on the World Economic Forum at Davos and eight-figure compensation packages, while US citizens are left holding the bag.”

Just another day on Wall St.

David Wineberg… (altro)