Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has further exposed the hypocrisy of the woke investment fad known as ESG.

ESG is the acronym for environmental social governance. It’s an amorphous group of edicts that have been adopted by big Wall Street firms, investment managers and many corporations to allegedly make the world a better place. 

Follow ESG edicts and you will help protect the environment by investing in windmills instead of oil companies. Board diversity is big under ESG rules. So is supporting social justice, which is why you see so much corporate money flowing to groups like Black Lives Matter.

Do all of that and you can virtue signal ‘til the cows come home despite obvious drawbacks. Reducing your carbon footprint might be a good thing but do it as the ESG zealots want and you get what we have now: Higher energy prices because of the inefficiencies of windmills.

That’s a tax — and a big one — on the working class.

Who doesn’t want board diversity? But when diversity trumps skills it’s the shareholders who suffer. Those shareholders aren’t a bunch of rich white dudes. They’re teachers, police and firefighters who depend on fully-funded pensions.

Yes, Black Lives Matter sounds good on paper — that’s why major corporations funneled money into its coffers following the tragic murder of George Floyd by a white police officer. Dig deeper and you will discover the organization’s Marxist foundations, sketchy finances and ample evidence of its violent tactics.

Where was Gensler?

ESG is the Swiss cheese of corporate governance but it may also become law. Since his appointment last year, Securities and Exchange Commission’s lefty chair Gary Gensler has been working hard to make ESG a standard every public company must adhere to or face sanctions from Wall Street’s top cop.

Then came Putin’s war on Ukraine, and the whole ESG charade has been exposed even if Gensler and his corporate lackeys still won’t fully admit it. Bodies are piling up, bloody images of Ukrainian women and children are seen daily almost in real time, yet under ESG coda it’s OK to be operating a McDonald’s in Moscow. You can also invest in a company owned by one of Putin’s oligarch pals because big exchanges like Nasdaq exempt foreign companies like those in Russia from their ESG listing standards. (Nasdaq did recently suspend trading in Russian companies.)

There is a case to be made that ESG has funded Putin’s tanks and artillery. Same with China’s President, Xi Jinping, who is setting his sights on Taiwan while operating a gulag to oppress anyone who challenges his autocratic rule.

You see for years, ESG prevented no investment fund, bank or company from doing business with Putin or Xi. Only now when Putin’s bloodlust appears to have now gone too far, are the wokesters walking back their hypocrisy. They’re all scrambling to dump Russian investments from funds. Big companies are debating whether to pull out of Russian altogether as the Putin war machine rages on.

The absurdity of all of this, of course, is that Putin has never hid who he really was. He had already leveled Chechnya killing tens of thousands of innocents; thousands of civilians died when he aided Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with indiscriminate bombing to suppress an uprising. Stories abound of his henchmen searching the globe to assassinate all rivals. All under the nose of Gensler and some of Wall Street’s allegedly smartest investors who blindly followed their ESG guidelines that allowed them to do business with a madman.

If you’re blood isn’t boiling just yet, consider this: Gensler, the ESG hyping SEC chair, has between $5.5 million to $26 million across two emerging markets funds with a considerable stake in Russian assets, according to Fox Business’s Eleanor Terrett.

No word yet from Gensler if he plans to virtue-signal his way out of that investment.

Hidden ‘Valley’

Media banking sensation Aryeh Bourkoff loves to name drop. Bragging to corporate fat cats that he’s plugged in everywhere is how he banked last year’s $43 billion mega deal between WarnerMedia and Discovery Inc., I am told.

I don’t know if everyone is really talking to Aryeh, but every year he does hold some sort of movers-and-shakers conference in Deer Valley, Utah. It’s a more secret, and for my money, less relevant version of the Allen & Co., Sun Valley media powwow and this year’s version begins today. While no one outside Aryeh’s inner circle is supposed to know who’s going, through the magic of reporting, I’ve obtained the entire “highly confidential” list of invitees.

Question I have: Why should it be such a secret that Aryeh wants some face time with Paris Hilton? (Yes, she’s on the list.) And what makes her such a media mover and shaker? Ditto for Lance Armstrong, Naomi Campbell, Maria Sharapova and Robert De Niro (De Niro is a maybe).

To be fair, there are some interesting corporate types attending, though I’m not sure why their attendance is such a state secret since all of them have significant public profiles. People like Shari Redstone of Viacom, her CEO Bob Bakish, David Zaslav of the aforementioned Discovery, and investment wiz Dan Loeb, are out and about in NYC all the time and they don’t even make Page Six.

Oh yeah, there appears to be one journalist attending, CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. He’s on TV every day, so he’s not that bashful about being noticed. Full disclosure: Maybe I’m a little jealous my friend Andrew got the invite and I didn’t.

I bet it’s because Aryeh knows I can’t keep a secret.