(Article by Tyler Durden republished from ZeroHedge.com)
The culture of ESG status, which is rooted in far-left identity politics, climate change hysteria and the World Economic Forum's concept of "Stakeholder Capitalism" has created a vast network of financial systems built on woke ideology. The recent fallout from the Silicon Valley Bank crash has highlighted the deep flaws involved in ESG based finance, the same flaws that the alternative economic media has been warning about for some time.
Several years ago, venture capital was free flowing in large part due to the Federal Reserve's near-zero interest rates and stimulus measures, and these conditions fueled the ESG cheap money bonanza. However, the Fed took away the punch bowl and has been continuously raising rates into economic weakness, making ESG lending untenable. The model that relied so much on perpetual central bank support began to die.
The latest casualty of the ESG implosion is Amazon, with over 9000 layoffs announced this past week, along with cuts being made to various Amazon subsidiaries including the Twitch video streaming service popular with gamers. The San Francisco based company has an extensive and ugly history of EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) measures that have greatly influenced its hiring practices as well as its censorship practices. The platform is notorious for its crackdown on content that runs contrary to their social justice sensibilities.
Twitch is most famous for its implementation of an 8 member "Safety Council" which had oversight on TOS rules for the platform. The leftist saturated council included a trans member (a man identifying as a woman) who also believed he was a deer that often accused gamers of being "white supremacists."
With Get Woke, Go Broke becoming a hard fast rule these days, it's not surprising that Twitch will now be firing 400 members of its 1100 member staff; that's 36% of its employees, in order to cut costs and save the company. The move comes only days after CEO Emmet Shear resigned (jumped ship), indicating a corporate subsidiary in panic mode. Amazon appears to be cutting the fat, and woke projects like Twitch make up a lot of fat.
Read more at: ZeroHedge.com