Bennett Freeman
speaker
102 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 8 Jul
Bennett Freeman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This is, you know, how the world should work is we have a free exchange of ideas and not try to silence each other.
So Greenpeace is really at the tip of the spear here with this case, and it's going to play out over the coming months.
If I could add here to Chloe's good points that while that statement was weak in some respects, it was significant insofar as there were over half a dozen of the largest companies in corporate America among the signatories, the Minneapolis, St.
Paul, the Twin Cities of Minnesota companies.
to have some of the major corporate headquarters um in in the country so it was notable in that respect yet it's also important to note that not just on human rights issues but more broadly rule of law and constitutional democracy the corporate america has been largely silent
in the first 17 months now of this second Trump term, in a notable contrast to the situation immediately before and after the 2020 presidential election, when the Business Roundtable, the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, about 10 days, 12 days before the election in early November 2020, issued a joint statement
calling for peaceful transfer of power, anticipating or fearing something like January 6th, 2021.
And then finally, and it's just extraordinary to reflect back now, given the current political climate and the relative silence of corporate America, that on the evening of January 6th, 2021, the National Association of Manufacturers issued a public statement
calling on then vice president pence to convene the cabinet invoke the 25th amendment of the u.s constitution and remove the then still current occupant of the oval office from from office for the final two weeks of the term extraordinary in retrospect
And I don't want to get much beyond our remit here of business and human rights, but we may have some testing times in connection with the midterms, midterm congressional elections in early November, and again, the presidential election in 2020.
But the point here is, is that business respect for human rights ultimately relates directly to respect for rule of law and constitutional democracy.
And that's beyond the mandate of the center in this specific report.
But these issues do and responsibilities all join up at some point.
Maybe I'll address it first because I was Senior Vice President of Calvert Investments from 2006 to 15, so in the middle of the whole responsible investment and ESG world in the US.
I think that this backlash, which became increasingly apparent in calendar year 2022, although there was some
build up before that.
It's built ever since.
I'd like to think, I'm not certain, but I'd like to think that it's peaked, that we now are also seeing a pushback against the backlash against ESG.
There was a notable development just recently, a group of Republican members of the House of Representatives
including a North Carolina Congressman, Pat Harrigan, issued a letter calling for investors to be able to make their own choices as to how they assess risks.
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