Nasdaq DEI Mandates Decked

A federal appeals court in New Orleans recently rejected Nasdaq/s yearlong woke push to set as well as publish mandated racial & gender targets for the boards of its listed companies. So, the retreat from progressives’ DEI & Eco terror gains steam?

As the WSJ article reporting the news suggested, “The court’s decision followed a broad backlash against what conservatives dub ‘woke’ policies in the political & corporate worlds,” such as DEI in hiring & ESG aka investing based on environmental, social & corporate-governance factors … rather than merit or traditional notions of common sense. As the piece notes, “Companies that had earlier embraced such policies have since quietly retreated from them.” The woke movement in Nasdaq had gone so far as requiring its companies “to meet certain minimum targets for diversity, or explain in writing why they hadn’t done so … for most US companies, the ultimate target at the end of [a] phase in period was for boards to have one female director and one director who identifies as a racial minority or as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer.”

Seriously. The plaintiffs in the 5th Circuit case had sued the SEC for approving Nasdaq’s proposed diversity rules in 2021, arguing they were mandated targets that amounted to an unlawful quota. The appeals court majority agreed. The SEC “has intruded into territory far outside its ordinary domain,” Judge Andrew Oldham wrote in the ruling. Said the New Civil Liberties Alliance, one of the groups that had sued, The mandated Nasdaq rules had “stripped people of their individuality & forced companies to classify them based on gender, race, ethnicity & sexuality.” Sort of a reverse discrimination argument? Nasdaq had denied that its diversity targets were “mandates” at all since they gave members a chance to explain their lack of diversity in writing. The appeals court didn’t buy it.

Davd Soul