Others have written about the findings emerging from Edelman’s 2022 Trust Barometer. Edelman - the establishment’s favourite PR agency - must have found itself in a tricky situation when the Davos-loving outfit’s annual survey revealed that a massive percentage of its 36,000 respondents seemed to have lost trust in both government and the media.

“We find a world ensnared in a vicious cycle of distrust, fueled by a growing lack of faith in media and government. Through disinformation and division, these two institutions are feeding the cycle and exploiting it for commercial and political gain.”

Edelman’s take-away from this is that business must lead as trust in government continues to spiral.

The trouble, of course, is that big business has been complicit in the loss of trust in both media and government. And, as shown by the Trust Barometer findings, around half of the respondents view government and media as divisive forces.

Why is this? Well, it’s because so many large corporations are told how to behave (as society’s newest guardians) directly or indirectly by the government or its apparatchiks. Most of America’s largest companies are de facto owned by just 3 major asset management firms: Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street. The biggest of these three, Blackrock, is regarded as an annex of the US government and chief enforcer of bizarre, anti-Capitalist corporate wokery (also known as ESG). In short, Larry Fink, Blackrock’s CEO, can pretty much mandate how businesses should behave in terms of their environmental, social and governance policies.

But there’s a problem. People want these businesses to deliver excellent products and services more than they want them to peddle woke. The proof is in the share price. Chief agent of woke, Facebook, has seen its share price and advertising revenue tumble since it decided to appoint itself as Society’s moral guardian. Twitter’s management was summarily fired by Elon Musk when he acquired the company - and he is now setting about telling just how Twitter 1.0 was manipulated by the FBI, CIA and other government appointed thought police. Last week, Amazon announced 18,000 job losses, and scrapped several of its more zany ESG-inspired projects like robot delivery.

And various US States are now pulling investments out of under-performing ESG funds controlled by Biden’s favourite PE firms.

In fact the ESG movement is rapidly petering out just as Edelman implores business to do more ESG moral guardian stuff to replace the misinformation peddled by government and the media.

What Edelman conveniently overlooks is that the misinformation by government in the last 3 years was directly related to public health protocols and was instigated by big business and government acting in cahoots. The vast increase in public debt over the last 3 years - raised to pay for Covid related malfeasance - was largely spent on a rag-bag collection of corporations involved in PPE, Covid testing, vaccine ‘research’, public health propaganda ‘think tanks’ and big pharma. And now that the Net Zero Ponsi scheme is in full flow we can throw into this mix the Democratic Party’s favourite “effective altruism” outfit and fraudster-Cryptocurrency Exchange, FTX.

In short, when Corporations are established or reengineered to address “societal problems” they do nothing useful and have a tendency towards evil. Just like governments.

However, that said, there is a problem when huge swathes of society don’t trust their democratically elected governments and their puppet media.

What’s to be done? In America they’re a bit further along in terms of remedying things. Biden’s control on power is diminished following the mid-terms. Much of his crazier ideas and policy announcements will be overturned in the House. And the markets are already turning against the ESG movement - there’s even a new Asset Manager in town that’s doing rather well. And, hopefully, the Republican Party will realise that there’s a new political game in town: restoring trust.

In the United Kingdom we’re a bit further behind. None of the mainstream political parties appear to know how to restore trust. A starting point has to be the admission of wrong-doing. The first Party to start campaigning against the lying, fear-mongering and scientism of the last 3 years will win a landslide. However, it’s more likely that brave independent voices will start the political change that’s needed.

But there’s much that business can do - not by campaigning for social change - but by making profit, growing and employing. Only business - focused on fundamentals - can get us out of this unholy mess. Government should stay well away.

A Matter of Trust