This Week in ESG and Impact Investing

Shou Chew, C.E.O. of the social media app TikTok, testified before  the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce " about China’s ties to TikTok, data privacy and the app’s effects on children." Ignoring significant actual damage caused by US-based social media companies, the hearing and the questioning had the same quality as discussions about dropping the bomb on Hiroshima: you can justify the action, but you can also question the choice of target. Recall that " personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected without their consent by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, predominantly to be used for political advertising. Facebook apologized for their role in the data harvesting, their CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of Congress, and, in July 2019, the firm was fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission due to its privacy violations ."  The problems are recurring and wide spread: "NSA documents from June 2013 include...

According to 2 USC 25 : Oath of Speaker, Members, and Delegates. (Text contains those laws in effect on January 4, 2023:) “At the first session of Congress after every general election of Representatives, the oath of office shall be administered by any Member of the House of Representatives to the Speaker; and by the Speaker to all the Members and Delegates present, and to the Clerk, previous to entering on any other business; and to the Members and Delegates who afterward appear, previous to their taking their seats.” Essentially, most interpretations of this section state that the oath of office must be administered by the House Speaker. (Can't Members swear each other in?) Until then, all representatives are just Representative-Elects, and don’t hold any actual power. Without a Speaker, there are only 100 members of Congress (the US Senate), and an interim speaker cannot administer the oath.  It appears that "members are operating under the rules for the last Congress"...