Sure, there were regulatory agencies and accountants up the kazoo, but money is also power: the paper dollar would get returned to the owner, but the whole time it was out of his hands, its power was being used against him.

In a free market, millions of voters can vote with their wallet. It's a form of democracy. But for hapless sleepy investors in a pension plan — sometime in the 1980s that power to choose the kind of industries and values they wanted to support was silently given away to a guy called Larry Fink and a few of his colleagues.

Snoozing-at-the-wheel, citizens voted for cheap energy every two years, while their money voted for "ESG" every day. And ESG is the expensive Environmental, Social, Governance kind of electricity which freezes your peas AND corrects the weather (in theory).

The size of the pension funds managed by the likes of BlackRock, Vanguard and StateStreet became The Financial  Swamp Monster: