In my previous piece I declared how pleased I was with the little birthday surprise brought to me by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability as I turned 72. That day at 10:00 a.m. it held the hearing “ESG Part I: An Examination of Environmental, Social, and Governance Practices with Attorneys General,” artfully chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-KY-01). He has written a riveting wrap up which I will have more to say about in a future piece. But, as with all good stories, it’s best to begin at the beginning. I will do this by focusing on the opening testimony of the three witnesses: Steven T. Marshall (Alabama Attorney General), Sean D. Reyes (Utah Attorney General), and Mark Frerichs (Illinois State Treasurer).

Doing so one week later presents a certain challenge since much has already been written about the hearing, including “Opinion: The day free-market Republicans became Soviet economic planners” by Dana Millbank in The Washington Post and “Dazed and Confused at Congress’ ESG Hearing: That was seriously weird.” by Jeva Langue in Heatmap. I don’t want to repeat what others have said. I also want to acknowledge that these pieces are written by folks that are on the lefty side—like me 🐥.

So what to do? Here is where my degree in pure mathematics from MIT comes in handy. I decided my value add would be a simple but elegant (like all good math) analytical one. I created word clouds for the three witnesses who got this hearing off to such a sterling start as I ate popcorn and quaffed some champagne 🍾 (day drinking, I know) to celebrate my 72^nd birthday.

innovation idea Word Cloud Concept | GETTY

I suspect most of you are familiar with word clouds but just to be clear for everyone, The Free Dictionary defines a word cloud as “A graphic representation of words, typically those used in a document or website, in which the words are arranged artistically in close proximity and the size of each word is proportional to the word’s frequency or to the size of numeric variable associated with the word.” I like free so I went with that source. I also like free markets, as does the minority witness—in contrast to his counterparts from the majority. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself and I promised to start at the beginning.

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