4 minute read
Corporate Greed
THOMAS MCARDLE was a White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush and writes for IssuesInsights.com. Thomas McArdle
Woke Trillions
During the covid-19 pandemic, when the U.S. Federal Reserve invested heavily in corporate debt in unprecedented fashion, which entity in the private sector do you think our central bank turned to for advice? The largest asset manager in the world and perhaps the most powerful “woke” entity in the global financial firmament: BlackRock.
Panicky investors kept a keen eye on which exchange-traded funds and other debt-heavy instruments the Fed favored during the crisis, and they found BlackRock’s own funds high on the list. So naturally, they grabbed onto the central bank’s coattails and invested in the firm themselves. BlackRock got even bigger as a result, pulling in tens of billions of dollars more to oversee than in the previous year. The firm now has more than $10 trillion in assets under management—more than twice Germany’s annual gross domestic product (GDP).
“It’s not that complicated, really. The Fed says, ‘We’re buying this.’ OK, then, I’m going to buy it too,” Michael Rosen, chief investment officer of the $38 billion-strong New York-based Angeles Investments, told The Wall Street Journal a few months after the Fed’s actions began in 2020.
No wonder BlackRock largely waived its consulting fees for its services to the Fed.
One might imagine that such oceans of cash would satisfy anyone. Hardly. Not that the world hasn’t known saintly tycoons, and as George Gilder eloquently reminded us 40 years ago in his masterful “Wealth and Poverty”:
“Capitalism begins with giving. Not through greed, avarice, or even self-love can one expect the rewards of commerce but from a spirit closely akin to altruism, a regard for the needs of others. ... Not taking and consuming but giving, risking, and creating are the characteristic roles of the capitalist.”
In the case of BlackRock, however, greed became so drowned by lucre that it sought other satiation on new shores, such as manipulating others, especially its fellow rich, those who employ the nonrich.
In a chillingly oligarchic remark in 2017, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said, “Behaviors are going to have to change. ... You have to force behaviors, and at BlackRock, we are forcing behaviors.”
Money doesn’t just talk, as the saying goes, it coaxes and seduces, and in BlackRock’s case, it bullies and blackmails. Fink, in 2019, joined the board of the Davos, Switzerland-based World Economic Forum, and as strategic risk consultant F. William Engdahl of the Center for Research on Globalization noted, BlackRock has, since 2018, targeted companies for either investment or shunning based on their ESG (environmental, social, and governance) credentials. In other words, the Democratic Party’s woke agenda.
Companies and equity investment funds seeking capital from big investor entities are supposed to be worried about balance sheets, profits, and overall financial performance; now they also have to worry if they’re politically correct enough on race and climate. Engdahl pointed out that BlackRock awards a firm “positive ratings for the seriousness of its hiring gender-diverse management and employees” or when it embraces green energy. And the criteria can “include anything from corporate donations to Black Lives Matter to supporting UN agencies such as the World Health Organization.”
“Even Carl Icahn, a ruthless Wall Street asset stripper, once called BlackRock ‘an extremely dangerous company. ... I used to say, you know, the Mafia has a better code of ethics than you guys,’” he said.
The firm invests in Chinese military companies and helps Beijing sustain its totalitarian power over the Chinese people. It influences who informs you and who governs you; BlackRock, for years, has held one of the largest shares of ownership in The New York Times. Brian Deese, director of President Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, was brought into the administration straight from BlackRock, where, as “global head of sustainable investing,” his salary and perks were in the millions. Nigerian-born Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, the current deputy secretary of the Treasury, was chief of staff to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink from 2017 to 2019. Michael Pyle, senior economic adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, was global chief investment strategist at BlackRock.
The Heartland Institute’s David Hoyt said: “BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Capital are the top three shareholders in a startlingly large number of the world’s largest and most influential companies. They all sing from the same dark hymnal on governance, which is how they have cartelized private global enterprise to promote their left-wing agenda.”
And yet conservative Republicans are shy to recognize and combat this unholy alliance of private money and public power.
“What the radical left could not achieve by force with the typical levers of government power, it is now poised to accomplish with nominally public-private enterprise partnerships. This new strategy has confused the conservative and libertarian response,” Hoyt said.
Success as a capitalist shouldn’t shield anyone who promotes the Democratic Party’s agenda of insanity and assault on freedom.
Companies and equity investment funds seeking capital from big investor entities now have to worry if they’re politically correct enough on race and climate.
