Business
BlackRock’s woke capitalist vision is failing: here’s why
Larry Fink, New York Times DealBook 2022. Thos Robinson/Getty Images for The New York Times
From LifeSiteNews
By Frank Wright
Corbett shows how public outrage at the unelected political power of asset managers has led to an investor backlash, with politicians and legislators taking steps against the “forcing of behaviors” which BlackRock CEO Larry Fink once trumpeted as his mission
The always engaging James Corbett has produced some of the most informative guides to the power of BlackRock – who together with second-placed Vanguard Group own a combined 15 trillion U.S. dollars of assets under management.
In this report I relate how Corbett argues for a fightback against BlackRock and the asset management giants like them, who use their power to shape the world regardless of public consent. His views are more than corroborated by the news which followed the release of his video.
Corbett’s September 21 presentation, “How to Defeat BlackRock,” followed up by his excellent, “How BlackRock Conquered the World,” begins with some very encouraging news about the fortunes of the global investment giants – and what can be done to stop them. Happily, this process is already underway.
Corbett shows how public outrage at the unelected political power of asset managers has led to an investor backlash, with politicians and legislators taking steps against the “forcing of behaviors” which BlackRock CEO Larry Fink once trumpeted as his mission.
According to Corbett, and a growing number of other sources, this pressure looks likely to force asset management giants like BlackRock out of the behavior business altogether.
READ: How Vanguard and BlackRock took control of the global economy
A faltering global agenda
The first piece of good news is that the brand of ESG (environmental, social and governance) is so toxic that not even BlackRock’s CEO wants to use it any more.
BlackRock, under the leadership of Larry Fink, has used its immense wealth for years to compel companies to adopt the ESG agenda, becoming the driving force of “woke” capitalism. Yet leveraging financial power to force social and political change in this way has led to a backlash – from the general public, from lawmakers – and from the financial sector itself.
Last December, the North Carolina State Treasurer Dale R. Folwell called for Fink’s resignation, threatening to withdraw over $14 billion in state funds from the investment firm. As The Daily Mail reported, Folwell said:
Fink is in ‘pursuit of a political agenda… A focus on ESG is not a focus on returns and potentially could force us to violate our own fiduciary duty.’
Six months later, in June 2023, Fink said he was “ashamed” of ESG which he said had become “politically weaponized.”
Though his company, BlackRock, has continued to rate businesses on the same criteria, it has removed almost every mention of the term from its communications.
Speaking in Aspen, Colorado, Fink admitted that the decision of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to withdraw $2 billion in state assets managed by BlackRock had hurt the company. The ESG agenda advanced by BlackRock is so beleaguered, even its former champion will not speak its name.
The power of public opinion
What this shows, as Corbett argues, is a further piece of good news: that public opinion still matters. It is public knowledge of the unelected political meddling of BlackRock and others which has led to outrage – and to action.
As a result of extensive coverage – mainly from independent media – of the nefarious influence of his company, Larry Fink has faced sustained criticism for over a year. This in turn has led to the kind of legal and financial consequences which have made people like Fink think again.
READ: How Larry Fink uses ESG and AI to control the world’s money
This also shows why so much money is invested in propaganda, censorship and “narrative control.” Governments and corporations are afraid of a well-informed public, because such a public is very likely to demand they are held to account.
The case of BlackRock not only shows that what is in your mind can indeed matter, but also that the goliaths of globalism do not always win.
This is one reason for the ongoing information war, and the growing censorship-industrial complex. An informed citizenry has the power to hold the powerful to account. Taken together, public outrage can also move markets – and the money men who watch them.
I investigated some of the claims Corbett made about the financial world’s mounting unease with the involvement of BlackRock, Vanguard and other firms in pushing unelected political and social change. I found more cause for celebration than even Corbett himself would admit at the time.
Passive investments, legal actions
In further good news, mounting legal troubles have accompanied the practice of companies like BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street to leverage their enormous asset piles into social and political compliance engineering.
According to a June 2023 report from RIAbiz, an online journal for registered investment advisers (RIAs), BlackRock and Vanguard’s “fooling around” with ESG targets has left them exposed to prosecution.
The business of managing many assets is supposed to be “passive” – a legal term which means that companies such as BlackRock are prohibited from “exercising control” of the companies whose funds they manage.
Federal exemptions had been granted to these asset management giants, but their habit of forcing behaviors on issues such as carbon “net zero” and “diversity” has placed their capacity to do business in jeopardy.
In May of this year, BlackRock and Vanguard saw a legal challenge emerge, and one which not only deters investors, but may also lead to their being broken up.
As Oisin Breen reported on June 1:
Seventeen AGs moved on May 10 against BlackRock on the grounds that its climate-based activism and its pro-ethical, governance and social (ESG) stance make it an active investor, in breach of a FERC antitrust agreement.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is involved due to BlackRock’s – and Vanguard’s – holdings in domestic energy utilities. Breen continues:
Separately, 13 AGs filed a motion to block Vanguard from renewing its FERC exemption. They represent mostly energy-producing states like Texas, as do the 17 now pressing to have BlackRock’s exemption revoked.
Though Breen concluded that both firms had “won a reprieve” from immediate legal censure, the message appears to have been received.
Three months later, Fortune magazine reported:
Finance giants BlackRock and Vanguard – once ESG’s biggest proponents – seem to be reversing course.
Hitting the bottom line
The global business publication noted the legal complications of mixing finance with social, environmental and governance policies, saying:
It appears these strategic shifts are being driven by a combination of public backlash and a focus on their bottom lines.
Then, on October 23, leading U.S. insurance brokerage WTW reported that BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street had all seen significant drops in their total amounts of assets under management (AUM). BlackRock’s alone fell from over 10 trillion dollars to just over 8 trillion.
By October 31, Fortune returned with the verdict that BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street had all “turned against environment and social proposals… in a clear sign of backlash.”
Their report noted a “precipitous” fall in the support of all three asset giants’ commitment to these agendas – with BlackRock’s funding of “ESG” measures falling by over 30 percent from 2021.
Real world consequences
This is the delayed result of a reality which BlackRock themselves acknowledged – and one which drove much of the public disapproval – that the ESG agenda was an economic and social wrecking ball.
Remarkably, BlackRock itself admitted that its promotion of ESG, in the aggressive pursuit of net zero and diversity policies, had actually contributed to a severe economic downturn.
In its “2023 Outlook,” the asset giant said these initiatives had been a major factor in ending the decades-long period of prosperity in the West known as the Great Moderation.
READ: The End of Prosperity? How BlackRock manipulates the West’s economic downturn
Buycotts – not boycotts
In his video Corbett is frank about the limitations of individual consumer power. You cannot “access BlackRock directly,” as it is a management firm. You can, of course, withdraw support from the companies in which it and its fellow behemoths Vanguard and State Street have holdings.
Yet Corbett moves from boycotts of individual corporations to the intriguing concept of “buycotts.” What he means by this is “taking your money from the corporations and using it to build things you want to see.”
How realistic is this solution? Already, businesses are emerging to capitalize on growing public discontent with what is done with their money – without their consent or approval.
Changing our behaviors – for good
The investment platform Reverberate, for example, allows users to “Rate companies highly (over 2.5 stars) if they make your life better, or lower if they make your life worse.”
What is more, user feedback from the public will determine which shares it buys:
Our publicly-traded investment fund buys shares of companies whose average ratings are high and/or rising, and sells shares of those whose average ratings are low and/or falling.
On their website, Reverberate says:
This is our way of trying to align capital allocation with the interests of the general public, as estimated by us in a relatively unbiased, wide-reaching way.
The decline of the asset managers’ ESG agenda is a happy corrective to the damaging belief that nothing can be done about anything.
It shows how well-informed public opinion can lead to genuine change, and with some of Corbett’s insights, how we can move from complaint to constructive action in making a better world.
You can see Corbett’s entertaining case for countering the woke asset management giants here.
Business
Deadlocked Jury Zeroes In on Alleged US$40 Million PPE Fraud in Linda Sun PRC Influence Case
A jury of New Yorkers will return to court Monday, heading into their second week of deliberations in a landmark foreign-agent and corruption trial that reaches into two governors’ offices, struggling to decide whether former state official Linda Sun secretly served Beijing’s interests while she and her husband built a small business and luxury-property empire cashing in on pandemic-era contracts as other Americans were locked down.
On Thursday — the fourth day of deliberations — the jury sent federal Judge Brian Cogan a blunt note saying they were deadlocked on the sprawling case, in which the federal government has asked jurors to accept its account of a complex web of family and Chinese-community financial transactions through which Sun and her husband allegedly secured many millions of dollars in Chinese business deals channeled through “United Front” proxies aligned with Beijing.
The defense, by contrast, argues that Sun and her husband were simply successful through legitimate, culturally familiar transactions, not any covert scheme directed by a foreign state.
“We deeply feel that no progress can be made to change any jurors’ judgment on all counts,” the panel wrote Thursday. “There are fundamental differences on the evidence and the interpretation of the law. We cannot come to a unanimous decision.”
Cogan reportedly responded with a standard “Allen charge” — an instruction often used in deadlock situations, urging jurors to keep an open mind and continue deliberating. Because a juror had to be replaced due to travel commitments, the reconstituted panel will need to restart deliberations from square one on Monday.
According to a message the U.S. Justice Department sent to The Bureau on Wednesday, the panel had already asked for transcripts from four witnesses — Sean Carroll, Mary Beth Hefner, Karen Gallacchi and Jenny Low.
Those requests underline just how dense the case is — and how much money was at stake in the pandemic-era PPE deals at the heart of several key counts. Sun and her husband, businessman Chris Hu, face 19 counts in total, including Sun acting as an unregistered foreign agent for the People’s Republic of China; visa-fraud and alien-smuggling charges tied to a 2019 Henan provincial delegation; a multimillion-dollar pandemic PPE kickback scheme; bank-fraud and identity-misuse allegations; and multiple money-laundering and tax-evasion counts.
Carroll and Hefner’s testimony is central to the government’s key procurement-corruption allegation. Prosecutors say Sun used her influence to help steer more than US$40 million in PPE contracts to companies tied to her husband in China, with an expected profit of roughly US$8 million — money they allege was partly kicked back to Sun and Hu and funneled through accounts opened in Sun’s mother’s name and via friends and relatives.
Prosecutors say the clearest money trail in the Sun case runs through New York’s COVID PPE scramble and a pair of Jiangsu-linked emails.
“What was Linda Sun’s reward for taking official action to steer these contracts through the procurement process? Millions of dollars in kickbacks or bribes. It was money that she knew would be coming her way if she pushed these contracts through,” prosecutor Alexander Solomon told jurors in closing.
He argued that in March 2020, as the pandemic hit, a Jiangsu provincial official in Albany emailed state staff, including Sun, with information on four Chinese PPE and medical suppliers — and that the next day Sun forwarded herself a second email that copied the language about two of those vendors but added a new line claiming that “High Hope comes highly recommended by the Jiangsu Department of Commerce.”
A New York State IT specialist testified that this exact phrase appears only once in the state’s entire email system, in Sun’s self-forwarded message. Prosecutors urged jurors to see it as a fabricated email.
They suggest it is one of a number of frauds and forgeries, including claims that Sun repeatedly faked Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature on invitation letters used to bring Chinese provincial officials into the United States as part of plans to build a large education complex in New York.
On the PPE dealings, prosecutors say that during a period when Sun still had broad latitude to vet vendors, she sent procurement official Sean Carroll a proposal for High Hope to supply five million masks.
Prosecutors say she did not disclose that High Hope was tied to family associate Henry Hua or that she had a financial interest in the deal, but did repeat language that the company “came recommended” by Jiangsu authorities — phrasing Carroll testified he understood as an official validation from the Chinese side.
Prosecutors then linked the High Hope contracts that moved through Carroll’s office to alleged downstream cash flows laid out in a Chris Hu spreadsheet: PPE contract money Hu recorded as owed by Jay Chen, marked as wired into an account called “Golden” and then on to “HC Paradise,” the vehicle Hu allegedly used to pay for a Hawaii property.
In the government’s telling, that is how a doctored Jiangsu government “recommendation” for High Hope ultimately turned into New York taxpayer funds helping to buy a Hawaiian condo.
As The Bureau has reported in detail, prosecutor Alexander Solomon used his closing argument to give jurors one of the clearest open-court narratives yet of how the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front allegedly seeks to shape Western politics through diaspora networks — and to argue that Sun sat at the center of such a network in Albany.
Solomon walked the panel through a cast that ran from Sun’s family and business partners in Queens to United Front–linked association bosses in New York, provincial officials in Henan and Guangdong, and senior staff at China’s New York consulate. In his account, Sun — officially feted in Beijing as an “eminent young overseas Chinese” after a 2017 political tour — became a “trusted insider” who quietly repurposed New York State letterhead, access and messaging to serve Beijing’s priorities on Taiwan, Uyghurs and trade, while keeping that relationship hidden from her own colleagues.
Among the most striking elements of the government’s case, as The Bureau reported from Solomon’s summation, were that Sun allegedly forged Hochul’s signature on multiple invitation letters that Chinese officials then used to secure U.S. visas for provincial delegations — promising meetings in Albany that, Solomon said, no one in state government had actually approved — as part of a broader push by Henan Province to anchor a major education complex in the United States.
He then tied that influence narrative to money: millions in lobster-export deals for Chris Hu, allegedly greased by Chinese officials and New York-based United Front intermediaries; coded “apple” cash drop-offs funneled through third-party accounts; and the pandemic PPE contracts.
In Solomon’s formulation, all of that adds up to clandestine agency for Beijing.
He told jurors that while Sun was boasting to Chinese consulate officials that she could treat Hochul “like her puppet,” she was acting “like an agent,” treating PRC officials as her “real bosses,” and seeking and receiving benefits. Sun kept doing so, Solomon said, even after an FBI agent warned her about the Foreign Agents Registration Act and the risks of working too closely with the consulate.
Defense lawyers for Sun and Hu, in their own summations, urged the jury to reject that picture of a couple monetizing their access to senior American politicians in order to enrich themselves through clandestine business dealings facilitated by community leaders secretly working for Beijing’s United Front units. According to the Global Investigations Review summary and other accounts, they argued that prosecutors have overreached by criminalizing ordinary diaspora politics, networking and pandemic procurement.
On the defense view, much of what the government calls “direction and control” is better understood as routine back-and-forth involving a diaspora liaison in the governor’s office and community or trade groups with ties to China. None of the government’s evidence, they argue, amounts to an agreement to operate under the “direction or control” of a foreign principal — the core FARA requirement.
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This article supplied by Troy Media.
Inflation is down, poverty is falling and Argentina’s economy is growing as Javier Milei pushes reforms many skeptics said would fail
Javier Milei recently passed the two-year mark as president of Argentina. While his personal popularity has been bumpy in recent months—the Americas Society/Council of the Americas suggested his approval rating was a little under 40 per cent this fall—the political climate is still very much in his favour.
His party, La Libertad Avanza, won almost 41 per cent of the vote in the October midterm elections, earning 13 of 24 Senate seats and 64 of the 127 contested lower-house seats.
Few would have expected a libertarian economist who supports small government, lower taxes, more individual rights and freedoms, private enterprise, trade liberalization and anarcho-capitalism to become a success in Argentine politics. The proof has been in the political pudding for quite some time, however.
“As of September, the economy is growing at five per cent on a yearly basis,” the Cato Institute’s Marcos Falcone wrote on Dec. 10. “Poverty, which exceeded 40 per cent before Milei took office and peaked at 52.9 per cent in the first half of 2024, is now down to 31.6 per cent. Monthly inflation, which often surpassed 10 per cent in the pre-Milei era and reached 25 per cent in December 2023, now hovers around two per cent. Both exports and imports are rising rapidly.”
These are all significant benefits for the Argentine economy. Milei wants to accomplish even more. Falcone noted that “the government has already called for special sessions in Congress for its new members to vote on labour, tax and criminal justice reform bills before the end of the year.” Some other legislative goals include “privatization of major state-owned enterprises, pension reform that allows for private retirement plans, the liberalization of education, and further deregulation of the economy, among others.”
Milei’s libertarian philosophy of anarcho-capitalism, which was largely the brainchild of the late American economist Murray Rothbard, rejects statism and socialism. He has worked hard to convince Argentines that free markets, private enterprise, open trade and more will lead to economic success for individuals, families and businesses alike.
That is why Milei remains a “breath of fresh air for Argentina,” as I wrote in a Nov. 20, 2023, National Post column, and “he’s exactly what the doctor ordered for this struggling and impoverished nation.”
He is also an eccentric fellow, to put it mildly. The Argentine president used to be a TV pundit known as El Loco, the madman, who was known for his “profane outbursts,” Time magazine noted on May 23, 2024. He also bragged about being a “tantric sex guru, brandished a chainsaw at rallies to symbolize his plans to slash government spending, dressed up as a superhero who sang about fiscal policy, and told voters that his five cloned English mastiffs, which he reportedly consults in telepathic conversations, are his ‘best strategists.’”
Milei even claimed to have met one of his beloved canines, Conan, in a previous life in the Roman Colosseum more than 2,000 years ago. He was a gladiator, and his four-legged companion was a lion.
Milei’s left-leaning critics have attempted to use these eccentricities to their advantage. They have also called Milei “far right” and claimed he was an Argentine version of U.S. President Donald Trump. None of this is true. Milei has always rejected fascism and totalitarian regimes. He is business-oriented and focused on getting Argentina back on the road to financial success. He wants his home country to be free from government interference, state control and the iron grip of Peronist fanatics. He is getting closer to this goal.
Falcone, the Cato Institute analyst, pointed out in his piece that “a key reform that is still part of Argentina’s unfinished agenda is dollarization.” Milei strongly “advocated” for this policy in 2023, and he has wanted to finish it off for some time. With his party in control of both houses, that time is now.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Dec. 15 that “Argentina’s central bank … would allow the peso to move more freely, responding to investors who have demanded President Javier Milei’s government correct an overvalued currency.” The new policy for the peso will “allow the band to expand at the rate of monthly inflation, which was 2.5 per cent in November, the central bank said. The band currently expands at a monthly rate of one per cent.”
This announcement has been met favourably. “The changes go in the right direction,” Pablo Guidotti, an economist at the Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires, told the Wall Street Journal. “If the economy expands, this will contribute to higher peso demand allowing Argentina, together with access to capital markets, to accumulate international reserves.”
The quest to achieve dollarization in Argentina has begun.
In summation, Milei’s economic program “is serious and one of the most radical doses of free-market medicine since Thatcherism,” The Economist noted in a Nov. 28, 2024, piece. While the political left “detests him” and the “Trumpian right embraces him,” he does not belong in either camp. “He has shown that the continual expansion of the state is not inevitable,” The Economist continued, and he is a “principled rebuke to opportunistic populism, of the sort practised by Donald Trump. Mr. Milei believes in free trade and free markets, not protectionism; fiscal discipline, not reckless borrowing; and, instead of spinning popular fantasies, brutal public truth-telling.”
There is much that world leaders can learn from the strange, quirky anarcho-capitalist president of Argentina. They should start to take note—and, more importantly, take notes.
Michael Taube is a political commentator, Troy Media syndicated columnist and former speechwriter for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He holds a master’s degree in comparative politics from the London School of Economics, lending academic rigour to his political insights.
Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country.
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