How Larry Fink turned your pension fund into a leftist activist machine.
John Masko, UnHerd:
As the ESG agenda took hold, the individual investor increasingly found himself shunted aside. …
In 2020, BlackRock voted at 16,200 shareholder meetings on 153,000 company proposals. Frequently, these votes were against company management. According to the company’s own Investment Stewardship Annual Report: “In 2020, we identified 244 companies that were making insufficient progress integrating climate risk into their business models or disclosures. Of these companies, we took voting action against 53, or 22%. We have put the remaining 191 companies ‘on watch’. Those that do not make significant progress risk voting action against management in 2021.”
In the same report, BlackRock boasted of having voted against management more than 1,500 times for “insufficient diversity” in company management. …
Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock
“Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate.”
Allow me to translate: On behalf of millions of shareholders I’ve never met, I declare that they no longer truly own the companies they have invested in. Society does.
By Joanne Nova.
By forcing people to put money into pension funds in a form of investment that they weren’t necessarily comfortable with, governments created vast piles of money that was essentially left unguarded on the beach in a bay with a hundred pirate ships.
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.
Trust
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. …
With $10 trillion in funds, BlackRock could be the Climate Mafia, and all [Larry Fink] needed to do was write a letter every year telling the corporate world “nice business you have there, shame if something happened …” …
Remember how in October 2020 BlackRock told Australia to get rid of coal faster, and then the next year our conservative government agreed to commit us to Net Zero Targets that the voters didn’t ask for? That was the moment when our Treasurer effectively told us the Bankers bullied Australia into Net Zero. We know which banker he means. As I said then:
Australia is adopting Net Zero because the Global Financiers, who only want to save the world, would have refused to lend us money without jacking up our interest rates by 1.5%. The banker punishment would have meant a “17% investor exodus”. Fancy a stock market collapse?
Can’t wait for central bank digital currencies, so they can tell us what to do with all our money.
