Veto Joe! Why ESG is AUKUS, Why Leonard Leo's Days Are (Thankfully) Numbered, and How BlackRock's Larry Fink Ought To Respond
President Biden vetoes anti-ESG law and confirms sky people over ground people triumph.
What even is ESG — the investment craze now so demonized in right wing circles?
The terms — environmental, social, governance — are vague and that is by design.
But among the many dumb (duplicitous?) things that Peter Thiel has said is that when you think of ESG you should think of the Chinese communist party.
“When you hear ESG think CCP,” Thiel once said. He repeated his comments at a book party for Alex Epstein, the Likud shill for the Ayn Rand Institute who often partnered with Yaron Brook, an Israeli military intelligence officer. (Perhaps when you think “Epstein” you ought to think Israeli intelligence?)
Promoting Alex Epstein’s tendentious book promoting the fossil fuel industry was bad enough but Thiel also backed both Toby Neugebauer’s anti-woke bank (it failed) and now presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s anti-ESG Strive Asset Management. Ramaswamy has come up for quite a lot of ridicule lately but he should be understood as the op that he is. His job is to cause strife not deliver solutions.
When you think ESG you should think CIA or even Mi6. We’ve traced the American republic from Ben Franklin’s lightning rod to Edison’s illumination to WASP geniuses Shockley/Brattain/Bardeen’s transistor. Electricity and its generation is very much a WASP thing. We are the sky people, after all.
This is precisely why you see the Russians attacking power installations or messing with windmills in the North Sea. They can’t imagine a post-petrostate world.
Can Peter Thiel?
Consider that Thiel, who backed the Iraq war according to his biographer Max Chafkin, purports to believe in peak oil theory and for a time, he and his hedge fund Clarium were rewarded when oil prices rose. Could there might be something to the notion that the Russians were heavily involved in tricking America into invading Iraq so as to push up oil prices? I wonder.
Apropos Thiel’s friendship with Austrian financier Christian Angermayer — under fire for his ties to the Wirecard scandal engulfing Germany — as well as his initial backing by Deutsche Bank should give us a sense of where his loyalties lie. Ever the socialite Angermayer has numerous Russian associates and friendships including the Mercers.
Angermayer even purportedly arranged for Thiel to get Maltese citizenship after Thiel invested with him. Recall that Austrian Jan Marsalek of Wirecard was also deeply involved in Malta and that Malta is a staging ground for Libya. Marsalek “talked of assembling a Libyan militia and bragged of adventures with Russian troops,” according to the Financial Times.
The Russians do not want Libya back in the oil producing game and they’ve used the Wagner Group accordingly. Russia doesn’t want a stable world order.
As America and Britain move away from fossil fuels by diversifying their sources of energy we have less and less need for the rest of the world’s crazy petropolitics. The Stone Age didn’t end because the world ran out of stones. Nor will the oil age.
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The main source of Leonard Leo’s capital is Barre Seid but a close second was Peter Thiel.
Leonard Leo is beginning to have all sorts of problems after he got $1.6 billion from his patron Barre Seid, an electronics manufacturing mogul.
I’ve written about meeting Barre Seid in the past — he told me in his office that he was a major backer of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — and I direct your attention to this rather great profile of the Leo-Seid alliance in ProPublica.
We find that Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust has been funding a lot of anti-ESG propaganda. This turn is consistent with Seid’s world view and his business interests. For many years Seid was a backer of the Heartland Institute, a rather large anti-climate change think tank in the Chicago area.
It looks as if Leo has been living the good life while being pro-life.
Since 2016, however, his recent wealth accumulation has included two new mansions in Maine, four new cars, private school tuition for his children, hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Catholic causes and a wine buyer and locker at Morton’s Steakhouse, according to POLITICO’s review of public records.
At least two of Leo’s former Federalist Society colleagues — who were also bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars from Leo’s aligned groups while working for the society — now work at CRC.
To prop up his candidates for the judiciary Leo made some other buys too. Rather incredibly Leo went and used some of Seid’s money to purchase Kellyanne Conway’s fake polling company. Conway is the granddaughter of Jimmy "The Brute" DiNatale who the local press dubbed “Hammonton’s Don Corleone.” As a girl Conway worked for the blueberry farms in Hammonton which were known to be mob fronts. Conway even won the Blueberry Packing Championship in New Jersey. Was it rigged? Of course it was rigged.
Conway got her political start with Frank Luntz’s fraudulent polling firm. For what it’s worth I’ve long suspected that Conway was the go between with the Italian mob and the Russians through the Mercers. She was especially close with Rebekah Mercer, herself a front for the Chinese-Russian alliance and Cambridge Analytica. This we know already.
Given this history why would Leo buy the firm? One gal’s polling firm is another person’s payoff — and Conway needed the money for the four years she was in the White House.
I once met Conway many years ago at the Phillips Foundation — which was itself something of a front for Russian activity in politics. She was one of these people who pretended to know everything but clearly that was part of the hustle.
Years later I met her outside of a Project Veritas event waiting for a cab. I was pro-Cruz and she was pro-Cruz so we got to talking. “We need to talk about Trump’s victims,” she said. Later she went to go work for Donald Trump. Can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, I guess.
No one seems to have noticed that Conways lived right next to Oleg Deripaska. Did I mention that John Weaver — the disgraced alleged pedophile cofounder of the outfit — was also a lobbyist for Russia?
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A way to think of the pressure campaign brought against ESG investing is as a kind of mob war between different Chinese factions with the U.S. deep state acting as a referee. You can detect a little of this tension if you read between the lines of George Soros’s op-ed warning BlackRock about investing in China.
I suspect BlackRock is being turned by the U.S. intelligence community into being reliable.
Larry Fink of BlackRock was heavily involved with investing in China and Barre Seid produces lots of his TrippLite items in China. As China’s economy slows down there’s a fight over who will get that increasingly scarce Chinese capital coursing through their businesses.
Perhaps not totally unrelatedly Founders Fund announced it has raised a much smaller fund: “Founders Fund has quietly cut the size of its eighth venture capital fund in half, from around $1.8 billion to around $900 million, Axios has learned from multiple sources.”
Fink should, I think, turn the tables on those going after him on ESG by investigating the groups targeting him and by feeding that information to a ravenous press that’ll be only too happy to take down those who took over the Court.
Meanwhile ESG seems to be winning. The Washington Post’s Steven Mufson has the story.
Conservatives have long held that the government should avoid interfering with private business decisions. But over the last two years, Republican state treasurers and attorneys general in Texas, Florida and other states have sought to blacklist banks that factor climate risks and social concerns into their investment decisions.
Now the backlash is coming.
In Republican strongholds such as North Dakota, Indiana, Mississippi and Kentucky, state lawmakers have recently defeated proposals that would prohibit state governments or pension funds from doing business with the big financial institutions that have adopted ESG — environmental, social and governance — goals and policies.
In North Dakota a pair of proposed laws went to crushing defeats with one losing by a 90-3 margin on Feb. 1. They were shot down, in part, by arguments that these proposals contradicted conservative principles.
“Our biggest concern is the idea of somebody telling our banks who to do business with or who not to do business with,” Rick Clayburgh, chief executive of the North Dakota Bankers Association, said after beating back those proposals. “We believe our banks should be allowed to do business with customers they know, the people they know and to make those decisions.”
In other words: Americans can draw their own conclusions about how to allocate resources and think about climate change, thank you very much.
President Joe Biden is wise to veto anti-ESG legislation and wise still to create a different paradigm for energy investing.