“Protect and enrich.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the Clinton Foundation and the Obama book and television deals. Then there is the Biden family corruption, followed closely behind by similar abuses of power and office by the Warren and Sanders families, as Peter Schweizer described in his recent book “Profiles in Corruption.” These names just scratch the surface of government corruption.
How BlackRock Became The World's Largest Asset Manager
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga_we_sOopk
JOE'S BIGGEST BANKSTER DONOR IS BLACKROCK
How BlackRock Became The World's Largest Asset Manager
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga_we_sOopk
Don’t be fooled by Joe Biden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCqc5Ozrh6c
Chris Hedges | NAFTA, Clinton, and Obama BETRAYED Americans... and Joe Biden was right there with the worst of them!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qryblALiqOI
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
BIDEN HAS PUT HIS BIGGEST PAYMASTER BLACKROCK IN CHARGE OF THE ECONOMY SO THEY CAN WRITE THEIR OWN BOTTOMLESS BAILOUT
OF THE $90 MILLION THE BANSKTERS PUMPED INTO CANDIDATE JOE 'CREDIT CARD' BIDEN, $30 MILLION CAME FROM BLACKROCK. WHAT'S IN IT FOR THEM?
BlackRock Investment’s CEO is forcing wokism on American corporations
BlackRock Investment is a company bigger than most of you can imagine. BlackRock and The Vanguard Group, together, own just about every business in America (not to mention a staggering amount of real property). It turns out that BlackRock’s CEO, a guy named Larry Fink, is another one of those limousine leftists who believes it’s his job to force leftism on America, one corporation at a time. He’s also gung-ho on (JOE BIDEN'S PAYMASTERS) China and uses the money of ordinary investors to help fund Chinese aggression. This isn’t capitalism, this oligarchy and it needs to be addressed.
BLACKROCK CONDUCTS JOE BIDEN'S LIES! How the White House is trying to fight rising inflation
BIDEN’S GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY AGENDA OF WIDER OPEN BORDERS and no Legal need apply!
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/12/bidens-open-borders-for-hordes-of-cheap.html
This is because despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and the military-industrial complex.
This Disturbing New Debt (TO BANKSTERS) Scheme Is Enslaving Americans!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrzpmHCBVEY
BlackRock Investment’s CEO is forcing wokism on American corporations
BlackRock Investment is a company bigger than most of you can imagine. BlackRock and The Vanguard Group, together, own just about every business in America (not to mention a staggering amount of real property). It turns out that BlackRock’s CEO, a guy named Larry Fink, is another one of those limousine leftists who believes it’s his job to force leftism on America, one corporation at a time. He’s also gung-ho on China and uses the money of ordinary investors to help fund Chinese aggression. This isn’t capitalism, this oligarchy and it needs to be addressed.
Rather than do a lot of writing, I’ll just offer you two short and one medium-length videos. First, Vivek Ramaswamy manages to explain in under one minute how Larry Fink is using investors’ money to push American corporations further and further left:
Second, a group called Consumers’ Research has put had a short video focusing on Larry Fink’s strong support for the Chinese Communist Party—again, using investors’ money:
The group has also set up a website that covers topics such as Fink’s love for China, woke pressure on American corporations, use of ordinary Americans’ financial trouble to increase his financial control and BlackRock’s holdings, and his “controversial resume,” among other things. It all paints a very ugly picture.
Image: Larry Fink. YouTube screen grab.
And third, I’m going to revisit a video I posted at American Thinker in June. A Dutch woman created the video by working her way through publicly available information (often from Wikipedia). The result of her research is a demonstration that, contrary to what we think about our capitalist system, neither private investors nor a broad range of institutional investors owns most of this country’s corporations. Instead, BlackRock and The Vanguard Group pretty much own everything:
If you don't want to watch the video or don't have 45 minutes to spare, you can read the transcript here.
If you type “Larry Fink” into YouTube, you’ll also find a video entitled “Larry Fink—The Most Powerful Man in Finance.” I haven’t watched it but I suspect it’s illuminating, whether it praises or damns him.
One aspect of my conservativism is that I am opposed to any single person or entity having too much power. Concentrated power never works well for ordinary people. Moreover, I believe that one of America’s greatest strengths over the centuries has been its diffuse power, and the room that creates for ordinary people to do great things.
BlackRock and Larry Fink are everything I fear and dislike: Too much power and too much money concentrated in a single entity and person. I don’t have any idea how this can be addressed—perhaps falling back on the type of anti-monopoly policies that made Teddy Roosevelt so great—but something must be done. No one person should have that much control over America’s destiny
If you type “Larry Fink” into YouTube, you’ll also find a video entitled “Larry Fink—The Most Powerful Man in Finance.” I haven’t watched it but I suspect it’s illuminating, whether it praises or damns him.
JOE BIDEN'S CRONY BLACKROCK AND BANKSTERS' RENT BOY CHUCK SCHUMER
Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream⎜WHY POVERTY?⎜(Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6niWzomA_So&list=WL&index=19
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
BIDEN, LIKE THE CLINTON CRIME DUAL AND THE OBOMB, IS TOTALLY OWNED BY BIG BANKSTERS. THE BIGGEST OF THEM ALL IS BLACKROCK. NO BANKSTER PUMPED MORE INTO BIDEN THAN BLACKROCK.
World’s largest asset management firm was “front and center” of Fed’s Wall Street bailout
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
According to the article, Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock, the world’s biggest asset management firm, was “in frequent touch” with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Fed chair Jerome Powell “in the days before and after many of the Fed’s emergency programs were announced in late March.”
The extent of the collaboration is revealed in new emails obtain by the newspaper together with information that has been previously made public.
In one newly obtained email, Fink refers to planning for the rescue measures as “the project” that he and the Fed were “working on together.”
As the article notes, “America’s top economic officials were in constant contact with a Wall Street executive whose firm stood to benefit financially from the rescue,” showing “how intertwined Blackrock has become with the federal government.”
Blackrock’s close collaboration with the Fed and Treasury came at a crucial point in the development of a crisis in financial markets which began with the onset of the pandemic in March and fears in corporate circles over the response in the working class amid walkouts by workers insisting that safety measures be out in place.
The Fed responded to the initial turbulence in the markets by cutting interest rates. But these measures proved to be insufficient and the potential for a major meltdown in the markets emerged in the week ending March 20 when the $21 trillion US Treasury bond market—the bedrock of the US and global financial system—froze.
Instead of providing a “safe haven” for investors it moved to the centre of the crisis as Treasuries were sold off and no buyers could be found as the sell-off extended to all areas of the financial system.
Faced with a disaster when the markets re-opened, Mnuchin, Powell and Fink were engaged in a series of discussions over the weekend of March 21–22 to devise a rescue package. According to the Times report, Mnuchin spoke to Fink five times over the two days, more than anyone else, other than Powell with whom he spoke nine times.
One of the most significant features of the rescue measures announced on Monday March 23 was the decision by the Fed, for the first time ever, to buy corporate bonds which, as the Times noted, “were becoming nearly impossible to sell as investors sprinted to convert their holdings to cash.”
Blackrock had already closely collaborated with the Fed developing its response to the 2008 financial crisis was thereby set to play a key role in the March intervention.
The article pointed out that, while Blackrock signed a non-disclosure agreement on March 22 restricting officials from sharing information about the upcoming measures, the way in which the rescue package was devised “mattered to Blackrock.”
The decision of the Fed to buy corporate bonds and provide an underpinning for the market was significant and involved two key areas of Blackrock’s operations. One of the ways it makes profit is by managing money for clients charging a preset fee. But assets under management were contracting as investors went for cash and its business model was under threat.
Blackrock is also a major player in the short-term debt markets which were coming “under intense stress” as investors moved their holdings to cash.
Electronic Traded Funds (ETFs), which track market indexes but which trade like a stock, were also severely impacted.
In the words of the Times article: “Corporate bonds were difficult to trade and near impossible to issue in mid-March 2020. Prices on some high-grade corporate ETFs, including one of Blackrock’s, were out of whack relative to the value of the underlying assets.”
As Gregg Gelenzis, associate director for economic policy at the Center for American Progress told the Times: “This was the first time that ETFs came under stress in a really systemic way.”
In the rescue package the Fed committed itself to buying already existing debt as well as new bonds and also decided it would purchase ETFs with the result that the “bond market and fund recovery was nearly instant.”
As the Times article notes, while practically all of Wall Street benefited from the Fed’s intervention, and other financial firms were “consulted” apart from Blackrock “no other company was as front and center.”
The closeness of the relationship between Blackrock and the financial and economic arms of the state, the US Treasury and the Fed, were highlighted in a comment by William Birdthistle, of the Chicago-Kent College of Law and the author of a book on funds, cited in the article.
He said Blackrock was “about as close to a government arm as you can be, without being the Federal Reserve.”
The Fed makes every effort to cover up that relationship in order to try to preserve the fiction that it is not beholden to Wall Street and operates as an independent public authority concerned above all with the state of the economy and the welfare of the population.
The Times article recalled a news conference in July 2020 in which Powell was asked about the discussions with Fink.
“I can’t recall exactly what those conversations were,” he said, “but they would have been about what he is seeing in the market and things like that.
He said there were not “very many” conversations and that the Blackrock chief was “typically trying to make sure that we are getting good service from the company he founded the leads.”
Powell’s claim that, in the midst of the most significant crisis since the meltdown of 2008—with a potential to go even further, as the freeze in the Treasury market showed—he could not recall those conversations simply does not pass muster.
The value of every crisis, it has been rightly said, is that it reveals the real relations that are obscured and covered over in “normal” times.
And that is the case here. The economic arms of the capitalist state are not some independent authority but function every day in the interests of the corporate and financial oligarchy, servicing its needs and interests above all else.
Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream⎜WHY POVERTY?⎜(Documentary) IN THIS DOC YOU SEE DEM BANKSTER RENT BOY CHUCK SCHUMER KISS BANKSTER ASS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6niWzomA_So&list=WL&index=19
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
BlackRock and The Vanguard Group, together, own just about every business in America (not to mention a staggering amount of real property).
If you type “Larry Fink” into YouTube, you’ll also find a video entitled “Larry Fink—The Most Powerful Man in Finance.” I haven’t watched it but I suspect it’s illuminating, whether it praises or damns him.
This week, Biden announced that Obama alum Brian Deese (PIG PARASITE GAMER LAWYER), now an executive at the investment management firm BlackRock, will serve as his top economic adviser should he enter the White House.
BIDENOMICS: THE RICH GET MUCH, MUCH, MUCH RICHER AND VOTE DEM TO GET EVEN RICHER!
A MASSIVE ECONOMIC FAILURE WAS JUST REVEALED! FINANCIAL COLLAPSE, PAYCHECK TO PAYCHECK CONTINUES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb-J3YelWvc
JOE BIDEN: WE CAN'T MOUTH OFF ABOUT RED CHINA'S SLAVE LABOR BECAUSE WE'RE BUILDING OUR OWN SLAVE LABOR AND THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS ARE CONVEYING THESE WORKERS OVER, UNDER AND ACROSS OUR BORDERS TO WORK 'CHEAP' AND VOTE DEMOCRAT FOR MORE!
NANCY LOOTED A VAST FORTUNE WHILE IN OFFICE AS SHE SERVED WALL STREET'S BIGGEST CRIMINALS AND RED CHINA
They Lied.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivIPkr2zaZI
An economy built on extraction migration also radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture and allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
Unsurprisingly, a wide variety of little-publicized polls do show deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
BIDEN’S GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY AGENDA OF WIDER OPEN BORDERS and no Legal need apply!
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/12/bidens-open-borders-for-hordes-of-cheap.html
This is because despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and the military-industrial complex.
This Disturbing New Debt (TO BANKSTERS) Scheme Is Enslaving Americans!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrzpmHCBVEY
This Disturbing New Debt (TO BANKSTERS) Scheme Is Enslaving Americans!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrzpmHCBVEY
Fmr. Obama Treasury Counselor Rattner: Biden’s Explanation for Inflation Is ‘Wrong,’ His Spending Is ‘Coming Home to Roost’
11 Feb 20220
3:27
On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” MSNBC Economic Analyst Steve Rattner, who served as counselor to the Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration, said that President Joe Biden’s explanation for what’s causing inflation is incorrect, “the primary blame for the inflationary pressures” is government spending, and the price of not paying for the spending at the beginning of the Biden administration “in inflation terms is coming home to roost.”
After viewing a clip of Biden’s explanation for inflation, Rattner said, “Well, first of all, Joe, they’re not really all outside factors or things that — a perfect storm or things that just rained down from heaven. This is highly a self-inflicted problem, not just by us, but by the rest of the world. And I say with regret that everything President Biden just said in that news clip that you showed was basically wrong, in terms of what’s causing inflation.”
He continued, “The problems with the supply lines did not cause inflation…excess demand caused the problems with the supply lines, which then caused inflation. We’re actually buying more stuff than we’ve ever bought before. Imports were up 20% last month, and that creates — you try to import 20% more things through the Port of Los Angeles than you did before the pandemic, that causes supply problems. And so, it has left us in a really twisted-up situation. I can go through other examples like that. But the answer is that in the short run, there’s really nothing the administration can do. … But I think what — the lesson learned is we have to be much more careful with our policy actions, both at the congressional level, where more spending, more deficits would not be a good thing, and at the Fed, where, unfortunately, interest rates are going to have to go up.”
Rattner added, “There’s no question, Joe, that the primary blame for the inflationary pressures is the 5, 6, 7 trillion dollars that was put in the economy by two presidents over the last two years or so. And, initially, it was obviously a good idea. You had to try to keep the economy moving, you had to try to put purchasing power out there, but then we piled one stimulus program on top of another stimulus program and we ended up with the $2 trillion and we ended with people trying to buy a lot more stuff than they used to buy, and that just clogs up everything. And part of it is something we didn’t anticipate, none of us anticipated, which was that people would move from services, where it’s hard to go on vacation, it’s hard to go to a restaurant, or you’re scared to or uncomfortable doing that, to buying goods and trying to buy a new car. And so, why are new car prices up so much? Yeah, there’s a chip shortage, there are some complicated reasons for that. But the fact is that people have been trying to buy a car. Why are used car prices up? People are trying to buy used cars.”
He further stated, “I’m not against new policies, I’m not against new spending, but it needs to be paid for. And we didn’t do that at all with the $1.9 trillion at the beginning of the Biden administration and now the cost of that in inflation terms is coming home to roost.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
BlackRock Investment’s CEO is forcing wokism on American corporations
BlackRock Investment is a company bigger than most of you can imagine. BlackRock and The Vanguard Group, together, own just about every business in America (not to mention a staggering amount of real property). It turns out that BlackRock’s CEO, a guy named Larry Fink, is another one of those limousine leftists who believes it’s his job to force leftism on America, one corporation at a time. He’s also gung-ho on (JOE BIDEN'S PAYMASTERS) China and uses the money of ordinary investors to help fund Chinese aggression. This isn’t capitalism, this oligarchy and it needs to be addressed.
Rather than do a lot of writing, I’ll just offer you two short and one medium-length videos. First, Vivek Ramaswamy manages to explain in under one minute how Larry Fink is using investors’ money to push American corporations further and further left:
Second, a group called Consumers’ Research has put had a short video focusing on Larry Fink’s strong support for the Chinese Communist Party—again, using investors’ money:
The group has also set up a website that covers topics such as Fink’s love for China, woke pressure on American corporations, use of ordinary Americans’ financial trouble to increase his financial control and BlackRock’s holdings, and his “controversial resume,” among other things. It all paints a very ugly picture.
Image: Larry Fink. YouTube screen grab.
And third, I’m going to revisit a video I posted at American Thinker in June. A Dutch woman created the video by working her way through publicly available information (often from Wikipedia). The result of her research is a demonstration that, contrary to what we think about our capitalist system, neither private investors nor a broad range of institutional investors owns most of this country’s corporations. Instead, BlackRock and The Vanguard Group pretty much own everything:
If you don't want to watch the video or don't have 45 minutes to spare, you can read the transcript here.
If you type “Larry Fink” into YouTube, you’ll also find a video entitled “Larry Fink—The Most Powerful Man in Finance.” I haven’t watched it but I suspect it’s illuminating, whether it praises or damns him.
One aspect of my conservativism is that I am opposed to any single person or entity having too much power. Concentrated power never works well for ordinary people. Moreover, I believe that one of America’s greatest strengths over the centuries has been its diffuse power, and the room that creates for ordinary people to do great things.
BlackRock and Larry Fink are everything I fear and dislike: Too much power and too much money concentrated in a single entity and person. I don’t have any idea how this can be addressed—perhaps falling back on the type of anti-monopoly policies that made Teddy Roosevelt so great—but something must be done. No one person should have that much control over America’s destiny.
CUT SOCIALISM FOR THE PIGS ON WALL STREET AND WE START TO HEAL THE NATION AND REBUILD MIDDLE AMERICA!!!
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
According to the article, Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock, the world’s biggest asset management firm, was “in frequent touch” with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Fed chair Jerome Powell “in the days before and after many of the Fed’s emergency programs were announced in late March.”
Joe Biden’s Pick for Economic
Adviser Tied to Delphi
Pension-Slashing Scheme
Democrat Joe Biden’s pick to be his top economic adviser in the White House served on the Obama-appointed team that helped slash pensions for roughly 20,000 Americans in the auto bailout.
This week, Biden announced that Obama alum Brian Deese, now an executive at the investment management firm BlackRock, will serve as his top economic adviser should he enter the White House.
NO CORPORATION PUMPED MORE MONEY INTO GAMER LAWYER THAN BLACKROCK. HE QUICKLY HIRED THEIR GAMER LAWYER BRIAN DEESE TO OPERATE BLACKROCK'S INTERESTS FROM THE WHITE HOUSE!
In his annual letter to BlackRock shareholders a few days ago, CEO Larry Fink argued that expectations of business leaders have changed dramatically in the last few years. Increased profits, happy shareholders, and more jobs are no longer what a chief executive is expected to deliver. For instance, most stakeholders -- from shareholders, to employees, to customers, to communities, and regulators -- “now expect companies to play a role in decarbonizing the global economy.” And “few things will impact capital allocation decisions -- and thereby the long-term value of your company -- more than how effectively you navigate the global energy transition in the years ahead.” This illustrates perfectly what stakeholder capitalism -- the new mantra of the Business Round Table as announced in August 2019 and endorsed by almost 200 CEOs of the largest corporations -- is all about. In Klaus Schwab’s words,
JOE BIDEN'S CRONY BLACKROCK AND BANKSTERS' RENT BOY CHUCK SCHUMER
Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream⎜WHY POVERTY?⎜(Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6niWzomA_So&list=WL&index=19
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
‘Red-Handed’: Blackstone Founder Pumped $100M into Marxist Education for American and Other Students Studying in China
19
Nicolas Asfouri/Getty Images; BNN Edit
8 Feb 20220
4:11
Wall Street titan Steve Schwarzman launched a $100 million plan to create a global education scholarship program in China to rival the Rhodes Scholarships offered at Oxford University, Peter Schweizer writes in his bestseller Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win.
Schwarzman has been called the “supreme leader” of Blackstone, a Wall Street firm with $684 billion of investments. The firm went public in June 2007, but Schwarzman reportedly still holds an iron grip over it, despite only owning around 20 percent of the company he founded in 1985 with Peter Peterson.
Schwarzman has also been called the “China whisperer” for his close connections to the Chinese government and China’s business leaders. Schweizer’s book describes Schwarzman as jokingly claiming he served both as the “unofficial U.S. ambassador to China” as well as the “unofficial Chinese ambassador to the U.S.”
The Schwarzman Scholars program is based in Tsinghau University, which Schweizer describes as “a training ground for Chinese Community Party and government elite.” Chinese dictator Xi Jinping appears to be an alumnus of the school, which has an “Institute for Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” established with the cooperation of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.
“Students from around the world—but especially the United States—would come and be exposed to the Chinese communist system. Schwarzman explains that his goal in setting up the program is that ‘recipients would return to their countries able to interpret the massive change in China in a way that calmed fears and misunderstanding about the country,'” Schweizer writes.
Red-Handed documents the cozy financial and political connections between the Chinese government and some of the most powerful people in the United States, including powerful U.S. financial institutions like Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock.
In 2007, the Chinese government and Communist Party bought a 9.9 percent stake in Blackstone for $3 billion.
“The Chinese government transaction with Blackstone yielded Schwarzman some powerful allies. Lou Jiwei, head of CIC when it made that initial investment, later became Beijing’s finance minister,” Schweizer writes.
While officials from both the Obama and Trump administrations have characterized China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a challenge to America’s global position, Schwarzman has actually praised it as a wonderful program, according to Red-Handed.
Christine Schwarzmann and Stephen Allen Schwarzman attend the 2021 Met Gala on September 13, 2021 in New York City. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)
Chinese officials are quite pleased with the Schwarzman Scholars program.
When it was started, the admissions process was set up by a panel that included officials from the Chinese Communist Party Youth League, the Central Party School (which imposes ideological discipline), and the United Front Work Department, which runs political influence operations. The program’s founding dean, David Daokui Li, was viewed by the government’s propaganda arm “as an especially reliable ally,” Schweizer writes.
Red-Handed describes the curriculum:
Schwarzman Scholars studying at Tsinghua are also required to take a course titled “Theory and Practice of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” which is taught by He Jianyu, associate professor in the School of Marxism at Tsinghua University. The curriculum notes: “There will also be group discussions based on the course literature, a mid-term paper aimed at teaching how to read and analyze the official text of CCP documents and files, and a final paper aimed at providing an opportunity to communicate with a policy maker who is engaged in the decision-making process or an ordinary Chinese citizen who is experiencing the change of China.”
“So what does this all mean,” writes Schweitzer. “A Wall Street financier worth billions, courtesy of the free market system, is funding courses in Marxism-Leninism and a program that preaches the superiority of Chinese communism over American capitalism.”
The Big Lie of Woke Capitalism
By S.R. Piccoli
There are at least three terms to describe the concept of stakeholder capitalism -- corporate wokeness, woke corporatism and woke capitalism. The last of the three was coined in 2015 by Ross Douthat when writing a piece for the New York Times. He defined it as how companies signal their support for progressive causes in order to maintain their influence in society. Since then the concept has become very popular in the U.S. and worldwide, corporations have gone political and seek, or at least profess to seek, change in the world.
On January 24, for one thing, former Unilever CEO Paul Polman wrote in a piece for the Financial Times that “Today, staff and customers believe you should... speak out on big, touchstone issues, from race to fake news and climate change.” In a historic moment of multiple and converging global challenges, he thinks, we have no other option but to embrace so-called stakeholder capitalism. After all, evidence is stacking up to show the “financial benefits to companies that consistently apply their principles and actively work to solve societal problems,” he argues. “Not everyone agrees, however,” he sadly but honestly acknowledges. In fact, if there is a big support for stakeholder capitalism among corporations, there’s also been a backlash from conservative voices, as we will see below. But let us dwell a little more on the supporters of stakeholder capitalism.
In his annual letter to BlackRock shareholders a few days ago, CEO Larry Fink argued that expectations of business leaders have changed dramatically in the last few years. Increased profits, happy shareholders, and more jobs are no longer what a chief executive is expected to deliver. For instance, most stakeholders -- from shareholders, to employees, to customers, to communities, and regulators -- “now expect companies to play a role in decarbonizing the global economy.” And “few things will impact capital allocation decisions -- and thereby the long-term value of your company -- more than how effectively you navigate the global energy transition in the years ahead.” This illustrates perfectly what stakeholder capitalism -- the new mantra of the Business Round Table as announced in August 2019 and endorsed by almost 200 CEOs of the largest corporations -- is all about. In Klaus Schwab’s words,
That is the core of stakeholder capitalism: it is a form of capitalism in which companies do not only optimize short-term profits for shareholders, but seek long term value creation, by taking into account the needs of all their stakeholders, and society at large.
Stakeholder capitalism supporters sometimes love to insist that their credo is not about politics. It is not a social or ideological agenda, they assure, much less it is “woke.” “It is capitalism, driven by mutually beneficial relationships between you and the employees, customers, suppliers, and communities your company relies on to prosper. This is the power of capitalism.” As Fink himself wrote in his letter, “We focus on sustainability not because we’re environmentalists, but because we are capitalists and fiduciaries to our clients.” Stakeholder capitalism, he said, “is not a social or ideological agenda. It is not ‘woke’.” At this point, one might wonder why, then, is BlackRock launching a Center for Stakeholder Capitalism -- one that brings together “leading CEOs, investors, policy experts, and academics to share their experience and deliver their insights” -- and not simply a Center for Capitalism? There seems to be a contradiction here. Or, talking about down-to-earth things, one “might question whether most people really care whether the management of Tesco supports taking the knee,” as Rupert Darwall puts it in response to Paul Polman’s piece. “More importantly, does it matter if they don’t? Or are customers actually more bothered that their weekly shop remains affordable during a time of spiraling inflation?”
But that’s nothing compared to the avalanche of criticism on the stakeholder theory and the deluge of objections that have been raised against it. Take Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, a book that decries America’s turn to stakeholder capitalism. A biotech entrepreneur, the author lifts the lid on the “dirty little secret” behind corporations supporting social causes such as the Black Lives Matter movement and takes the reader behind the scenes into corporate boardrooms and five-star conferences, into Ivy League classrooms and secretive nonprofits, to reveal “the defining scam of our century.” He explains how U.S. companies are exploiting “woke” values and pretending to care about social justice in order to boost profits and gain more power at the expense of the American people. He accuses big companies such as Coca-Cola of capitalizing on the outrage over George Floyd’s death after employing and promoting progressive values in the workplace.
American capitalism has become a “con,” says the author. The con works like a magic trick, which generally consists of three parts, as Ramaswamy explains in an article he wrote for the New York Post:
First, the Pledge: You find an ordinary market where ordinary people sell ordinary things. The simpler, the better. Second, the Turn: You find an arbitrage in that market and squeeze the hell out of it. An arbitrage refers to the opportunity to buy something for one price and instantly sell it for a higher price to someone else. That much is well known. But here’s the dirty little secret underlying the third step of corporate America’s act, its Prestige. Here’s how it works: Pretend like you care about something other than profit and power, precisely to gain more of each.
And so it was that Wokeness remade American capitalism in its own image. “The modern woke-industrial complex divides us as a people,” the book’s description says. “By mixing morality with consumerism, America’s elites prey on our innermost insecurities about who we really are. They sell us cheap social causes and skin-deep identities to satisfy our hunger for a cause and our search for meaning, at a moment when we as Americans lack both.”
Meanwhile in Britain, at the end of January, the Adam Smith Institute published a new paper, “Capitalism After Covid,” that says companies should ditch woke capitalism or risk derailing the UK’s post-pandemic recovery: “Companies should stick to traditional profit-driven shareholder capitalism rather than pursuing ‘woke capitalist’ social objectives that often require political action and leave firms facing accusations of hypocrisy.” The think-tank’s statement comes as City investment titan Terry Smith lashed out at consumer goods giant Unilever for being “obsessed” with its sustainability credentials.
How do we come out of the con? The way to counter all of this is not to fight back directly, Ramaswamy writes. To do so is a “losing battle” and “you’ll be canceled before you even stand a chance.”
The true solution is “to gradually rebuild a vision for shared American identity that is so deep and so powerful that it dilutes wokeism to irrelevance. One that no longer leaves us susceptible to being divided by corporate elites for their own gain.” This looks like a good path to follow.
Samuel Robert Piccoli is a blogger and the author of the books Being Conservative from A to Z (2014) and Blessed Are the Free in Spirit (2021). He is Italian and lives in the Venice area.
Image: Center Street Publishing
BIDENOMICS: The issue is not the survival of what the leader of the most powerful imperialist country calls “democracy.” Joe Biden really means capitalism, the profit system, which has produced a level of economic inequality that is entirely incompatible with any genuine democracy. Instead, it is generating fascist movements all over the world, which aim to abolish all democratic rights and subject the working class to the naked dictatorship of the rich. PATRICK MARTIN
Hostile Takeover: Wall Street Assumes Command of Joe Biden Transition Team
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-biden-i-need-secretary-of-treasury.html
Wall Street and the biggest U.S. banks, after spending a fortune to unseat President Trump, are getting key spots in Democrat Joe Biden’s transition team that he has devised before the presidential election is certified.
Many of the big banks with links to Biden transition team members were major donors to the former vice president.
JOE BIDEN'S CRONY BLACKROCK AND BANKSTERS' RENT BOY CHUCK SCHUMER
Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream⎜WHY POVERTY?⎜(Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6niWzomA_So&list=WL&index=19
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
BLACKROCK IS BRIBES SUCKER JOE BIDEN'S
BIGGEST PAYASTER
The culture of power and money lust of the American Corporate Community and its major players — BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Bridgewater, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Twitter, and Musk — and, of course, Gates — that draws them to a plutocracy that would never hesitate to betray America for a financial advantage or an opportunity to be a part of a global powerhouse oligarchy complicit with and colluding with malefactor government tyrannies. (avarice, cupidity, and rapaciousness)
Schweizer Hits Another Home Run on Biden-China Corruption
Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win
by Peter Schweizer
352 pages, hardcover $18.25, Kindle $14.95
ISBN-10: 0063061147
Harper, 2022
Peter Schweizer is an Oxford graduate, former Hoover Institution Fellow, and cofounder and president of the Government Accountability Institute of Tallahassee, Florida. He is a widely read and interviewed investigative journalist and has authored popular and well received books on political corruption: Clinton Cash, Extortion, Throw Them All Out, and Architects of Ruin.
The book is the usual fare from Schweizer — based on well documented and researched financial records that support assertions of the author. In this book, the focus is corruption in high places that results from cozy entanglements with China. This book focuses on the Chinese communist connections for good reasons: China has set about a long-term effort to compromise the political, business, cultural, academic, and scientific elements of America as a set up for creating global Chinese hegemonic control and dominance. The Chinese have accomplished a great deal in the decades since the ill begotten Kissinger Nixon opening to China in 1972, followed by the Clinton-Bush acquiescence to admission of China into the World Trade Association that was finalized with favored status in 2001.
Through these decades, the wolf, bear, coyote China has gradually expanded its dominance of world trade and economics by stealing intellectual property, using bribes and influence-purchasing, and standard espionage and propaganda methods.
The point of Red-Handed is exposing the participation of persons of influence in the West who have been compromised by Chinese efforts to buy influence and power — on a scale not previously seen.
Mr. Schweizer had a big scandal to investigate but a good team of researchers to help him organize the exposé — an exposé that warns of short-term and long-term danger for the survival of Western nations and the ascendancy of a savage and murderous Chinese communist tyrannical autocracy stained by a history of ethnic, religious, and domestic pogroms, persecutions, and genocide of immense and barbaric proportions that are numerous and stunning, extending forward from the millions of deaths of Mao's Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward that resulted in the deaths of millions of Chinese from starvation and systematic political purges to modern-day activities that subjugate Tibet, Hong Kong, the domestic religious minorities while pursuing external influence and dominance.
Now under new leadership, China continues to commit atrocities domestically and expand its influence in foreign political and economic matters, which raises the question — how do the compromised oligarchs of the West who are ensnared in the Chinese web of influence sleep at night or excuse their complicity? Is money enough to justify complicity with barbaric malevolence? When does the complicity become the role of accessory to crimes ranging all the way to treason?
With the foregoing in mind, the best this review can do is identify and briefly describe and introduce evidence of the treasonous or traitorous American perps who have sold their positions, stature, and influence to the Chinese political peddlers. Mr. Schweizer's systematic reviews and investigative revelations include the following (in order of the chapters) — and after every short summary comes my choice of a few words to describe the corruption and treason:
An introduction featuring the ROPE, alluding to the apocryphal commie saying that the capitalists will sell the communists the rope they can use to hang the capitalists. This chapter is a warning and an exposition of how brutal and cruel socialist systems can infiltrate and influence — ultimately devour civil society from the inside. How American core concepts can be compromised with cheap talk and promises — brutality can dominate civility, and culture can be eviscerated by aggressive activist advocacy of Marxist nonsense. The key, though, is the complicity of American citizens. (vice, infidelity and treachery)
A chapter on the evil and corrupt Biden family and its selling out to worldwide opportunities for corruption, but particularly Chinese influence-peddling. (decadence and depravity)
A wearying and maddening description of the corruption and pandering, grifting, and shilling by the denizens of capitol hill — Feinstein and family, Swallwell, Pelosi and family, McConnell and Chou, former congress people like Senators Boehner, Lott, Breaux, Baucus, and of course a long list of congressmen, also from both sides of the aisle — all selling their souls and positions of trust. (degradation and degeneration)
The culture of power and money lust of the American Corporate Community and its major players — BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Bridgewater, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Twitter, and Musk — and, of course, Gates — that draws them to a plutocracy that would never hesitate to betray America for a financial advantage or an opportunity to be a part of a global powerhouse oligarchy complicit with and colluding with malefactor government tyrannies. (avarice, cupidity, and rapaciousness)
The special place of diplomats and the chattering class as the lubricant for the social and societal resets best exemplified by pretentious poseurs like Kissinger, with so many others that the author exposes as self-promoting narcissists who achieve a grandeur that they consider to be well deserved, a grandeur usually as part of the dominant oligarchy — the list of exposed poseurs by the author is impressive because they saturate public life. (egoist and megalomaniac)
A special chapter set aside for the Bush and Trudeau families, who have been served by their associations with China at the expense of their home countries. (betrayers and quislings)
Academia, for various reasons, provides excellent examples of the perfidy of betrayal, but of course academics consider themselves beyond such pedestrian concepts as loyalty, fealty, family, tradition, constitutional government, since they are pursuing the greater good...and their greater good. They also identify themselves as "experts," essential to the survival of the world and progress of mankind, although many have no marketable or real-world valuable skills. (overweening, smug, and vainglorious)
Mr. Schweizer saves the last chapter for a grand summary and proposal to reverse the corruption he's put on display that endangers the survival of America. The key phrase he uses is "Elite Capture," and the elites are vulnerable. He warns that republics are easy prey for autocrat countries' intel and military influence-peddling and sabotage.
· Clean up the lobbying and influence-peddling in D.C., and enforce foreign agent registration.
· No lobbying and influence-peddling by foreign intel and military entities.
· Clean up research and academics from influence-peddling and ban joint research.
· Ban foreign military and intel company listings on the stock exchanges.
· Engagement with foreign governments is a dangerous business. Stop the looseness.
· Transparency and all conflicts declared on all "experts" proposed by media, government, or academia.
· Most of all, a return to the constitutional concepts of limited government and strict equality under the law, equal administration of the laws, no favorites or exceptions.
Mr. Schweizer has received deserved praise for this excellent book, which is a product of extraordinary research. I hope my introduction results in your decision to read it. Three hundred fifty-two pages of your time.
Image: Marc Nozell via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.
JOE BIDEN'S CRONY BLACKROCK AND BANKSTERS' RENT BOY CHUCK SCHUMER
Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream⎜WHY POVERTY?⎜(Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6niWzomA_So&list=WL&index=19
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
Schumer-Aligned Group Brought in Record $92M in Dark Money from Anonymous Donors
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
4 Feb 20220
2:40
A dark money group aligned with Democrat Senate Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) brought in a record $92 million in dark money from anonymous donors while Schumer blasted Republicans for using dark money.
Majority Forward is a nonprofit organization affiliated with Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC. Between July 2019 and June 2020, Majority Forward hauled in $92 million, according to the organization’s most recently released tax forms.
During the 2020 election cycle, Majority Forward gave Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC $51 million in contributions, making it the largest donor to Schumer’s PAC.
U.S. President Joe Biden, with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, arrives at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2022, to mark the anniversary of the attack on the Capitol in Washington, DC. (Photo by BILL CLARK/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
While Schumer benefitted from millions of dark money dollars, he criticized Republicans for doing the same thing. Schumer also pushed the Senate to pass the For the People Act, which contains provisions requiring political nonprofits to disclose donors who contribute more than $10,000.
“Majority Forward is kind of a dark money empire that the Democrat Party really doesn’t want to talk about, especially Chuck Schumer,” said Parker Thayer, a Capital Research Center investigator.
“The Democratic Party makes a big deal in public about getting rid of dark money, getting dark money out of politics, but the reality is even the New York Times is now reporting on this,” Thayer told Fox News.
Thayer referred to a recent New York Times report that found 15 of the most active Democrat dark money organizations outspent the top 15 Republican groups by a margin of over $600 million. Those Democrat dark money groups spent $1.5 billion during the 2020 cycle, compared to $900 million for Republican organizations.
Thayer pointed out the hypocrisy, telling Fox News:
Democrats use much more dark money than Republicans do, and they’re more than willing to take that funding as long as it benefits them, but they’ll still simultaneously call out conservatives and Republicans for using dark money as well.
Although Democrat dark money groups spent more than Republican groups in 2020, pro-GOP super PACs outraised their Democrat counterparts in 2021. For example, the pro-GOP Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF) raised double what the pro-democrat House Majority PAC did.
Last year, CLF brought in $110 million, compared to House Majority PAC’s $55 million.
BIDEN, LIKE THE CLINTON CRIME DUAL AND THE OBOMB, IS TOTALLY OWNED BY BIG BANKSTERS. THE BIGGEST OF THEM ALL IS BLACKROCK. NO BANKSTER PUMPED MORE INTO BIDEN THAN BLACKROCK.
World’s largest asset management firm was “front and center” of Fed’s Wall Street bailout
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
According to the article, Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock, the world’s biggest asset management firm, was “in frequent touch” with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Fed chair Jerome Powell “in the days before and after many of the Fed’s emergency programs were announced in late March.”
The extent of the collaboration is revealed in new emails obtain by the newspaper together with information that has been previously made public.
In one newly obtained email, Fink refers to planning for the rescue measures as “the project” that he and the Fed were “working on together.”
As the article notes, “America’s top economic officials were in constant contact with a Wall Street executive whose firm stood to benefit financially from the rescue,” showing “how intertwined Blackrock has become with the federal government.”
Blackrock’s close collaboration with the Fed and Treasury came at a crucial point in the development of a crisis in financial markets which began with the onset of the pandemic in March and fears in corporate circles over the response in the working class amid walkouts by workers insisting that safety measures be out in place.
The Fed responded to the initial turbulence in the markets by cutting interest rates. But these measures proved to be insufficient and the potential for a major meltdown in the markets emerged in the week ending March 20 when the $21 trillion US Treasury bond market—the bedrock of the US and global financial system—froze.
Instead of providing a “safe haven” for investors it moved to the centre of the crisis as Treasuries were sold off and no buyers could be found as the sell-off extended to all areas of the financial system.
Faced with a disaster when the markets re-opened, Mnuchin, Powell and Fink were engaged in a series of discussions over the weekend of March 21–22 to devise a rescue package. According to the Times report, Mnuchin spoke to Fink five times over the two days, more than anyone else, other than Powell with whom he spoke nine times.
One of the most significant features of the rescue measures announced on Monday March 23 was the decision by the Fed, for the first time ever, to buy corporate bonds which, as the Times noted, “were becoming nearly impossible to sell as investors sprinted to convert their holdings to cash.”
Blackrock had already closely collaborated with the Fed developing its response to the 2008 financial crisis was thereby set to play a key role in the March intervention.
The article pointed out that, while Blackrock signed a non-disclosure agreement on March 22 restricting officials from sharing information about the upcoming measures, the way in which the rescue package was devised “mattered to Blackrock.”
The decision of the Fed to buy corporate bonds and provide an underpinning for the market was significant and involved two key areas of Blackrock’s operations. One of the ways it makes profit is by managing money for clients charging a preset fee. But assets under management were contracting as investors went for cash and its business model was under threat.
Blackrock is also a major player in the short-term debt markets which were coming “under intense stress” as investors moved their holdings to cash.
Electronic Traded Funds (ETFs), which track market indexes but which trade like a stock, were also severely impacted.
In the words of the Times article: “Corporate bonds were difficult to trade and near impossible to issue in mid-March 2020. Prices on some high-grade corporate ETFs, including one of Blackrock’s, were out of whack relative to the value of the underlying assets.”
As Gregg Gelenzis, associate director for economic policy at the Center for American Progress told the Times: “This was the first time that ETFs came under stress in a really systemic way.”
In the rescue package the Fed committed itself to buying already existing debt as well as new bonds and also decided it would purchase ETFs with the result that the “bond market and fund recovery was nearly instant.”
As the Times article notes, while practically all of Wall Street benefited from the Fed’s intervention, and other financial firms were “consulted” apart from Blackrock “no other company was as front and center.”
The closeness of the relationship between Blackrock and the financial and economic arms of the state, the US Treasury and the Fed, were highlighted in a comment by William Birdthistle, of the Chicago-Kent College of Law and the author of a book on funds, cited in the article.
He said Blackrock was “about as close to a government arm as you can be, without being the Federal Reserve.”
The Fed makes every effort to cover up that relationship in order to try to preserve the fiction that it is not beholden to Wall Street and operates as an independent public authority concerned above all with the state of the economy and the welfare of the population.
The Times article recalled a news conference in July 2020 in which Powell was asked about the discussions with Fink.
“I can’t recall exactly what those conversations were,” he said, “but they would have been about what he is seeing in the market and things like that.
He said there were not “very many” conversations and that the Blackrock chief was “typically trying to make sure that we are getting good service from the company he founded the leads.”
Powell’s claim that, in the midst of the most significant crisis since the meltdown of 2008—with a potential to go even further, as the freeze in the Treasury market showed—he could not recall those conversations simply does not pass muster.
The value of every crisis, it has been rightly said, is that it reveals the real relations that are obscured and covered over in “normal” times.
And that is the case here. The economic arms of the capitalist state are not some independent authority but function every day in the interests of the corporate and financial oligarchy, servicing its needs and interests above all else.
ark Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream⎜WHY POVERTY?⎜(Documentary) IN THIS DOC YOU SEE DEM BANKSTER RENT BOY CHUCK SCHUMER KISS BANKSTER ASS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6niWzomA_So&list=WL&index=19
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
THE LONG HISTORY OF OBAMA-BIDENomics:
The “managed bankruptcy” of GM and Chrysler ordered by the Obama administration set into motion the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs, including 35,000 GM production jobs in the US alone, the shuttering of dozens of assembly and parts plants and the closing of more than 1,000 car dealerships. Obama worked with the United Auto Workers to slash the wages of new hires in half, abolish the eight-hour day, ban strikes for six years and relieve the corporations of retiree health care obligations by handing the provision and cutting of retiree medical benefits to the UAW.
The executive from the giant investment firm BlackRock played a leading role in the destruction of autoworkers’ jobs and living standards during the 2009 restructuring of GM and Chrysler.
Who is Biden’s top economic adviser Brian Deese?
President-elect Joe Biden has reportedly selected Brian Deese, an executive at the Wall Street investment firm BlackRock, as director of the National Economic Council, according to several major news outlets. “In his new post, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation, Mr. Deese will play a lead role in implementing Mr. Biden’s economic agenda,” the Wall Street Journal wrote Monday.
While Deese was not among those Biden introduced Tuesday as his “economic team,” an announcement is expected soon. Deese, the Global Head of Sustainable Investment at BlackRock, would be the second executive chosen by the incoming administration from the world’s largest asset manager, which controls $7 trillion in assets and is a major shareholder in Deutsche Bank, Wells Fargo, Apple, Microsoft and other global corporate giants.
On Tuesday, Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, a former chief of staff to BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink, was named top deputy to Janet Yellen, the former Federal Reserve Chairwoman who Biden picked for Secretary of the Treasury. Tom Donilon, chairman of BlackRock Investment Institute and brother of Biden’s chief campaign political strategist, had been considered for the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, but the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Donilon decided to stay in the “private sector.”
Brian Deese (Source: BlackRock)
The selection of Deese and Adeyemo—who both previously served in the Obama administration—exemplifies the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, DC, which operates constantly, regardless of which party controls the White House.
It is a further signal to the financial oligarchy that a Biden administration will dispense with its rhetoric about raising taxes on the wealthy and continue funneling trillions into the stock markets. “By picking folks with deep ties to large asset managers,” Tyler Gellasch, executive director of investor trade group Healthy Markets Association, told the Journal, “the administration can help assuage financial executives’ concerns. It sends a clear signal to the industry to breathe easier: They can plan for stability without likely facing massive new regulatory or tax risks.”
After working on Obama’s 2008 election campaign, Deese was appointed Special Assistant to the President for economic policy and served on the National Economic Council as Obama took over the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) from the outgoing George Bush administration, and pumped massive resources into the same banks and financial institutions whose criminal activities had crashed the economy.
Deese, who had no formal training as an economist, then made a name for himself for being the most aggressive advocate of throwing General Motors and Chrysler Corp. into bankruptcy in 2009.
In a May 2009 New York Times article, headlined “The 31-Year-Old in Charge of Dismantling G.M.,” David Sanger wrote, “It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.
BLOG EDITOR: WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT THE PARASITE LAWYERS?!?
“But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.”
Deese was part of the White House Auto Task Force, which was made up of Wall Street asset strippers, including billionaire investor and Democratic Party fundraiser Steven Rattner and Ron Bloom, another Wall Street “turnaround specialist” with a long history of collaborating with the unions during the bankruptcy restructuring of the airline and steel industry.
While publicly claiming that they wanted to avoid bankruptcy, court document would show that Deese and others in Obama’s inner circle were determined to force the auto companies into a forced restructuring from the earliest days of the new administration.
After Rick Wagoner, GM’s former chief executive, said publicly that bankruptcy was not a viable option, the administration would fire him and threaten to withhold any further money from GM unless it imposed far more “painful” cuts than outlined in its initial plan, which called for the elimination of 47,000 jobs worldwide, including 21,000 hourly workers in the US.
The “managed bankruptcy” of GM and Chrysler ordered by the Obama administration set into motion the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs, including 35,000 GM production jobs in the US alone, the shuttering of dozens of assembly and parts plants and the closing of more than 1,000 car dealerships. Obama worked with the United Auto Workers to slash the wages of new hires in half, abolish the eight-hour day, ban strikes for six years and relieve the corporations of retiree health care obligations by handing the provision and cutting of retiree medical benefits to the UAW.
As the wrote at the time, “Obama’s Auto Task Force has focused on one thing from the beginning: how to exploit the crisis of the auto industry to create conditions for Wall Street to reap huge profits. Its leading figures—Secretary Treasurer Timothy Geithner and White House economic [adviser] Lawrence Summers—played a key role in the Wall Street bailout, opposing the slightest restrictions on compensation paid to banking executives receiving public money. When it has come to the auto industry, however, they have demanded the most brutal job cuts and wage and benefit concessions from autoworkers.
“The outcome of the dismantling of the auto industry,” the continued, “will mean that the industrial base of the US will shrink even more and the economy will be further dominated by the type of reckless and socially destructive speculation that is responsible for the worst economic and social crisis since the 1930s.”
A year after the forced bankruptcies, Citi Investment Research analyst Itay Michaeli boasted that GM’s fixed cost per vehicle would drop from $10,400 in 2009 to $7,280 in 2010 and fall to $5,772 by 2012. In the five years following, labor costs at GM and Chrysler—which declared bankruptcy on April 30, 2009—were predicted to be lower than any Japanese automaker operating nonunion plants in the US, making it profitable for the company to build small cars in the US, rather than in Mexico.
The auto restructuring became a template for the decimation of wages throughout the working class during the eight years of the Obama administration, which oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to top in US history up until today.
Deese’s “success” during the auto restructuring earned him a rapid set of promotions in the Obama White House. He was soon named deputy direct of the National Economic Council and then the deputy director and acting director of the Office of Management and Budget. In 2015, he helped negotiate the 2015 Bipartisan Budget Act.
After finding limitless funds to bail out Wall Street, the Obama administration would insist there was no money to bail out states and municipalities, which had laid off hundreds of thousands of educators and other public employees during the Great Recession.
When Biden introduced his economic team Tuesday, he claimed that “help was on the way” to the tens of millions of workers, small business owners and unemployed who are facing an unprecedented economic and social catastrophe. But his selection of Deese, Yellen, Adeyemo and others directly from Wall Street make it clear that a Biden administration will be committed to austerity and back-to-work campaign aimed at forcing workers to pay for the corporate bailout no matter how many lives are needlessly lost to the pandemic.
At the time, Delphi employed nearly 50,000 Americans, who earned about $30 an hour on the assembly line. Now, workers in Mexico for the company earn about $1 an hour.
HOW FAR WILL JOE BIDEN HELP HIS PAYMASTERS, BLACKROCK BUY UP ALL THE FORECLOSED ON PROPERTIES INCREASING THE HOUSING CRISIS TO NATIONWIDE EPIDEMIC.
GET READY TO BE HOMELESS!
HOME FORECLOSURES JUMP! HOUSING SUPPLY SHOCK COMING, REAL ESTATE CRASH STARTING? HOME PRICES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfH0C5y5beE
This company owns the world (and it's our fault) - BlackRock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghP7kImI9WM
How BlackRock Became The World's Largest Asset Manager
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga_we_sOopk
JOE'S BIGGEST BANKSTER DONOR IS BLACKROCK
Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors.
BLOG EDITOR: WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT THE PARASITE LAWYERS?!?
“But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.”
Big Tech and Big Law dominate Biden transition teams, tempering progressive hopes
Alexander Nazaryan administration takes office in January.
WASHINGTON — For six years, Brandon Belford worked as an economic policy adviser to President Barack Obama in the White House and federal agencies. He moved to the Bay Area when Donald Trump became president, part of a massive flight of Obama officials from Washington to Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Hollywood. He took high-ranking positions with Apple and then Lyft, where he is currently the ride-sharing company’s chief of staff.
Now Belford is back, as part of one of the “transition teams” named by President-elect Joe Biden to restock a federal government that has been battered after four years of Trump by hiring new officials and advising the incoming administration on what its first governing steps should be.
Those steps could be timid, judging by the composition of those teams, where Obama-era centrism prevails. That has some progressives worried that Biden represents nothing more than a return to normal, at a time when many of them believe the nation is ready to embrace policy ideas well to the left of center.
“The status quo is killing us,” says former Bernie Sanders press secretary Briahna Joy Gray, who now hosts a podcast called “Bad Faith.”
Belford is joined by dozens of other Democratic operatives who have spent the past four years working at prestigious law firms and think tanks. On these “agency review teams” are high-ranking executives from Amazon, partners at white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling and enough experts from D.C. center-left think tanks — including six from the Brookings Institution alone — to fill a center-left think tank.
Progressives knew this was coming. “I am very concerned about the role Uber executives would play in this administration,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-N.Y., told Yahoo News. Even though she also effusively praised the appointment of Ron Klain as the incoming White House chief of staff, Ocasio-Cortez vowed that corporate America would not “pull the wool over our eyes” when it came to crafting the Biden presidency.
Some have put it less bluntly. “Biden’s transition team is full of wealthy corporate executives who are completely disconnected from the struggles of the working class,” complains left-leaning activist Ryan Knight, whose Twitter handle is @ProudSocialist.
App-based drivers from Uber and Lyft protest in a caravan in front of City Hall in Los Angeles on October 22, 2020 where elected leaders hold a conference urging voters to reject on the November 3 election, Proposition 22, that would classify app-based drivers as independent contractors and not employees or agents. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP) (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)More
He was presumably referring to the two dozen agency review team officials who come from law firms like Arnold & Porter. Or to the 40 or so members of the Biden transition who are current or recent lobbyists.
The agency review teams are not exactly settling into their cubicles just yet. For one, President Trump has not yet conceded the election, and the transition has been hindered in part by Republican operatives at the General Services Administration. And agency review is an enormously complex process, one that actually began months ago. The transition teams are supposed to ensure a “smooth transfer of power,” in large part by making sure that capable officials are ready to get to work in their respective agencies the moment Biden lifts his hand from the Lincoln Bible.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one member of the Biden campaign working on agency-related matters says teams were primarily tasked with surveying the landscape of the federal bureaucracy. She says that the transition teams would make some hiring recommendations, but only as a secondary function.
With a single exception, the agency review team members mentioned in this article did not respond to requests for comment.
One with a typically impressive biography is that of Aneesh Chopra, who served as the U.S. chief technology officer for Obama before starting his own medical data logistics company, CareJourney. Now he is on the transition team for the U.S. Postal Service, where he will presumably work to undo the alleged damage by another logistics maven: Trump appointee Louis DeJoy.
Of course, most progressives are glad that there’s a Biden transition to speak of, instead of a second Trump term. But they also recognize their own role in the Democratic candidate’s victory.
“Everyone fell into line and did everything they could to get Joe Biden elected,” says Max Berger, a progressive activist who worked for Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign and Justice Democrats, the group that helped elect Ocasio-Cortez to the House in 2018.
Berger recognizes that progressives will be a “junior partner” to the establishment Democrats with whom Biden has been ideologically and temperamentally aligned for a good half-century. They want to be partners all the same, not just the loyal opposition.
Many are cheered by some of the agency review teams. For one, they are notably more diverse, a stark contrast to Trump’s reliance on white males for so much of his advice. On the transition team for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is Jedidah Isler, the Dartmouth professor who in 2014 became the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in astrophysics from Yale. The transition team for the Small Business Administration includes Jorge Silva Puras, a political leader in Puerto Rico who also teaches entrepreneurship at a community college in the Bronx.
“The presence of labor officials throughout many of the groups is notable,” says David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect. In the Department of Education team, for example, are several executives from the American Federation of Teachers.
He called the Federal Reserve and Treasury teams “all-stars,” a sentiment shared by other progressives interviewed for this article. On the Treasury team is Mehrsa Baradaran, a progressive economist who has written on the racial wealth gap. She is also on the Federal Reserve team, along with Reena Aggarwal, a corporate governance expert.
Progressive strategist Elizabeth Spiers says the finance-related teams are not “not quite Elizabeth Warren levels of aggressiveness but also not stuffed with finance people.” Biden’s advisers appear to have learned the lessons of his former boss. During Obama’s first year, he relied on banking executives to help quell the financial crisis. They did so in ways that steered the new president away from progressive proposals, such as nationalizing those very same banks.
There is not a single current executive from Citibank or Goldman Sachs on any of the transition teams. Bank of America has also been shut out. JPMorgan can boast a single toehold in the agency review process: Lisa Sawyer of the Pentagon team. A spokesman for JPMorgan told Yahoo News that the bank was “following the appropriate election laws” and that Sawyer was “not on an agency review team that will touch any banking issues.”
“I think the Biden administration is going to be surprising to progressives in some ways and disappointing in others, and the agency review teams reflect that,” Dayen says. During the summer, the American Prospect published a lengthy exposé about Biden’s foreign policy advisers’ lucrative foray into corporate America.
Many are set to return to the highest echelons of official Washington.
“I have to be cautiously optimistic,” says Waleed Shahid, communications director for the Justice Democrats.
Relatively young progressives like Shahid are less likely to wax romantic about the way things were in Washington. They are less interested in experience than conviction. But for many in Biden’s camp, a lack of experience was among the several fatal flaws of the Trump years.
“Everyone — right or left — has made the mistaken assumption for years that governing is easy,” says “The Death of Expertise” author Tom Nichols, who teaches at the Naval War College and is an ardently anti-Trump Republican.
“After having a bunch of nitwits and cronies loose in the government,” Nichols wrote in an email, “I think a lot of people on the left are really giving in to the assumption that as long as you’re not Trump, or not a complete idiot, anyone can do it.”
Given the title and theme of his book, Nicholas cautioned against that approach. “It’s a childish and silly approach to government, but it’s a bipartisan problem,” he told Yahoo News.
While progressive may not see their stars like Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren occupying the Treasury Department, they do very much hope that a Biden presidency amounts to more than a third Obama term. It was unaddressed economic inequality, they believe, that bred the populist resentment that gave Trump an opening in 2016. The coronavirus has only made that inequality worse. That will only increase populist resentment, they worry, to be exploited by a Trump acolyte — or perhaps Trump himself, again — in 2024.
Addressing that inequality, for now, falls to transition team officials like Mark Schwartz of Amazon and Ted Dean of Dropbox, as well as Arun Venkataraman of Visa and David Holmes of defense contractor Rebellion Defense, in which Eric Schmidt of Google is an investor. Many of these officials are veterans of the Obama administration or Democratic offices on the Hill.
“There is a lot of corporate influence there,” says Maurice Weeks, co-founder of the Action Center on Race and the Economy. “And that is troubling.” But he is encouraged by the presence of “hard-core progressives” like Sarah Miller, a former Treasury deputy who is both an anti-Facebook activist and the executive of the American Economic Liberties Project, which seeks to curb corporate power. She is now on the Treasury transition team.
In some ways, the difference is between former Obama officials who, like Miller, went on to become activists and those who moved on to become rich. The latter did only what many government officials had done before them. But at a time of mass unemployment, a stint at the corporate law firm Latham & Watkins (three transition team members) may not seem as impressive as it may have when Obama was president.
“We don’t just want to rewind the clock by four years,” Weeks says.
For many progressives, Trump was a singular threat to important institutions of the federal government, but rebuilding those institutions is simply not as important as rebuilding entire communities shattered by economic, social and racial inequalities.
It doesn’t help matters that, today, tech giants are distrusted by conservatives and progressives alike. Firms that were run out of Palo Alto garages now chafe at antitrust laws like the railroad companies of a century ago.
And like those companies, they know how to use their influence. In 2019 alone, two of the biggest and most influential technology firms — Amazon and Facebook — each spent $17 million on “government affairs,” better known as lobbying.
Ocasio-Cortez’s reference to Uber may have been a subtle warning to the incoming administration: The brother-in-law of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is Tony West, who worked for the Department of Justice under President Bill Clinton and is now the chief counsel at Uber. Jake Sullivan, another top Biden adviser, also worked for Uber.
The company recently won a major victory in California with Proposition 22, a successful response to legal efforts to make Uber drivers and other “gig workers” employees, not contractors. That’s exactly the kind of labor policy, Ocasio-Cortez says, the Biden administration must avoid.
Many top Obama staffers went to Silicon Valley in 2017. They could be returning to Washington with a new appreciation for free market capitalism at a time when “socialism” is no longer a dirty word.
“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry players,” noted Protocol, an online publication that covers technology.
That’s exactly what worries Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, which tracks what Trump has called, without much affection, “the swamp.” He notes that the transition team for the Office of Management and Budget appears to have borrowed rather avidly from Silicon Valley, with team members hailing from Lyft, Airbnb and Amazon.
The budget office wields an “enormous amount of power,” says Hauser, including in both how congressionally appropriated money is doled out and how certain rules are implemented. Though it had a supporting role in Trump’s impeachment drama over foreign aid, OMB is otherwise obscure, making it a perfect site for covert exercises of federal power.
Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors.
Watching the transition, Gray, the former Sanders adviser, recalled an old saying: “The fish rots from the head.” The head, in this case, is Joe Biden, of whom Gray has long been a skeptic.
“He’s a fundamentally conservative man,” Gray says. She reasons that if Biden was “unmoved by the largest protest movement in American history” to endorse Medicare for All, he can’t be trusted to do much for conservative causes like a $15 minimum wage and the Green New Deal.
Still, she believes that Biden can be made to hear the voices of progressives — if, Gray says, they are loud enough. She points out that there is widespread support for progressive legislation like the $15 minimum wage in Florida, even though Trump won the state.
Biden easily won Oregon, but a push to legalize small amounts of drugs, known as Measure 110, was even more popular than he was.
She sees that as evidence that progressive ideas are more popular than Biden himself. “Progressives should never stop screaming that reality from the rooftops,” Gray told Yahoo News. And she vowed to keep fighting, even with Trump gone and a Democratic president in the Oval Office once again.
“I don’t accept resignation,” she said.
Cover thumbnail photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Joe Biden’s Pick for Economic
Adviser Tied to Delphi
Pension-Slashing Scheme
MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
30 Nov 2020316
4:35
Democrat Joe Biden’s pick to be his top economic adviser in the White House served on the Obama-appointed team that helped slash pensions for roughly 20,000 Americans in the auto bailout.
This week, Biden announced that Obama alum Brian Deese, now an executive at the investment management firm BlackRock, will serve as his top economic adviser should he enter the White House.
Deese previously served as a special assistant to Obama for economic policy and played a role in the administration’s bailout of the auto industry, which ultimately led to slashed pensions for 20,000 non-union workers at the Delphi Corporation, an auto parts supplier to General Motors (GM).
In 2009, as part of the Obama-Biden administration’s taxpayer-funded bailout of GM, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) terminated the pension plans of non-unionized Delphi workers. In some cases, workers had their pensions gutted by as much as 75 percent.
A federal report in 2013 detailed that the Delphi workers would likely have their pensions cut by an estimated $440 million. Meanwhile, GM topped off unionized Delphi workers’ pensions at a cost of about $1 billion.
Deese, along with agency heads like Timothy Geithner and top advisers like Ron Bloom, was named in that federal report, having had been involved in multiple conversations about the Delphi pensions:
In July 2009, internal Government emails between the Auto Team and Advisor to the President Brian Deese discussed GM’s need to address issues with Delphi’s “splinter unions.” Auto Team officials did not recall details related to the emails. When Senator Charles Schumer took a position that GM should assume the Delphi salaried retiree pensions, Mr. Deese emailed Mr. Rattner this “may complicate the optics of doing anything for the splinters.” Other emails from Mr. Deese stated, “We will continue to face intense scrutiny on this issue. The politics of terminations is quite intense” and “we need to work on a clear rationale for the outcomes we’re moving toward, as well as an explanation of respective roles.” Mr. Rattner emailed members of the Auto Team that he had spoken with Fritz Henderson about “our logic on the splinters, which he [Henderson] was fine with. [Auto Team Analyst] Sadiq [Malik] should speak to Janice [Uhlig] about the details, particularly how the reallocation of the $417mm would work.” Auto Team member Feldman emailed members of the Auto Team about health care/pension benefit changes for IUE and USW employees, and Mr. Deese responded that the company’s organizing principle was parity between GM salaried and non-UAW hourlies. Mr. Deese referenced a discussion about health care costs and the “credible fairness arguments to augment the hourlies’ recovery based on the pension disparity, but that for all the reasons we discussed that would not be possible. However, I think the logic of that conclusion strongly counsels in favor of bringing the top-up through. Otherwise, we’re moving in the opposite direction from a position that we all agreed was itself on the edge of fairness.”
In October, President Trump signed a memorandum to devise a plan to restore the pensions of the Delphi workers. Biden has not said if he supports the memorandum.
Former Delphi workers told Breitbart News in interviews how the pension-slashing scheme uprooted their livelihoods. One retiree said she lost her home, and her retirement plans to move to the Florida coast have been squashed.
Another retiree said his wife died in the process, as he was forced to find work in order to pay for her medical bills. He had assumed that after 30 years at Delphi, he and his wife would have a good healthcare plan in their retirement. That ended when his pension was cut by about 30 percent.
Delphi, which has since split into Aptiv and Delphi Technologies, announced in 2006 that it would shutter 21 of its 29 plants in the United States — offshoring some 20,000 U.S. jobs to Mexico, China, and other foreign countries.
At the time, Delphi employed nearly 50,000 Americans, who earned about $30 an hour on the assembly line. Now, workers in Mexico for the company earn about $1 an hour.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
YOU WONDERED WHY BIDEN HAS VOTED FOR EVERY WAR FOR THE LAST 50 YEARS???
JOE BIDEN'S GLOBAL WAR MACHINE TO BE RUN BY WALL STREET CRONIES
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/biden-names-national-security-team-of.html
Biden names national security team of right-wing militarists
This is because despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and the military-industrial complex.
Amazon is entangled not only with Wall Street, but also with the US military and intelligence apparatus. Amazon was awarded a $600 million contract with the CIA in 2013, followed by a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense last year to move government data onto the cloud. Meanwhile, Amazon’s facial-identification software “Rekognition” is being marketed to federal and local police.
Hostile Takeover: Wall Street Assumes Command of Joe Biden Transition Team
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-biden-i-need-secretary-of-treasury.html
Wall Street and the biggest U.S. banks, after spending a fortune to unseat President Trump, are getting key spots in Democrat Joe Biden’s transition team that he has devised before the presidential election is certified.
Many of the big banks with links to Biden transition team members were major donors to the former vice president.
JOE BIDEN SAYS MUCK PROGRESSIVES, I MADE MY DIRTY MONEY SERVING WALL STREET!
“Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors.”
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-bidens-america-to-be-ruled-by-wall.html
“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry players,” noted Protocol, an online publication that covers technology.”
“He was presumably referring to the two dozen agency review team officials who come from law firms like Arnold & Porter. Or to the 40 or so members of the Biden transition who are current or recent lobbyists.”
“During the summer, the American Prospect published a lengthy exposé about Biden’s foreign policy advisers’ lucrative foray into corporate America. Many are set to return to the highest echelons of official Washington.”
Woke Capitalism Is a Monopoly Game
By Michael Rectenwald | February 11, 2022 | 5:04pm EST
In 2018, Ross Douthat of the New York Times introduced the phrase “woke capital.” Essentially, Douthat suggested that woke capitalism works by substituting symbolic value for economic value. Under woke capitalism, corporations offer workers rhetorical placebos in lieu of costlier economic concessions, such as higher wages and better benefits.
The same gestures of wokeness also appease the liberal political elite, promoting their agendas of identity politics, gender pluralism, transgender rights, lax immigration standards, climate change mitigation, and so on. In return, woke corporations hope to be spared higher taxes, increased regulations, and antitrust legislation aimed at monopolies. Although woke capitalism alienates cultural conservatives, the Republican Party remains pro-corporate, making woke capitalism a win-win strategy for corporations.
Business Insider columnist Josh Barro suggested that woke capitalism provides a form of parapolitical representation for workers and corporate consumers. Given their perceived political disenfranchisement, woke capitalism offers them representation in the public sphere, as they see their values reflected in corporate pronouncements.
Others have suggested that corporations have gone woke only to be spared cancellation by Twitter mobs and other activists, that wokeness is a good “branding tool,” or that progressive shareholders also demand corporate activism.
But woke capitalism cannot be sufficiently explained in terms of placating coastal leftists, ingratiating left-liberal legislators, or avoiding the wrath of activists. Rather, as wokeness has escalated and taken hold of corporations and states, it has become a demarcation device, a shibboleth for cartel members to identify and distinguish themselves from their nonwoke competitors, who are to be starved of capital investments. Woke capitalism has become a monopoly game.
Just as nonwoke individuals are cancelled from civic life, so too are nonwoke companies cancelled from the economy, leaving the spoils to the woke. Corporate cancellations are not merely the result of political fallout. They are being institutionalized and carried out through the stock market. The Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Index is a Chinese-style social credit score for rating corporations. Woke planners wield the ESG Index to reward the in-group and to squeeze nonwoke players out of the market. Woke investment drives ownership and control of production away from the noncompliant. The ESG Index serves as an admission ticket for entry into the woke cartels.
Research suggests that ESG investing favors large over small companies. Woke capitalism vests as much control over production and distribution in these large, favored corporations as possible while eliminating industries and producers deemed either unnecessary or inimical.
The investment approach of BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager; Vanguard, the second largest; and others lends credence to this interpretation. BlackRock and Vanguard are solidly behind stakeholder capitalism — the corporate ethos of benefiting “stakeholders” in addition to or in lieu of shareholders.
In his “2021 Letter to CEOs,” BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, made his position on investment decisions clear, declaring that “climate risk is investment risk” and “the creation of sustainable index investments has enabled a massive acceleration of capital towards companies better prepared to address climate risk.” Fink promised a “tectonic shift” in investment behavior, an increasing acceleration of investments going to “sustainability-focused” companies. Fink warned CEOs: “And because this will have such a dramatic impact on how capital is allocated, every management team and board will need to consider how this will impact their company’s stock.” In thus throwing down the stakeholder gauntlet, Fink echoed the menacing words of World Economic Forum (WEF) founder and chairman Klaus Schwab, who wrote in June 2020: “Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”
But unlike Schwab’s rhetorical gesturing, Fink’s dictum of “go woke or go broke” should not be dismissed as the conspiratorial rantings of Dr. Evil. It has the direct force of capital behind it. Fink carries out what Schwab can only promote with propaganda.
Fink’s “2022 Letter to CEOs: The Power of Capitalism” continues the promotion of stakeholder capitalism, suggesting that stakeholder capitalism has always been the modus operandi of successful capitalist corporations:
"Over the past three decades, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with countless CEOs and to learn what distinguishes truly great companies. Time and again, what they all share is that they have a clear sense of purpose; consistent values; and, crucially, they recognize the importance of engaging with and delivering for their key stakeholders. This is the foundation of stakeholder capitalism."
According to Fink, stakeholder capitalism is a not an aberration. He goes on to declare, rather defensively: “It is not a social or ideological agenda. It is not ‘woke.’ It is capitalism.”
Klaus Schwab erects the straw man of “neoliberalism” — which he equates with the free market — as the source of economic and social woes for the masses. But corporatism, corporate and state favoritism differentially benefitting chosen industries and players within industries — and not fair and free competition — has been the real source of what Fink, Schwab, and their ilk decry.
Corporatism, otherwise known as “economic fascism,” involves the coordinated production and the running of society by a consortium of dominant interest groups. If anything, stakeholder capitalism is a form of corporatism. Furthermore, despite Fink’s assertion to the contrary, the corporatism he promotes exercises corporate power and relies on state sanctions to achieve a particular ideological and political agenda. That agenda is wokeness. Woke capitalism is thus more accurately called woke corporatism.
Unsurprisingly, stakeholder capitalism has been seen by some conservatives, and even by a few socialists, as a new approach for advancing socialism. Yet woke stakeholder capitalism does not advance state socialism as such. Rather, it tends toward corporate socialism. In extreme versions, it amounts to capitalism with Chinese characteristics — an authoritarian state ultimately directing the for-profit production of state-sanctioned corporate entities.
Corporate socialism has a long history, dating back to the end of the nineteenth century. I’ve written about this history in connection with the monopolistic and socialist ideals of one King Camp Gillette, the founder of the Gillette Razor Company. Gillette authored and funded the writing of several books to promote a corporation-based socialism. He argued that socialism is best established by the corporation. Incorporation, mergers, and acquisitions would continue until all production is finally subsumed under one “World Corporation,” with all “citizens” holding equal shares. While this is not exactly the vision of contemporary corporate socialists like Fink and Schwab, they are no less presumptuous or contemptuous of the free market, and they use the rhetoric of diversity, equity, inclusion as a cover for their economic fascism.
Likewise, contrary to “correct” opinion, it is not reactionary to oppose woke capitalism. Economic fascism, in whatever form, is authoritarian and totalitarian. And, as Xi Jinping acknowledged in a recent address to the World Economic Forum, it is not “egalitarian.” It vests economic and political power in the hands of corporate and state elites, and it uses coercion and state power to concentrate the control of wealth in their hands — however much they promise to redistribute it through “social justice.”
In addition to building parallel cultural, economic, and social structures, in the short term, woke corporatism can be challenged by divestment from ESG-abiding corporations and by opposition to the politicians who promote these corporations through legislative favoritism.
Michael Rectenwald served as a New York University professor for over a decade, operated TheAntiPCProf Twitter account, and has authored 11 books, such as "Thought Criminal," "Beyond Woke," and "Google Archipelago."
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