When Big Money Serves ‘Woke’ Government

A sign for BlackRock Inc. hangs above the company's building in New York on July 16, 2018. Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Commentary

One of the biggest laughs in the 1977 Tony-winning Broadway musical Annie was when the President and Mrs. Roosevelt accept tycoon Daddy Warbucks’s invitation to Christmas Eve dinner, and Warbucks, having not thought they would, barks, “Call Al Smith and find out what Democrats eat.”

While it’s true that during the Great Depression the likes of the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts would not have known what to serve then-New York Gov. Al Smith, or anyone else from the Lower East Side, Annie got it wrong: the patrician FDR was partial to filet mignon, lobster, and caviar before arriving in the White House and making a show of preferring working-class fare slathered with ketchup.

Today, sadly, too many of the rich are all too familiar with the tastes of today’s Democrats, and they’re happy to feed and fund and further the agenda of the far left. Too many are far more interested in “equity” than in entrepreneurship—the latter the key to providing our society’s have-nots with opportunities to attain productive, lasting jobs, or even join the ranks of the rich by offering good jobs to others. And all too often these ultra-rich are doing it not with their own but with taxpayers’ money.

During the pandemic, for example, when the U.S. Federal Reserve invested heavily in corporate debt in unprecedented fashion, from whom in the private sector do you think our central bank turned to for advice? The largest asset manager in the world and perhaps the most powerful “woke” entity in the global financial firmament: BlackRock.

Panicky investors kept a keen eye on which exchange-traded funds and other debt-heavy instruments the Fed favored during the crisis, and they found BlackRock’s own funds high on the list. And so, naturally, they grabbed onto the central bank’s coattails and invested in them themselves. BlackRock got even bigger as a result, pulling in tens of billions of dollars more to oversee than in the previous year. The firm now has more than $10 trillion in assets under management—more than twice Germany’s annual gross domestic product (GDP).

“It’s not that complicated, really. The Fed says, ‘We’re buying this.’ OK, then, I’m going to buy it too,” Michael Rosen, chief investment officer of the $38 billion-strong New York-based Angeles Investments, told The Wall Street Journal a few months after the Fed’s actions began in 2020. No wonder BlackRock largely waived its consulting fees for its services to the Fed.

One might imagine that such oceans of cash would satisfy anyone. Hardly. Not that the world has not known saintly tycoons, and as George Gilder eloquently reminded us 40 years ago in his masterful Wealth and Poverty, “Capitalism begins with giving. Not through greed, avarice, or even self-love can one expect the rewards of commerce but from a spirit closely akin to altruism, a regard for the needs of others ... Not taking and consuming but giving, risking, and creating are the characteristic roles of the capitalist.”

In the case of BlackRock, however, greed became so drowned by lucre it sought other satiation on new shores, like manipulating others, especially the fellow rich, those who employ the non-rich. In a chillingly oligarchic remark in 2017, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said, “Behaviors are gonna have to change … You have to force behaviors, and at BlackRock we are forcing behaviors.”

BlackRock Bullies for the ‘Woke’ Agenda

Money doesn’t just talk, as the saying goes, it coaxes and seduces, and in BlackRock’s case, it bullies and blackmails. Fink, in 2019, joined the board of the Davos World Economic Forum, and as strategic risk consultant F. William Engdahl of the Center for Research on Globalization warns, BlackRock has, since 2018, targeted companies for either investment or shunning based on their ESG (environmental, social, and governance) credentials. In other words, the Democratic Party’s woke agenda.

Companies and equity investment funds seeking capital from big investor entities are supposed to be worried about balance sheets, profits, and overall financial performance; now they have to worry if they’re politically correct enough on race and climate. Engdahl points out that BlackRock awards a firm “positive ratings for the seriousness of its hiring gender-diverse management and employees” or when it embraces green energy. And the criteria can “include anything from corporate donations to Black Lives Matter to supporting UN agencies such as the World Health Organization.” He quips, “Even Carl Icahn, a ruthless Wall Street asset stripper, once called BlackRock ‘an extremely dangerous company… I used to say, you know, the Mafia has a better code of ethics than you guys.’”

The firm invests in Chinese military companies and helps Beijing sustain its totalitarian power over the Chinese people. It influences who informs you and who governs you; BlackRock for years has held one of the largest shares of ownership in The New York Times. Brian Deese, director of President Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, was brought into the administration straight from BlackRock, where, as “Global Head of Sustainable Investing,” his salary and perks were in the millions. Nigerian-born Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, the current deputy secretary of the Treasury, was chief of staff to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink from 2017 to 2019. Michael Pyle, senior economic adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, was global chief investment strategist at BlackRock.

The Heartland Institute’s David Hoyt warns that “BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Capital are the top three shareholders in a startlingly large number of the world’s largest and most influential companies. They all sing from the same dark hymnal on governance, which is how they have cartelized private global enterprise to promote their left-wing agenda.”

And yet conservative Republicans are shy to recognize and combat this unholy alliance of private money and public power. “What the radical Left could not achieve by force with the typical levers of government power, it is now poised to accomplish with nominally public–private enterprise partnerships. This new strategy has confused the conservative and libertarian response,” Hoyt believes.

People who know how to make massive amounts of money can go for cheeseburgers or Chateaubriand. They can be driven by “a regard for the needs of others,” as Gilder describes, or by a lust for political and social power. Success as a capitalist should not shield anyone who promotes the Democratic Party’s agenda of insanity and assault on freedom.