Are you tired of corporate boards from Coca-Cola to Disney to BlackRock sounding more like a college sociology department? These people are supposed to be wizened by the business bottom line, yet aren’t. The reason might lie in their backgrounds. These aren’t people who through grit and determination rose from hardscrabble to billionaire philanthropist showering libraries from one corner of America to another (think Carnegie). Overwhelmingly, their world is the world of the suits and social remoteness.
Take for example Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock investment management corporation. The guy was born to an English professor mother and shoe store owner father in Van Nuys, Ca. He went from high school right to UCLA, Kappa Beta Phi, to an MBA, on to managing other people’s money, and co-founder of the cash-cow behemoth investor BlackRock. And he’s a Democrat and a lefty, all 5’ 7” of him.
His is a world alien to anyone who would find personal fulfillment in Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs. It’s easy for a super-zip (zip code) groupie like Fink, isolated as he is, to be marinated in the cultural passions of his fellow insular grandees. Today, lefty groupthink is all the rage among the super-zips, and Fink is hip deep into ESG – environment, social, and governance. What’s that? It’s anti-capitalism for a capitalist, or a cover for how to maintain cred with the Che’ crowd in the faculty lounge.
ESG has it all for those peddling lefty bromides. Beyond the usual race hustling, it is drowning in climate-change central planning. One would think that central planning would be anathema to corporate suits. Not so with this crowd, for they have bought into the lifestyle totalitarianism of the war on fossil fuels and the teenage rants of nincompoops like Greta Thunberg and AOC. Besides, they’re rich enough to cushion any negative fallout to them personally. So, for Fink’s BlackRock, no more money to companies on Greta’s hitlist, meaning oil companies.
Here’s Fink in a long-winded piece of nonsense: “As stewards of our clients’ capital, we ask businesses to demonstrate how they’re going to deliver on their responsibility to shareholders, including through sound environmental, social, and governance practices and policies.” But he can’t speak for BlackRock’s shareholders since they were never polled for their views on their money being used to advance eco-totalitarianism.
Well, look out, Fink, because Sen. Dan Sullivan (R, Alaska) has written up the antidote for your high-handedness with other people’s money. Sullivan’s “Investor Democracy Is Expected Act” wouldn’t allow money managers like Fink to act like Napoleon with BlackRock’s $10 trillion investors’ purse in order to blackmail targeted businesses into their woke political crusades. The individual investor in BlackRock would have that power, not Fink. Defanging Fink, and others like him in the super-zips and its soiree circuit, would be a step in the right direction of healthy free markets . . . and sane gas prices.
But I’m under no illusion that it’ll pass under the current Pelosi/Schumer/Biden regime. However, the bill would bring to light a serious distortion in the relationship between investor and a business. People like Fink would be properly limited to the fiduciary responsibility of enhancing shareholder value, not shills for the lefty chattering classes, if Sullivan’s bill ever survives the Democrats’ gauntlet.
*Read about Sullivan’s bill here.
RogerG