When government bureaucracies need to legally force “public confidence” in themselves over patient health, we know the health system is already so decrepit, dishonorable and corrupted no one should have any confidence in it at all.
So if a doctor raises any concerns about government health policy they will be undermining “confidence”?
TO: The Honourable the Speaker and Members of the Legislative Assembly of Queensland
Queensland citizens draws to the attention of the House the threat of Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2022 (Reference No. 2) is that it seeks to make “public confidence in health services” as the paramount principle of all our healthcare. This is a radical departure from the previously well-established and respected principle of patient-centred care. The RACGP and AMA have expressed concerns over this refocusing of healthcare, and professional indemnity insurance companies like MIGA and the Insurance Council of Australia have agreed that the term ‘public confidence’ lacks a clear definition and scope and have raised concerns about how courts and tribunals would interpret the term. The Queensland People argues strongly that the passing of this legislation will end the practice of medicine as we know it and will result in the death of informed consent, medical ethics, and the very lives of many Queenslanders and Australians.
Your petitioners, therefore, request the House to vote against the bill lest all our medical freedoms are eroded and unimaginable patient harm occurs to you or your loved ones.
The only “public confidence” that is worth anything is that which is earned and given freely. h/t another Ian
The Queensland government will allow unvaccinated teachers to return to work, but at a lower pay rate for 18 weeks. It has also sent them nasty letters to make sure they feel intimidated. There are only so many words for vindictive, spiteful tyrants.
Do the vaccinated realize that this will bite them soon too? Once bureaucrats can inflict penalties retrospectively, capriciously and with no possible reasoning (they don’t even try) — then anyone can be the next victim.
What’s happening to the unvaxxed Queensland teachers is the opening salvo in a Beijing-style ‘social credit’ system in Australia.
The govt is pointlessly persecuting a minority to enforce conformity. https://t.co/y03tR08oGI
Meanwhile, the CDC says you can’t have the new omicron vaccine unless you take the old out-of-date vaccine first
Not that anyone is hankering to try another round of medical experiments, but in what immunological world does that make sense… The old vaccines prime immune systems to respond to a virus that hasn’t been seen for 18 months. Using an out-of-date vaccine increases the risk of Original Antigenic Sin and Antibody Dependent Enhancement where our bodies make antibodies that aren’t as effective or which help the virus infect our cells. It’s playing with immunological fire.
It’s so stupid it’s getting spooky. Here’s the CDC:
Newly updated Covid booster shots designed to target omicron’s BA.5 subvariant should be available within in the next three weeks. That begs an important question: Who’s going to be eligible to get them?
The short answer: anyone ages 12 and up who has completed a primary vaccination series, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spokesperson tells CNBC Make It. It’s unlikely to matter whether you’ve received any other booster doses or not before, the spokesperson says — but if you’re unvaccinated, you won’t be eligible for the updated formula until you complete a primary series with the existing Covid vaccines.
It’s like their main aim is to clear the superseded floor stock, or make more sales for Mr Pfizer, not your health.
Or are they really afraid there are still people around who can act as a control group?
The rise of the tech giant billionaires, the crime, corruption, wokery, war, inflation, climate witchcraft, and the Big-Pharma reckless experiment — is all made possible by the same thing, and it’s been coming for fifty years.
Everyone under 40 has lived their entire lives in the fairy-land-of-plenty borrowed from the future. But all bubbles come to an end.
The rot started with a corrupted currency, and now infects every corner of the world — weakening markets and minds and concentrating power obscenely. When our medium of exchange is undisciplined, everything else is too. There is injustice built right in to Fake IOU’s made from thin air — especially when some can borrow big and early and at low cost, while others have to wait to earn them slowly an hour at a time. In the inflation race, speed is everything. They devalue the incentives that drive people to make things better, faster, and stronger. It punishes the prudent hardworking savers, and feeds speculative greed.
This is what BlackRock’s influence came from, and Gates, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and the WEF. All of them rode the wave of easy money and easy loans. Through predatory purchases on credit, they were able to buy out competitors or grind them down. What’s left are mega-glomerates of media, pharmaceuticals, and a sea of dark influence so vast that BlackRock commands more money than the GDP of every country bar China and the US, and Bill and Melinda Gates are the second largest “nation” funding the World Health Organization. The New Oligarchs speak with forked tongues, then crush the people who complain.
This is a graph of the US “money base” — the supply of US dollars created by the US Federal Reserve since 1960. Those base dollars are then amplified by the commercial banking system, by a factor of ten or twenty. We could label the left axis “The Global Crazy Index” and it would look just the same. Funny money feeds crazy behaviour.
The supply of money just keeps growing. We’ve been leading up to this corruption crisis since 1971 | St Louis Fed
The galactic bubbles in wokery, inflation, crime, and corruption need money to levitate above reality, so it’s no surprise that the more free money there is, the more crazy the world gets. Governments only get absurdly obese when they get access to new cream-puff-dollars created out of thin air. If western governments were stuck with just taxing the voters they wouldn’t get away with bloated welfare and bloated bureaucrats. The current everything-bubble started in 1982, after the previous inflation was wrung out of the US economy. But the signs of trouble were there in the seventies.
To fight this dark bubble, I could use your help. Thank you.
________________________________________________
1971 was the tipping point where all the trends bent
Many of these graphs don’t include the last year, so things may be even worse than they look in the rear view mirror…
This fall of Rome type stuff.
The USA was intrinsically wealthier until the end of the 1950s. Then its gold was quietly frittered away for $36 an ounce. By the late 1960s, France and others realized the fixed price of gold was absurdly low and called the bluff, asking for delivery of the gold instead of the dollar. At that point the game was up, and it all came to a crunching end in 1971. The US just didn’t have enough gold left, and President Nixon suspended the fixed price deal, and the world was then on a purely paper currency. Starting in 1971, the US dollar — and every other official currency — was no longer backed by anything. Without the constraint of needing to buy more gold bars, the printers at the US Federal Reserve were free to unleash as many dollars as they could get away with. Free money — printed in paper and then with binary code in bank accounts began to blink into existence, and so did inflation.
US Gold holdings. The wealth of a nation.
Dollars are just another commodity, where supply and demand matter
Growth of money supply = inflation:
Inflation as measured by Campbells Soup.
To put things in proportion — this is The American Century. This is also a graph made in Feb 2020.
Federal Debt as a percentage of GDP
There was still inflation on the Gold Standard, but nothing like what followed:
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Income inequality goes hand in hand with inflation
The left rail indignantly against income inequality but apparently don’t have any idea what causes it. Inflation is the invisible thief that steals from the poor and gives to the rich. The elite Chosen Ones get fast access to new “free money” while the workers have to earn it at yesterday’s hourly wage rate. The social pain that arises from extreme income inequality is a direct consequence of Reserve Bank policies.
If only the Occupy crowd could figure it out.
…
The criminals followed the money:
Incarceration rate, long term trend.
Lo and verily the lawyers did too:
There is no free lunch and no free houses either
Printing fiat dollars didn’t print more houses, but it did make housing less affordable — as real productivity ground to a halt, and cushy luxuries and inefficiencies bled through the system. It now takes a much larger slice of household income to buy a house than it did in 1971. Houses are bigger, true, but blocks are smaller, and now it takes two incomes and years longer to pay it off.
…
Are those kids still at home? When housing and cost of living becomes unaffordable, where else are they going to go?
So much of our life’s track depends on the luck or lack thereof, of where we are born in the boom and bust cycle:
Percentage of young adults still living at home. Graph.
Prices back in 1971:
1971 Prices.
The power of single men like Larry Fink to control national energy policy with the bizarre aim of “changing the weather” could only happen in fantasy booms created by bubbles.
The reckless and corrupt thrive on the easy money wave. And the world’s reserve currency, the US dollar, has been undisciplined and corroding for decades. The free ride on easy borrowed money has fed the corrupt oligarchs, the hedge fund takeovers, the super multinational conglomerates, the tech giants, and the wars. It is as it always has been.
The question is not whether the bubble will collapse, but how much it will take with it in the process.
Blistering high prices flow through the interconnectors too.
The energy price cap in the UK is now predicted to reach the £6,552 in April. Pretty soon only the Royal family will be able to afford electricity. If this continues, inflation in the UK may hit 18% by January.
As Javier Blas says: Day-ahead electricity prices in Europe are eye-watering, with lots of countries setting record highs for today. Notable to see the Nordics close to €400 per MWh, and Germany at €600. Before 2020, anything above €75-100 was considered expensive
It doesn’t matter who has the wind turbines, and who has the coal or nuclear power, everyone connected to junk generators gets expensive electricity. Denmark has more “free” wind power than nearly anywhere in the world but they are still paying €600+.
Meanwhile the German Energy Minister has decided he really should close the last three nuclear plants. Apparently it would only save 4% of their total gas bills, he says, not the 15% they need — like turning down a jerry can of fuel because it won’t fill the whole tank. I guess he’s not the one having cold showers.
Imagine how different it would be if low carbon fuel sources could actually save the world?
All the countries around Germany are feeling burned:
Andreas Kluth, Bloomberg: The EU’s eastern members, from Poland to Romania and Slovakia, are especially annoyed. They spent decades urging Germany not to make itself dependent on Russian gas and vulnerable to Putin’s blackmail. The Germans either ignored them or smugly lectured them on Kremlinology, refusing to acknowledge any connection between their policies on Russia, gas and fission.
Let’s hope it’s just a cult, and not a plan:
What many foreigners don’t appreciate, however, is that the German controversy is less a policy debate than a religious war — not unlike the American debates about guns or abortion, say. Many Germans have spent their entire lives protesting against the splitting of atoms.
Meanwhile gas is setting new price records (again)
It sure has that historic-international-crisis feeling:
“‘The nervousness of the market appears to increase day by day as we edge closer to winter delivery, now just five weeks away, and no big positive news on the horizon,’ Auxilione said.”
“A spokesperson for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said the UK has ‘one of the most reliable and diverse energy systems in the world’.”
While limp conservative parties in Europe, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia paint themselves green and pick up the cross of Marxist ‘struggle’, DeSantis rests on the premise that fighting for traditional values is right – presently, historically, and for the future.
On stopping the Woke wave in schools:
If an eco-cult entered the classroom and began telling children that they were ‘all about to die in a fiery apocalypse!’ because their parents engage in a capitalist economy – persisting with their preaching until those children were literally in tears, gluing themselves to the street, and developing severe mental illnesses due to the terror – well, oh. Okay, bad example.
No matter how much the activist class complain, it is Ron DeSantis who receives standing ovations and the support of fed-up parents. His Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Bill cleverly acronymed to Stop WOKE has infuriated Marxists because it prevents them from telling children they are ‘victims’ or ‘oppressors’ based on their skin colour, or inherently ‘sexist’ because they are boys.
It outlaws teachers suggesting that people are:
‘Inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; that people are privileged or oppressed based on race, gender, or national origin; or that a person “bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” over actions committed in the past by members of the same race, gender, or national origin. The law defines such training as discrimination.’
For most things that kill us there is a clock like regularity with deaths in a province as big as Alberta. Year after year dementia kills about 2,000 people, for example. But then there was Covid-19 and a disease called Unknown Causes. Wow.
Unknown causes of death killed more people in Alberta than anything else did
Despite billions of dollars in spending, somehow modern medicine is seven times less likely to know what someone died of than it was two years ago. Does anything else capture just how far medicine has advanced during the pandemic (all the way back to 1910?).
That’s a pretty significant signal there in 2021. In the world we thought we lived in, governments would have arranged a SWAT team of medicos to investigate, the opposition would be baying from the side and the media would be all over it. And the rollout of new experimental medical interventions would be halted immediately.
Sometimes things are so crazy-strange that satire makes more sense. Here’s the excellent JP Sears:
““Good Evening. People are dropping like flies from a mysterious killer called ‘unknown case of death.’ So tonight we’re bringing you a special report on this unknown case of death killer so we can steer your thinking in the right direction. “
h/t ColA and David Maddison, Scott of the Pacific.
*Unknown deaths in 2018 were not listed as “unknown”. There was a (blank) category of 550 deaths which I presumed was “unknown” but which may or may not apply. Prior years didn’t even have a “blank”.
There’s been a transformation in the last 6 years — the polarization between attitudes of young men and women is expanding like a bubble.
The new Gallup results suggesting the suddenly as many as 44% of young women identify as liberal but only 25% of young men do. It’s a gaping 19% maw. Eric Kaufman shows that its not because more women are going to university now, but mostly because more young women are Woke. The most important predictive factor in a thirteenfold (wow) kind of way, was simply whether they opposed controversial speakers on topics like BLM, abortion and LGBTQ-etc. In other words, it’s expanding like a designer fashion trend. And one so weak it has to hide the competition. It’s not a generational shift when half the generation is avoiding it. That’s good news. Bubbles will pop.
Wokeness targets women — offering them victimhood-candy and someone to blame, but almost always at the expense of men. Not surprisingly men are not turning up for their lecture on toxic masculinity. Think Gillette. Young men still want to impress young women, and being “Woke” can get the girl, but even that’s not enough to adopt the ideology.
Spread the word. Once the news gets out that political correctness is a girlie thing, and strong men stand against it, the pendulum will swing.
Recently, the centrist pundit Matthew Yglesias tweeted the historic time series of Gallup surveys on political ideology among Americans aged 18 to 29 (shown below).
The graphs demonstrate a growing ideological gap between the sexes, with a rapid increase in the share of “liberals” among women but not men. As polarisation deepens, fewer young people are calling themselves centrist or “don’t know” and picking an ideology, but only among women are they disproportionately moving Left.
….
By 2016, a record 42% of women identified as liberal, versus 28% for men. I lack access to the raw HERI data for subsequent years but the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) surveys of 55,000 undergraduates in the top 150 colleges in 2020 and 2021 show that 61% of women lean liberal compared to 44% of men, a whopping 17-point gender gap.
…what underlies the astounding gender divergence in youth attitudes? Essentially, it appears to stem from a wokeness divide. In the FIRE survey, when you control for opposition to allowing controversial speakers (on BLM, abortion and trans rights) on campus, the statistical effect of gender on ideology collapses thirteenfold in statistical power.
Political Correctness is for girls:
Kaufman points at a 2020 survey which shows how strong the effect is in teenage girls and women up to age 25.
Once young women settle down with a man, the fashions change.
Power and gas prices in Germany more than doubled in just two months, with year-ahead electricity at a blazing 570 Euro per megawatt-hour. Two years ago, it was 40 euros. It’s summer but electric heaters sales are already up 1000 percent and online searches for Firewood are running hot. In the UK — householders are facing bills in the order of £5000 a year — (like $10,000, after tax) people are described as being in “pre-panic mode” already. Some are starting to turn off freezers, giving up toast and showering every second day. Shops and Pubs are closing, consumer confidence is at an all time record low, the most depressed in the last 48 years consumer confidence has been measured for.
This week’s prices are “unbelievable,” analysts at Energi Danmark wrote in a note. “The rally on the gas and coal market and the very high spot prices we see this week have given the already elevated market further momentum.”
German year-ahead power, a benchmark for Europe, is on a nine-day rising streak. The contract rose 6.1% to a record 570 euros ($573) per megawatt-hour, with French futures jumping as much as 2.8% to 720 euros. Europe year-ahead coal futures hit a record $311.50 a ton, while carbon-emission permits traded at all-time highs.
For obvious reasons, Germans are worried about winter already:
Already the media are reporting that electric heaters are flying off the store shelves at an unprecedented rate – in the summertime! For example, online daily The Hamburger Abendblatt here reports: “Electric heater online retailers and DIY stores report explosion in demand – increases of up to 1000 percent.”
By Todd Gillespie, Stefan Nicola, and Monica Raymunt, Bloomberg
“Energy inflation is way more dramatic here than elsewhere,” said Ralf Stoffels, chief executive officer of BIW Isolierstoffe GmbH, a maker of silicone parts for the auto, aerospace and appliance industries. “I fear a gradual de-industrialization of the German economy.” …there’s evidence that Germany’s industrial position is slipping. In the first six months of this year, the volume of chemical imports rose by about 27% from the same period last year, according to government data analyzed by consultant Oxford Economics. Simultaneously, chemical production fell, with output in June down almost 8% from December.
People in Cornwall have been turning off their freezers, to the alarm of health officials warning of food poisoning. In Newcastle, food charities have been flooded with requests for non-perishable items that don’t require turning on the stove.
And in London at my house, the hot water has been off for the past month with showering scheduled for immediately after a sweat-inducing run in the park. A neighbour has given up toast and community groups advise people to vacuum the backs of their fridges to ensure they work as efficiently as possible and to shower every second day.
A pre-panic mode has struck households across Britain as a cost-of-living crisis approaches uncharted territory.
Easy to see why people might be jittery at these prices. How many houses will burn down when people cook by candlelight?
It’s a bad moment in Civilization but it’s a great day in parody and satire
I wish we all could leave California now
The Wikipedia page “California Exodus“shows that in the last decade there has been a net loss of 1.2 million people domestically. That’s from a state with about 39m people.
‘Flash Mob’ Looters Ransack Convenient Store after Street Takeover
On August 15 around 12:40am a street takeover initiated at Figueroa and El Segundo. The spectators then formed a ‘flash mob’ of looters and rushed a nearby 7-Eleven.
By a pure dollar reckoning, BlackRock is the third largest “foreign entity” in the world, after the USA and China, but its core business, its reason for existing is a contradiction: it claims to be an asset manager but acts like a political power. With neither citizens, land nor an army, it’s a kind of toxic financial bubble on a roll — part illusion, but still swallowing economies, minds and electricity grids.
BlackRock is supposedly investing funds on behalf of its customers while using those same funds to promote Woke political agendas that its management may like, but that its own customers may disagree with. It’s a totalitarian force that consumes democratic choices by force of money. Finally some state legislators are calling out the contradiction. Does BlackRock serve its customers or “the management of BlackRock”?
BlackRock is enormous, but it’s not untouchable, and if retirees and State pension plans pulled their money and filed writs for breaches of law, the activist-agency could vanish overnight. BlackRock has $10 trillion in assets to wield as an activist hammer, but those assets mostly belong to other people. BlackRock can only keep weaponizing that money as long the the other people let them. Underneath that big financial hammer is a $152 billion dollars in total assets belonging to BlackRock, and that’s shrunk from $240 billion dollars worth back in 2014.
Send this to your elected representative, your retirement fund and ask about their own “Fiduciary Duty” and “Duty of Care”.
Pay attention to your retirement funds. Money left unattended may be used against you…
Time to boycott the boycotters
Leading the way, West Virginia has announced last month that it will not do business with any firms that boycott the fossil fuels industry — which means Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and BlackRock, Wells Fargo, and Morgan Stanley. These companies are now ineligible for state banking contracts worth about $18 billion a year. Brilliant.
“At the end of the day, all we want is for banks to act like banks,” [Treasurer Riley Moore] told the Washington Free Beacon, adding it would be hard for the state to continue functioning without the coal industry.
In June, Moore gave the firms 30 days to provide the Mountain State’s treasury with proof they supported the coal, oil, and natural gas industries. “I simply cannot stand by and allow financial institutions working against West Virginia’s critical industries to profit off the very funds their policies attempt to diminish,” Moore said.
Billions of dollars of US State Pension funds are wrapped up with BlackRock. They don’t have to be.
This is round two of an exchange between the State AG’s and BlackRock. Here the state AG’s write to Mr Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, Inc. on August 4th, 2022 in reply to his letter claiming BlackRock is neutral, and just engaged in climate dialogue.
Based on the facts currently available to us, BlackRock appears to use the hard-earned money of our states’ citizens to circumvent the best possible return on investment, as well as their vote. BlackRock’s past public commitments indicate that it has used citizens’ assets to pressure companies to comply with international agreements such as the Paris Agreement that force the phase-out of fossil fuels, increase energy prices, drive inflation, and weaken the national security of the United States. These agreements have never been ratified by the United States Senate. The Senators elected by the citizens of this country determine which international agreements have the force of law, not BlackRock.
There are six key points (as translated by me, with a few quotes):
1. Neutrality –– BlackRock claims to be neutral on energy generation yet actively campaigns to accelerate “Net Zero”. They held 2,300 meetings with companies on climate, and took action against 53 companies with another 191 put “on watch”. The AG’s warn that BlackRocks agenda would covertly convert states core index portfolios into “ESG Funds”.
“Rather than being a spectator betting on the game, BlackRock appears to have put on a quarterback jersey and actively taken the field.”
2. Dialogue — BlackRock claims it is only talking to climate advocacy organizations “on sustainability issues important to our clients.” But under their state laws, the AG’s, who are clients of BlackRock, remind BlackRock that the only desired dialogue on energy transitions would be on “how to maximize financial returns”. Saying the unthinkable, they remind BlackRock that that sort of discussion would “include the opportunistic purchasing of fossil fuel assets discarded by companies seeking to meet net zero commitments.” Naturally, the climate advocacy groups don’t talk about that. Instead Climate Action 100+ and GFANZ discuss how to ““alter the planet’s climate trajectory.”
3. Duty of Loyalty — Either BlackRock is working to maximize state pension funds or it isn’t – no mixed motives are allowed. Taking action on climate change above and beyond legal requirements is a rampant violation of this duty:
BlackRock’s commitment to the financial return of state pensions should be undivided. Many of our laws state that a fiduciary must “discharge [their] duties solely in the interest of the participants and beneficiaries . . . for the exclusive purposes of . . . providing benefits to participants and their beneficiaries; and . . . defraying reasonable expenses of administering the system.” The stated reasons for your actions around promoting net zero, the Paris Agreement, or taking action on climate change indicate rampant violations of this duty, otherwise known as acting with “mixed motives.” As one commentator has put it: “Acting with mixed motives triggers an irrebuttable presumption of wrongdoing, full stop.” Whether mixed motives arise from a desire to save the world or attract investment from European or left-leaning pension funds, is ultimately irrelevant to the legal violation. Investors have wide latitude over their own money, but our state pensions must be invested only to earn a financial return.
4. Duty of Care — What if BlackRock are betting the wrong way with all that money? BlackRock assume that the “energy transition” is a done deal when it is falling over in so many places and many of BlackRock’s own predictions were flat out wrong. On May 24th BlackRock said that the Russian invasion would accelerate investments in renewables in Europe where “energy security goals are aligned with decarbonization”. Yet within a month of that, Germany was restarting coal plants. Meanwhile BlackRock voted to penalize the Board of Directors of Fortum for investing in coal, which would have been the right financial call. Given this incompetence, the State Attorney Generals wonder if BlackRock can predict worldwide energy demand decades in advance? Don’t we all?
If asset managers have committed to push portfolio companies to attain net zero, how is the choice of approaching the “energy transition” left to the client? Even if BlackRock allows clients to vote their shares, BlackRock has pressured public companies long before any vote occurs. It appears that all clients buying BlackRock funds are forced to support ESG whether they like it or not. These actions raise more questions.
BlackRock is betting on the Green line…
The diagram nearby, taken from a BlackRock report, shows that governments are neither implementing nor pledging policies that would achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Would a prudent fiduciary bet everything on the green line?
Perhaps the trajectory for net zero will change. Perhaps a U.S. president with 40% approval ratings will build enduring majorities in Congress with a coalition that supports destroying the American energy sector and, in turn, perpetuating high energy prices, low economic growth, and inflation. Perhaps leftist Democrats will attain majorities sufficient to enact the Paris Agreement, impose a carbon tax, hold the presidency for decades, and subsidize green products until a “thousand Solyndras bloom.” Perhaps the world will ignore aggression by Russia and China to stay on track with emissions targets. Perhaps the U.S. will cheerfully shovel $8 trillion into China by 2030 for green investments, which is the amount BlackRock’s public documents state China needs to keep on track for net zero 2050.
5. Antitrust –– BlackRock is a member of both Climate Action 100+ and GFANZ. These are both clubs which brag about how many trillions of investment funds they can coordinate to “transform the economy to Net Zero”. What looks like a cabal, acts like a cabal and stinks like a mafia stitch up?
Group boycotts, restraining trade, or concerted refusals to deal, “clearly run afoul of” Section 1 of the Sherman Act. Section 1 prohibits “[e]very . . . combination . . . , or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce.”
BlackRock’s actions appear to intentionally restrain and harm the competitiveness of the energy markets. Disturbingly, a survey last year from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas asked: “Which of the following is the primary reason that publicly traded oil producers are restraining growth despite high oil prices?” Sixty percent of respondents referenced a form of “investor pressure.”
6. Energy Boycotts — Many US states now prohibit boycotts of energy companies. BlackRock says it doesn’t but it also touts its ability to penalize directors by voting them out if they don’t reduce their carbon intensity. Given the price of coal, and Europe’s sudden desire to use it, this appears to be directly contrary to the financial interests of the energy company, and BlackRocks clients too.
The key words are fiduciary duty and antitrust
At the core of the pushback is the idea that the global guardian of citizens funds is supposed to be investing their capital for the best return possible. It’s not supposed to be using their money to pursue Woke, activist agenda’s or punish companies according to the personal whims or profits of the management team.
Spread the word.
h/t to Marcel, Old Ozzie, thanks for extra tips from MP, aspnaz, joseph, David Maddison, beowulf. So much more to come.
Some nice Banker people have turned up to give us the batteries we need to save the world. What could possibly go wrong?
The Leviathan BlackRock will soon spend a billion dollars on big batteries in Australia. It is the largest asset manager in the world — with some $10 Trillion in assets to direct. To put that kind of power in perspective, the entire GDP of Australia is about $1.4 Trillion, so if BlackRock chose to throw its weight around, to hypothetically, improve its chances of making a profit, it won’t need an army, it just needs to hint “nice business you have there”, and the path will presumably clear. There are only two countries on Earth with larger GDP’s — America and China.
If BlackRock was a country the Foreign Investment Review Board of Australia would need to pay attention to potential conflicts of interest. But as it is, BlackRock flies under that radar while it bullies other companies and governments to do things to “save the world” which also happen to make profits for BlackRock.
If say, the voters of Australia voted against Climate Action as electricity bills drew blood, it’s hard to imagine BlackRock wouldn’t be pulling strings to keep the government subsidy train pointed at its own tunnel. It would effectively be working against the interests of Australians. While all investors are supposed to work for their shareholders, most investors don’t wield the kind of power that’s larger than our GDP.
US Giant BlackRock to Invest $1 Billion Into Australian Battery Projects
Daniel Teng, The Epoch Times
U.S. investment giant BlackRock will invest $1 billion (US$701 million) into Australian battery projects after agreeing to acquire Melbourne-based Akaysha Energy.
Its largest project is the 1,600 megawatt Orana battery in Wellington, central-west New South Wales, which can provide around eight hours of energy storage.
Given that BlackRock is equivalent to a major foreign power, shouldn’t the government be asking harder questions before it opens the door to an entity that lobbies like a political activist, serves foreign investors, and shamelessly meddles in national policies?
The Energy debate in the most powerful nation on Earth is nothing more than stone age animism. Or perhaps it’s not that sophisticated. It’s just a kindergarten story.
The Democrats are the new Religious Caste. They have the hot-line to God, to Gaia, and luckily for Earth, at the eleventh hour they have managed to send a smoke-signal to Mother Earth to calm her down.
Nothing is too inane, too simplistic or too banal:
“How can they vote against The Planet? Mother Earth Gets Angry from Time to Time and this legislation will help us address all of that”. –– Nancy Pelosi
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