Louisiana Hits BlackRock With Massive Multi-Million Dollar Divestment For ‘Blatantly Anti-Fossil Fuel Policies’

Louisiana State Treasurer John Schroder announced his state will divest funds from the multi-trillion dollar investment firm, BlackRock, due to environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies some claim boycott the oil, gas and coal industries.

“Your blatantly anti-fossil fuel policies would destroy Louisiana’s economy,” Schroder said in a letter sent Wednesday to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.

To avoid losing state money “to the detriment of our citizens,” the Louisiana Treasury will gradually divest funds from the financial firm, Schroder wrote. The Louisiana Treasury divested $560 million from BlackRock as of Wednesday.

“Once complete, this divestment will reflect $794 million no longer entangled in BlackRock money market funds, mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) holdings,” according to the letter.

The letter took direct aim at ESG, an investing practice that penalizes industries believed to be harming the environment, but ESG’s environmental considerations are often made at the expense of other fiduciary duties. Investment firms that use ESG investing practices often refer to “stakeholder capitalism,” as BlackRock does on its website.

“At BlackRock, sustainable investing spans a range of strategies that combine traditional investment approaches with ESG insights to seek to deliver both financial and sustainable outcomes,” the firm’s site states.

Will Held, Executive Director of Consumer’s Research, an organization opposed to ESG, praised the Louisiana state treasurer for divesting from BlackRock.

“As noted in his letter, BlackRock is using the people of Louisiana’s money to advance a destructive agenda that raises costs for consumers in the state and across the country,” Held told the Daily Caller. “The seeds of today’s energy crisis were planted by BlackRock and others in their reckless abandonment of their fiduciary duty to cozy up to radical, woke politicians.”

Derek Kreifels, CEO of the State Financial Officers Foundation, a group that works with state treasurers to enact policies they argue are more in line with American consumer interests, praised Schroder for joining other financial officers in penalizing financial firms which employ ESG investing.

https://dailycaller.com/2022/10/05/esg-louisiana-blackrock-divestment-fossil-fuel-economy-state-treasurer-schroder/

Nobody Wants Biden’s Boosters — But He Forked Over Billions To Pfizer And Moderna For Them Anyway

President Joe Biden burned more than $5 billion in taxpayer funds on new COVID-19 shots hardly anyone wants.

The White House made the decision earlier in 2022 — before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) even authorized the new, variant-specific bivalent COVID-19 boosters — to purchase more than $5 billion worth of them from Pfizer and Moderna. Now, more than a month after the shots became available, only about 3% of eligible Americans have gotten one.

There are roughly 275 million Americans aged 12 and older, the age group eligible for one or both of the new boosters. Fewer than 8 million have boosted themselves since Sep. 1, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This leaves over 160 million doses ordered by the Biden administration sitting on the sidelines, waiting for demand to meet supply.

Thirty-six million of the doses have been delivered to states so far, according to the CDC. During the initial vaccine rollout in the U.S., a number of doses went bad due to lack of demand or mismanagement in states, while others were donated to foreign countries when they weren’t being used in the U.S.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) did not respond to questions from the Daily Caller about whether or not the administration overestimated what the demand would be for the shots. HHS also didn’t address how long the doses could last before expiring, and at what point doses would have to be discarded or donated to other countries if left unused.

Pfizer and Moderna’s bivalent booster doses were designed to target newly-emerged COVID-19 variants, namely the Omicron variant, better than the original vaccines are able to. Public health officials have stressed the importance of getting as many booster doses into Americans’ arms as possible before the winter, when surges in coronavirus cases and deaths typically occur — both before and after vaccines were available.

Biden’s health team fast-tracked the authorization and distribution of the vaccines for this very reason. The $5 billion order for shots was placed before the FDA authorized the jabs, while the agency completed that process without human trials for the new boosters — only rodent trials. The FDA claimed that the shots were similar enough to the initial formulations, which the agency ruled to be safe and effective in human trials. Thus it did not require new human trials before authorization.

A lack of demand for the new boosters could have been predicted based on recent trends in vaccination rates. An overwhelming majority of Americans got their first COVID-19 shot — more than 90% of adults got the first dose, according to the CDC. But the country’s vaccination rate plummeted as more doses were rolled out.

https://dailycaller.com/2022/10/05/joe-biden-covid-omicron-bivalent-booster-coronavirus-pfizer-moderna/

LinkedIn Billionaire Reid Hoffman’s Dark Money Behind Clandestine ‘Good Information Foundation’; Group Accused of Election Meddling

Two weeks ago, attorney and legal commentator Preston Moore posted a video saying he was offered (but did not accept) hundreds of dollars from a group to attack Donald Trump and “Trump Republicans.” The group that solicited Moore is called the “Good Information Foundation,” and presumably, if Moore is telling the truth, this is common practice for them.

Moore told Breitbart News, “They wanted me to use fear to manipulate people into voting blue, or into voting not Trump… And when they’re giving examples of the things they wanted me to say — don’t say ‘Trump and his allies,’ say ‘Trump Republicans’ — it became really clear that this was about putting out information… to impact midterms.”

“To impact midterms.”

It’s that brazen, apparently.

This appears to be a violation of federal law that prohibits 501(c)(3) organizations from “directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign.” This case seems like such blatant abuse of our tax code, I was personally compelled to file a complaint with the IRS about the group.

The Good Information Foundation is, according to its website, the non-profit arm of Good Information Inc., which describes itself as “a public benefit corporation committed to restoring social trust and strengthening democracy by investing in solutions that counter disinformation and increase the flow of good information online.”

It is not readily apparent from their website who is running the organization; they do not list board members, leadership, or key staff. Tom Fitton told me on our radio show, Breitbart News Daily, that the shadowy nature of this non-profit is not illegal, but it is “murky” and “unusual.” What’s more, they were founded recently so there is minimal publicly available financial information.

What has been reported, however, is that Good Information Inc., is not only backed by far-left billionaire activist George Soros, but also LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

Hoffman is a 55-year-old billionaire who helped launch PayPal before co-founding LinkedIn in 2002.

He has since fashioned himself into a Democratic mega-donor, though his activities are largely hidden from public view. He is one of the key framers of the modern political infrastructure that is contouring the current American political landscape by allowing the super-wealthy to use nonprofits and lenient disclosure laws to make large political contributions in relative obscurity. Tactically, he embraces both the disingenuous and the censorious – as well as the Chinese Communist Party. He’s one part Soros, one part Michael Bloomberg, and one part Laurene Powell Jobs.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/10/04/marlow-linkedin-billionaire-reid-hoffmans-dark-money-behind-clandestine-good-information-foundation-group-accused-of-election-meddling/

National Guard Gives Service Members COVID-19 Vaccine Instead Of Influenza Shot

The National Guard administered the COVID-19 vaccine to multiple service members who were lined up for the influenza vaccine, including a member who objected to the COVID-19 vaccine on religious grounds, according to officials and one of the members.

The incident took place in late 2021.

During a vaccination clinic where both flu and COVID-19 vaccines were being administered, “three service members were accidently given a COVID vaccine,” Maj. Carl Lamb, a spokesman for the Maine National Guard, told The Epoch Times in an email.

Mathew Bouchard, who is no longer with the Guard, has identified himself as one of the members.

Bouchard said he was ordered to receive an annual flu vaccine and went to the clinic to get that vaccine. He verified his name, date of birth, and part of his social security number, and told officials at the clinic he was there for the flu vaccine. But he was injected with a dose of a messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccine, officials told him.

“‘You know how you went in for the flu shot? Well, that wasn’t a flu shot. That was a COVID-19 vaccine,'” Bouchard told The Epoch Times, recounting the meeting with superiors.

“I think, in my mind, at that point, it was like, I completely didn’t know if I trusted any people in the military,” he added.

Religious Objections

Each branch of the military ordered members to get vaccinated, after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a Biden appointee, in August of 2021 directed them to do so.

Under federal law, medical and religious exemptions can be sought. The military has been using form letters with striking similarities to deny many religious exemption requests, federal judges have found, and several branches are blocked from taking punitive action against religious objectors.

Bouchard says he was pursuing a religious exemption due to his Christian faith when he was injected with a vaccine against his will. At the time, he only had several months left before his enlistment was over.

Bouchard believes the vaccine mixup was intentional, noting how the military has aggressively tried to pressure members to get vaccinated. The purpose would be to get members to re-enlist, he thinks.

“I think what they did was they thought soldiers who don’t want it and they accidentally get it are just going to come around and continue their service. So I feel like that was a way to vaccinate people,” Bouchard said.

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/national-guard-gives-service-members-covid-19-vaccine-instead-influenza-shot