From The Center Square

By Bethany Blankley

US House committee investigating 60 companies over ESG policies

Blackrock Inc. is the latest to announce it has left a United Nations-backed Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), among several within one month and not soon after Donald Trump was elected president. It did so as it and roughly 60 companies are being investigated by Congress for allegedly colluding as a “woke ESG cartel” to “impose radical environmental, social, and governance goals on American companies.”

Last month, Goldman Sachs was the first to withdraw from the alliance, followed by Wells Fargo, The Center Square reported. Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan next announced their departure.

According to the “bank-led and UN-convened” alliance, global banks joined, pledging to align their lending, investment and capital markets activities with a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions target by 2050.

Major U.S. banks began leaving the alliance after President-elect Donald Trump vowed to increase domestic oil and natural gas production and pledged to go after “woke” companies.

They also announced their departure two years after 19 state attorneys general launched an investigation into them for alleged deceptive trade practices connected to ESG.

While the companies haven’t appeared to seem daunted by state investigations, Trump’s reelection appears to be a different matter.

“BlackRock has hung in there as long as it could, but the pressure has become too great, and the reputational and legal risks too high, just before Trump takes office. It won’t be the last financial organization to quit a net zero initiative,” Hortense Bioy, Morningstar Analytics director of sustainable investing research, told Bloomberg News.

Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar has expressed skepticism about companies claiming to withdraw from ESG commitments, noting there is often doublespeak in announcements, The Center Square reported. This includes statements made by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Blackrock.

Blackrock claims its “participation in NZAMi didn’t impact the way we managed client portfolios. Therefore, our departure doesn’t change the way we develop products and solutions for clients or how we manage their portfolios. … Our commitment to helping our clients achieve their investment goals remains unwavering,” Bloomberg reported.

Last month, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee announced it was investigating more than 60 US-based asset managers’ involvement in the alliance, including BlackRock, Inc., JP Morgan Asset Management, Rockefeller Asset Management, State Street Global Advisors, among others.

The committee also issued a report, “Climate Control: Exposing the Decarbonization Collusion in Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Investing,” saying it found “direct evidence of a ‘climate cartel’ consisting of left-wing activists and major financial institutions that collude to impose radical environmental, social, and governance goals on American companies.”

Under the Trump administration, the committee will continue to investigate if “existing civil and criminal penalties and current antitrust law enforcement efforts are sufficient to deter anticompetitive collusion to promote ESG-related goals in the investment industry.” It also maintains that the companies “must answer for their involvement in prioritizing woke investments over their own fiduciary duties.”

The committee sent letters to dozens of entities in 12 states and the District of Columbia requesting them to provide information by Jan. 10. The majority are located in New York, Massachusetts and California.

Suppose you want to glimpse the political future that the globalist movement seeks to impose on the Western world. In that case, you should pay attention to current developments in the European Union, particularly the European Council- the appointed body that administratively manages the EU. Most think the European Union is an alliance between independent Westphalian nation-states that have banded together to form a trade partnership sharing a common currency. This certainly was the original justification (or marketing) for this political structure. But not the current reality.

The fact is that the organizational, administrative and political structure of the EU has evolved to yield a privileged political caste, based in Brussels, Belgium, which exerts unilateral political and financial authority over the formerly autonomous member nation-states. Of course, this process has developed under the careful guidance and watchful hidden influence of the United States and NATO.

As currently structured, Western Europe under the EU is more akin to the federal structure of the United States, but with a weaker central constitution and body of law (routinely disregarded) and less autonomy for each member state. Yes, there is the election of Members of Parliament of the European Union by the citizens of each state, but those MEPs have little of no actual power. Power is concentrated entirely in the European Council’s central authority and its President, Ursula Von der Leyen- all of whom are appointed rather than elected. And, as recently covered by both Politico and Unherd, although the center-right populist movements of Europe, including France, Italy, Germany and other countries have made great gains in the recent EU parliamentary elections, their growing power was not sufficient to disrupt the reappointment of Ursula Von der Leyen as President of the EU.

Unsurprisingly, upon reappointment, Von der Leyen swiftly moved to consolidate power by controlling the appointments to the European Council, which is the structure that actually makes EU policy and has the power to override any local decisions by the formerly sovereign legislatures of member states. To the surprise of virtually no one paying attention to what has been happening in the EU.

Key references for further reading include the following:

Politico: From queen to empress: Inside Ursula von der Leyen’s power grab

After unveiling her new team, the European Commission president holds more influence than ever.

BRUSSELS — When Ursula von der Leyen unveiled her team for the next European Commission, she simultaneously silenced the doubters about who was really in charge in Brussels.

As she revealed the 26 commissioners and their roles to the public, one point was immediately clear: she would have unfettered control over European Union politics. In a matter of minutes, she introduced a big title with little responsibility for one of the most powerful countries in the European Union, she propped up her buddies, and she diluted powerful portfolios by dividing them among multiple people.

The power grab was complete.

“She will be even more in control of everything,” said one EU official who, like others quoted in this piece, was granted anonymity to speak freely. “Who thought that was even possible?”

It was the culmination of months of public and private strategy to remove the dissenting voices of her first term as European Commission president. From the first team, none of the naysayers remain. Big personalities such as France’s Thierry Breton and the Netherlands’ Frans Timmermans are now gone.

During her first term — in which she faced a global pandemic and a war on the EU’s doorstep — she developed a reputation for making unilateral decisions, overstepping her job description, cutting other EU leaders out of the decision-making, and speaking only to a handful of advisers. As a result, she gained the nickname Queen Ursula in Brussels.

The morning of von der Leyen’s announcement of her second top team, she refused to tell the European Parliament, her partners in the process of approving commissioners,  who she was assigning to which job. Instead, she left a meeting with the Parliament’s top leaders and went straight into a press conference in which she revealed all the details. She was later accused of “contempt” for the Parliament.

Hours before, she convinced the French she would give their commissioner nominee an exceptionally important job if they swapped out Breton. On Tuesday, as she revealed job descriptions, they realized they’d been bamboozled into a watered-down position.

“Anyone who thought that she could have changed her style, her will to keep tight control, was at the very least naive,” said an EU diplomat.

Unherd: Von der Leyen’s authoritarian plot

National democracies will be subordinate to her Commission

The European Union is about to enter what could prove to be the most ominous phase in its troubled history. In a few weeks, Ursula von der Leyen’s new European Commission will officially take office, at which point she will have almost unfettered control over the bloc’s politics.

When von der Leyen introduced the new Commission’s lineup and organizational structure last month, even the typically Brussels-friendly mainstream media was forced to admit that what she had pulled off was nothing short of a coup. By placing loyalists in strategic roles, marginalizing her critics, and establishing a complicated web of dependencies and overlapping duties that prevent any individual from gaining excessive influence, the Commission President has set the stage for an unprecedented supranational “power grab” that will further centralize authority in Brussels — specifically in the hands of von der Leyen herself.

She is busy transforming the Commission “from a collegial body into a presidential office”,  noted Alberto Alemanno, EU law professor at HEC Paris. But this is the culmination of a longstanding process. The Commission has been stealthily expanding its powers for a long time, evolving from technical body into full-blooded political actor, resulting in a major transfer of sovereignty from the national to the supranational level at the expense of democratic control and accountability. But this “Commissionisation” is now being taken to a whole new level.

Consider the bloc’s foreign policy, and its defence and security policy in particular. It has gone relatively unnoticed that von der Leyen has used the Ukraine crisis to push for an expansion of the Commission’s top-down executive powers, leading to a de facto  supranationalization of the EU’s foreign policy (despite the fact that the Commission has no formal competence over such matters), while ensuring the bloc’s alignment with (or, rather, subordination to) the US-Nato strategy.

“The Commission is evolving from technical body into full-blooded political actor.”

A signal aspect of this move has been the appointment to key defence and foreign policy roles of representatives from the Baltic States (total population: a bit more than 6 million), which have now been bumped up the political food chain because they share von der Leyen’s über-hawkish stance toward Russia. One particularly important figure is Andrius Kubilius, former Prime Minister of Lithuania, who, if confirmed, will take on the role of the EU’s first Commissioner for Defence. Kubilius, known for his close ties to US-funded NGOs and think tanks, will be responsible for the European defence industry and is expected to push for greater integration of military-industrial production. Furthermore, Kubilius served on the advisory board of the International Republican Institute and is a former member of the Atlantic Council’s EuroGrowth Initiative — two Atlanticist organizations whose primary objective is to promote US corporate and geopolitical interests around the world.

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For those Western nation citizens left pondering why they should care about the political machinations of Angela Merkle’s protege Ursula Von der Leyen, they should consider the broader context. The structure of the EU is basically a test bed for ‘New World Order” political structure being incrementally advanced for the (literally) unholy alliance of the Socialist United Nations with the Corporatist World Economic Forum, both of which are allied as the proudly self-proclaimed new global government structure.

Quoting from our book “PsyWar Enforcing the New World Order”:

By globally synchronizing the public health response across the United Nations member states, new powers were granted to the UN and its organizations at the cost of national sovereignty. These universally applied regulations and multilateral agreements have given birth to an enlarged, globalized administrative state. Although this power grab has percolated for many decades, the COVID crisis acted as an accelerant to synergize international agreements that advance the UN as a world government.

The United Nations has morphed into a leviathan. Its various agreements and goals seek to centrally dictate the world’s economy, migration, “reproductive health,” monetary systems, digital IDs, environment, agriculture, wages, climate modifications, one world health, and other related globalist programs. To be clear, these are the goals of an organization seeking a globalized command economy, not an organization focused on world peace, ending wars or human rights!

This UN aims to regulate every dimension of our personal and national lives. It is working to reduce and eliminate national sovereignty across the world, and thereby to decrease our diversity, our traditions, our religions and our national identities.

The UN has partnerships and strategic agreements with member nations, as well as other globalist organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, CEPI, The World Trade Organization, The European Union and the World Economic Forum, known as the WEF.

An Example of How the United Nations Operates

The WEF and the UN signed a strategic agreement and partnership in 2019. Remember that the WEF has a commitment to “stakeholder capitalism,” by which private-partnerships work to control governments. The WEF developed a plan in 2020 to use the COVID-crisis to reorganize global governance around social issues, including climate change—this plan was called the Great Reset.

The WEF is a trade organization representing the world’s largest corporations. It repeatedly exploits disruptive technologies to enhance economic growth opportunities for its corporate members. The WEF is specifically designed to advance the economic power of its global elite members, otherwise known as the “billionaire class.”

As the WEF feeds money into the United Nations through their 2019 strategic agreement, who is managing the conflicts of interests that come with this partnership? Where is the transparency?

The UN has fourteen specialized organizations under its leadership, all involved in global governance, including the World Health Organization or WHO.

None of these organizations is related to the scope of the original UN charter, which was focused on ending wars, promoting world peace, and protecting human rights. The UN had been quietly building power for years prior to the pandemic through various agreements and treaties.

For instance, the “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” is a recent example of such an agreement.

Agenda 2030 has seventeen goals and 169 targets, which vary widely in scope and topic, but almost all of these goals directly affect world governance. Here are just a few examples from the Agenda 2030 treaty. Is this what the United Nations should be concerned with, or are these issues more properly addressed by the policies of sovereign nations?

‘We are determined to protect the planet from degradation, including through sustainable consumption and production, sustainably managing its natural resources and taking urgent action on climate change.

Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men.

Eliminate discriminatory laws, policies and practices.

Adopt policies, especially fiscal, wage and social protection policies, and progressively achieve greater equality.

Facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people.

By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.

This is an Agenda of unprecedented scope and significance. It is accepted by all countries and is applicable to all . . .”

Agenda 2030 is essentially a totalitarian socialist manifesto. This United Nations Treaty contains many more forceful statements regarding the reduction of national rights. The UN has signed strategic agreements with the largest organizations, corporations, and world powers to fulfill its utopian vision for the world.

This is a new world order—with unelected officials in control. That means that we all will be ruled by a nondemocratic UN administrative bureaucracy. This is a form of inverse totalitarianism. A world order based on a command economy; one that is at its core both socialist and totalitarian.

Now, these goals and targets may be fine for any single nation to undertake but this is a restructuring of the United Nations beyond its charter.

Early in the pandemic, the UN—through its surrogate the WHO, declared that a global vaccine passport was needed, and provided extensive guidance to member nations to standardize vaccine passports worldwide. In response, the leaders of the G20 issued a declaration in 2022 supporting development of a global standard of vaccination for international travel and the establishment of “global digital health networks” to be built on existing digital COVID-19 vaccine passports.

In June 2023, a new initiative between the EU and the WHO for strategic cooperation on global health issues was announced. This agreement seeks to “bolster a robust multilateral system with the World Health Organization at its core, powered by a strong European Union.”

The pandemic has allowed world leaders to coalesce global administrative power under the guise of public health through the administrative bureaucracy of the UN. Public health has been weaponized to gain control of passports, travel, banking, the environment and the international economy. This is a gross violation of the individual’s right to privacy, national sovereignty and the UN charter.

It is just a matter of time before these vaccine passports will be coupled with central bank digital currencies. Then, the passports can be used to deny the unvaccinated or other political dissenters access to travel and use of their own money.

Once international passports, central bank digital currencies, command economy aspects of the UN’s Agenda 2030, and the WHO amendments to the IHRs are implemented, the groundwork for a new world order will be complete. A global administrative state, whose core power resides with the UN. The US deep state views its relationship with the UN as one where it has kept some degree of organizational control. This new world order will become a spiderweb of rules, regulations, agreements, and treaties within which individuals and nations will be trapped like flies. This new global governance will be virtually unbreakable. From there, it is only a matter of time before national sovereignty becomes obsolete. This is a reality unless we fight to stop this madness.

For this reason, the power of the United Nations must be exposed and curtailed. Globalists seeking to advance their agendas are using the model of the European Union, whereby rules and regulations stymie national sovereignty, to build a worldwide system of control. All must fight this takeover at the local, national, and international level. We must use the courts, our legislatures, media, public protests, and the power vested in our national and state sovereignty to fight this. If all else fails, individual nations may need to withdraw from the UN’s New World Order in order to remain free.

“True Believers” like Corporatist EU President Ursula Von der Leyen or Socialist UN Secretary-General António Guterres always resort to heavy-handed totalitarian responses when threatened by alternative opinions or political movements. What can be observed with Von der Leyen’s response to the populist center-right political surge in Europe is precisely what will happen as the Socialist/Globalist agenda of the UN and its leader António Guterres is threatened by populist movements in the United States, Argentina, and across the world.

Let’s work together to keep our personal and national sovereignty safe for future generations. A New World Order is not needed, is not acceptable, and we the people and our sovereign governments should unequivocally reject this globalized takeover.

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