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AUSTIN, Texas (LifeSiteNews) — The Texas Permanent School Fund (PSF) is becoming the latest state fund to divest its financial stake in far-left asset management giant BlackRock, Inc., pulling $8.5 billion from the company over its use of corporate influence to push leftist activism.
The Washington Examiner reports that Texas State Board of Education Chairman Aaron Kinsey notified BlackRock and announced the decision the same day, March 19.
“BlackRock’s dominant and persistent leadership in the ESG movement immeasurably damages our state’s oil and gas economy and the very companies that generate revenues for our [Permanent School Fund],” he said. “Texas and the PSF have worked hard to grow this fund to build Texas’s schools. BlackRock’s destructive approach towards the energy companies that this state and our world depend on is incompatible with our fiduciary duty to Texans.”
The withdrawal followed the 2021 passage of a law banning the state from any company that practices so-called “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) standards, essentially a scoring system that incentivizes investing in companies not on the basis of their performance for customers and shareholders, but rather on their fealty to so-called “social justice” principles such as diversity and environmentalism. ESG is one of the reasons why so many companies in recent years have attempted to influence public policy on issues such as homosexuality, transgenderism, race relations, and abortion.
In 2022, Texas state Comptroller Glenn Hegar released a list of firms that would be barred from “entering into contracts with state and local” governmental agencies over their hostility to traditional energy production in favor of the so-called “green” agenda, including BlackRock.
“Today’s bold step by Aaron Kinsey and the Permanent School Fund of Texas, in accordance with state law, is a massive blow against the scam of ESG,” cheered State Financial Officers Foundation CEO Derek Kreifels, Fox Business reports. “This is what happens when public fiduciaries stand up for those to whom they owe a duty, instead of bowing down to Wall Street’s asset managers who continue to abuse their position in the market to advance radical ideologies.”
“Under Larry Fink’s leadership, BlackRock has been misusing client funds to push a political agenda for years. Nowhere was that more egregious than in Texas, where BlackRock was simultaneously trying to destroy the domestic oil and gas industry while managing funds that depended on royalties derived from that very same industry,” agreed Consumers’ Research executive director Will Hild. “A more flagrant violation of fiduciary duty is difficult to imagine.”
Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, South Carolina, Utah, and West Virginia have previously divested themselves of BlackRock. Last year, nineteen states – Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming – formed a coalition to collectively agree to resist ESG standards in a variety of ways, such as banning their use in state pension-fund investment decisions, banning the use of “social credit scores” in banking and lending practices, and banning ideological discrimination against customers by financial institutions.
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