BlackRock Misses Again

The Woke BlackRock, and especially its CEO Larry Fink, are not just wide of the mark, they’ve missed the target altogether. Not only does the company push its intrinsically racist and sexist “diversity, equity, inclusion” ideology onto those companies in which it invests—often for the sole purpose of the push; investment quality being irrelevant—now it’s been caught out applying its racism and sexism in its internal hiring practices.

America First Legal Foundation sent a letter Tuesday to the New York District Office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to demand an investigation into the asset management giant for allegedly “engaging in unlawful employment practices in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
…
“This program is just one piece of a long-term practice of BlackRock to use unlawful discriminatory employment practices to build its workforce,” the complaint stated. “Indeed, BlackRock has affirmatively and repeatedly represented to its shareholders, to its investors, and to the Securities and Exchange Commission, that its employment practices are infused with facially unlawful considerations of race, color, sex, and/or national origin.”

AFL added in a separate communication,

The odious and illegal practice of hiring based on immutable characteristics like race is a flagrant attack on civil rights that harms all Americans[.]

I’ll go further: it’s an insult to those minorities and women; BlackRock and Fink are saying that minorities and women are intrinsically inferior, inherently too stupid, to be able to compete without the special treatment and coddling that is preferential, DEI-based hiring.

There’s no doubt that there remains a disparity, especially in STEM environments, between white hiring into good-paying jobs and minority and women hiring into those jobs. But that disparity won’t be cured by preferentially hiring minorities and women; they still too often aren’t qualified for the positions, so they fail and set the program, and the hiring company, back.

The correction for the disparity lies in a factor that’s at the foundation of our nation: equal opportunity. That equality of opportunity doesn’t currently exist in our education system (among other milieus); see for a canonical example, the Baltimore, MD, school system’s failure and subsequent coverup by those responsible.

If BlackRock and similar entities put the money and energy they’re currently committing to push wokeness into improving our educational system (without the Woke…foolishness) and getting our children taught—from pre-K through high school—science, technology, engineering, and math, along with American history, Civics (and more of this than a single semester in junior high), Western Civilization, logic, and literature, with equal emphasis on inner city schools and wealthy district schools, those disparities would disappear in a generation.

 

The letter itself can be read at the first link above.

Funding PRC Research

Senator and Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Ranking Member Roger Marshall (R, KS) and his staff have released their Muddy Waters report concerning the origin of the Wuhan Virus—which he concludes happened via two likely leaks from the PRC’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab not equipped to do virus research at the depth to which it was handling the Wuhan Virus. One of the conclusions of his report is that the US government was funding gain-of-function research in that lab.

I have a couple of thoughts.

Marshall said about the PRC research,

That’s why we’ve been calling for a halt in all viral gain-of-function research until we get the guardrails around it.

I disagree with that. We should do viral gain-of-function research on a variety of viruses, but we should do it in our labs, where we have absolute control over the research and its findings as well as the quality and ability of the labs in which the research is done. We should be doing the research for a couple of reasons: one is that our enemies—vis., the PRC—are doing it, and we need to understand the altered viruses and how to counter them when those enemy nations use them against us. The other reason is that these viruses do cross-over from animals to humans sometimes, and whether they do this naturally—which is quite rare—or altered viruses accidentally leak from a lab, we need to understand them and how to counter them.

My other thought concerns this remark by Marshall, regarding American funding for PRC virus research:

If we’re funding it, then they need to conform to our rules, and we need American boots on the ground[.]

Certainly. However, aside from the fact that the PRC won’t agree to American presence in their labs in any useful way, we shouldn’t be funding PRC research on viruses at all. We shouldn’t be funding PRC research on any biological research. We shouldn’t be funding any PRC research, of any kind, at all.

Legalized Doxing

Doxing is the process of publicly identifying/publishing a person’s private information in order to “punish” that person for some imagined offense or for revenge because that person did something the doxxer didn’t like. In most jurisdictions, doxing is at least civilly wrong if not criminally so.

Now Michigan wants to force employers to dox their employees to unions.

A Michigan Senate bill currently under consideration aims to require employers to share employees’ name, home address, cell phone number, work address location, and personal email address with labor representatives every 90 days.

That’s all employees, not just union members. And every 90 days, yet—because the Progressive-Democratic Party members are at pains to keep the unions current on the dox data. State Senator John Cherry (D) on his Senate Bill 169:

The intent here is to make sure that individuals who are legally required to represent employees have the information on who they are actually required to represent and the ability to contact them and fulfill their requirements of representation[.]

This is utterly disingenuous. The unions already know who they represent: they have the union cards and the dues remittals. They don’t need to know where their members live, or their cell phone numbers, or their personal email data except to personally harass those employees who don’t toe the union line. They especially don’t need to know this information about employees who are not union members—union individuals don’t represent them, by intent of the non-union employee.

And for how long does anyone think unions would keep that information nonpublic, in any case, especially the information of those employees impudent enough to decline to join?

This is yet another example of unions gone amok and of Progressive-Democratic Party-run governments aiding and abetting union misbehavior.

More Government Overreach

This time it’s in the Federal government’s Securities and Exchange Commission move to force businesses to disclose their carbon emissions and other climate data. The demand is centered on the claim that inquiring investors want to know this stuff, so Government should force the disclosure.

Indeed, some investors do want to know this stuff, and some businesses think their profit intake will benefit from releasing such information. Other businesses say the proposed diktat mandate would inflict costly, complicated, and useless drags on their bottom lines.

The push, though, along with the push’s supporters and decriers, wholly ignore the key segment in our economy: us ordinary Americans consumers, and investors who are in large part us ordinary Americans.

If we and the investors, both big and small, institutional and retail, among us want this information, we’ll demand it of the companies we want it from, and we’ll do it—and get it—through the market force which we are in our aggregate.

The move by the SEC, though, is typical of beltway politicians of all parties and independents: if it’s a good idea for some or even for many, Government must require it for everyone. This is government overreach.

“Hurting Relations”

The People’s Republic of China greatly reduced its export of addicting drugs for the criminal trade into the United States after former President Donald Trump (R) pressured PRC President Xi Jinping to do so. Under Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden, Xi has resumed and vastly increased his nation’s addicting drug export, particularly of fentanyl and of fentanyl precursors into Mexico for transshipment and Fentanyl manufacture and shipment into our nation.

The fact that Xi so greatly increased his export of this drug and of its precursors, targeting us, is a clear illustration of Xi’s attack on us without going kinetic. He’s already supported, just in the two years of the Biden administration, the export into our nation enough fentanyl to completely exterminate us, were it not for the Biden-undermanned CBP.

Now Wang Wenbin, the PRC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Information Department Deputy Director, speaking for the PRC’s Foreign Affairs Department and in turn for Xi, objects to even the slight umbrage Biden is beginning to show.

The Treasury Department said Friday that the sanctions against Wuhan Shuokang Biological Technology Co, Ltd, Suzhou Xiaoli Pharmatech Co, Ltd, Yao Huatao, Wu Yaqin, Wu Yonghao, and Wang Hongfei are “part of a whole-of-government effort to counter the global threat posed by the trafficking of illicit drugs into the United States that is causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans annually, as well as countless more non-fatal overdoses.”

Here’s Wang:

China, in the spirit of humanitarianism, has been trying to help the US as best it can….

And

…US [move] to impose sanctions “seriously undermines” bilateral cooperation between the two countries over drug control….

How humanitarian of the PRC to sedate us before killing us.

What sort of cooperation, what sort of relationship of any sort, can we have with an enemy nation that already is at war with us, economically and via poisoning as many of us as it can with its drug war? We are not undermining relations; the PRC already has been doing so, for years.