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Billionaire Mike Bloomberg Gives GOP's Infowars Investors a Capitalism 101 Lesson: Making Money Good [1]

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Date: 2022-09-08

"Are you a right-wing, free-market type who believes that Fortune 500 CEOs have devolved into a gaggle of eco-friendly squishes? Do you like paying high expenses for stock market returns that lag the S&P 500? Would you trust a former tobacco executive and a junk science to manage your money? Then have I got a mutual fund for you! The Free Enterprise Action Fund ."

So begins a 2006 piece by Daniel Gross in Slate , describing Thomas Borelli and Steve Milloy's attempt to exploit investors via political shenanigans designed to prop up loser industries. How did it end? Per Gross, "in the short term, it looks like Borelli and Milloy are essentially paying the fund for the privilege of using it as a platform to broadcast their views on corporate governance, global warming, and a host of other issues."

And in the long term? Well just a few years later, in 2009, the fund merged with the Congressional Effect Fund, which according to its website is now all about the cryptocurrencies, another bet almost as sure as the long term viability of the oil and gas industry. So like the other ill-fated denier effort to crowdfund a pro-fossil-fuels hedge fund back in 2016 , Milloy's attempt to fight the finance world's drive to avoid bad investments fell flat.

Either the third time's the charm, or the same fate awaits Vivek Ramaswamy, the Alex Jones of Investing , and his Strive fund targeting Environmental, Social and Governance risk assessments.

Unfortunately, unlike past efforts, these days the Republican party is so thoroughly enmeshed with and dependent on the fossil fuel industry's Citizens United-unleashed donations that even state treasurers are playing politics with their state's investments.

But it's not going to go great for them either. Because even as the Wall Street Journal's opinion page runs op-eds promoting the stupid idea that ignoring risks is smart investing by such wise and definitely-not-biased voices like Strive advisor Jed Rubenfeld with Hudson Institute fellow William Barr, and then from Ramaswamy himself, the real investing story is a little different. And you don't even have to trust the liberal media to find out- even the WSJ itself reports as much!

Because off the opinion page and into the real world, in covering the GOP's bad business investment strategy for the WSJ, Amrith Ramkumar points out that Ramaswamy's energy investment fund "is nearly identical" to one from BlackRock, the big, supposedly "woke" investor Vivek is attacking. Not only is Ramaswamy a hypocrite for investing in the same way as the group he criticizes, but he's also stupid, because as a graph Ramkumar includes shows, clean energy stocks are outperforming fossil fuel firms. Whoops! Surely now the opinion page will reflect this reality, and stop misleading its audience, right?

If you don't trust the WSJ for your financial coverage though, you can also find a similar rebuke at Bloomberg , where Editor-in-Chief Emeritus Matthew Winkler shows that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's crusade against ESG investing fails its own metric of making investment decisions based solely on profits. Why and how?

Because the biggest ESG Exchange-Traded Fund has "increased its assets 4,700 times to $24 billion since its inception in 2016 and 80 times the past three years." Oh!

Why do investors love ESG? Well, per Winkler, "a big reason why ESG is attracting so much investment is because it’s crushing the traditional investment benchmarks," as "the total return of the Bloomberg ESG Index is more than six times greater than the largest ETF investing in traditional energy since 2014."

Investors are putting lots of money into ESG funds, and they're getting even more profit back.

That basic factual reality is why billionaire climate guy Michael Bloomberg wrote his own op-ed headlined, " On climate change, Republicans need a crash course in capitalism. " He then provides it, and if you can't get past the paywall, you can basically read it on FoxNews , where they excerpted it heavily and barely pushed back, because, well how could they?

Bloomberg writes, in his best explain like I'm 5 tone, how understanding the ESG risk factors the anti-wokesters claim to oppose is basically "investing 101, and either Republican critics of ESG don’t understand it, or they are catering to the interests of fossil fuel companies. It may well be both."

That sass!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/8/2121535/-Billionaire-Mike-Bloomberg-Gives-GOP-s-Infowars-Investors-a-Capitalism-101-Lesson-Making-Money-Good

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