Tag: stock market

Big US investors prop up the nuclear weapons industry

Nuclear weapons aren’t just a threat to human survival, they’re a multi-billion-dollar business supported by some of the biggest institutional investors in the U.S. according to new data released today by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and PAX, the largest peace organization in the Netherlands.

For the third year in a row, globally, the number of investors in nuclear weapons producers has fallen but the overall amount invested in these companies has increased, largely thanks to some of the biggest investment banks and funds in the U.S.

“As for the U.S., while there is, like past years, indeed a dominance, and total financing from U.S.-based institutions has increased, the total number of U.S. investors has dropped for the third year in a row (similar to our global findings), and we hope to see this number will continue to fall in the coming years,” Alejandar Munoz, the report’s primary author, told Responsible Statecraft.

In 2023, the top 10 share and bondholders of nuclear weapons producing companies are all American firms. The firms — Vanguard, Capital Group, State Street, BlackRock, Wellington Management, Fidelity Investments, Newport Group, Geode Capital Holdings, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley — held $327 billion in investments in nuclear weapons producing companies in 2023, an $18 billion increase from 2022.

These companies are also profiting from the enormous government contracts they receive for developing and modernizing nuclear weapons.

“All nuclear-armed states are currently modernizing their nuclear weapon systems,” says the annual “Don’t Bank on the Bomb” report from PAX and ICAN. “In 2022, the nine nuclear-armed states together spent $82.9 billion on their nuclear weapons arsenals, an increase of $2.5 billion compared to the previous year, and with the United States spending more than all other nuclear powers combined.”

American weapons companies are some of the biggest recipients of contracts for nuclear weapons. Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics are “the biggest nuclear weapons profiteers,” according to the report. Combined, the two American weapons manufacturers have outstanding nuclear weapons related contracts with a combined potential value of at least $44.9 billion.

Those enormous government contracts for nuclear weapons, alongside contracts for conventional weapons, have helped make nuclear weapons producers an attractive investment for American investment banks and funds.

“Altogether, 287 financial institutions were identified for having substantial financing or investment relations with 24 companies involved in nuclear weapon production,” says the report. “$477 billion was held in bonds and shares, and $343 billion was provided in loans and underwriting.”

The report notes that while the total amount invested in nuclear weapons has increased, the number of investors has fallen and trends toward firms in countries with nuclear weapons.

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US Funds Invest in Nuclear & Cluster Bombs

Amidst what the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists calls “an exceedingly dangerous nuclear situation” facing humanity today, the largest U.S. mutual funds — which manage the retirement and other savings of tens of millions of Americans — are profiting from investments in nuclear weapons, cluster munitions and other banned or controversial arms, an analysis by a leading shareholder advocacy group has revealed.

Measured by dollars invested, the top 25 U.S. asset managers “all earn a D grade or worse, with significant investments in arms manufacturers and major military contractors, including companies involved with nuclear weapons and controversial weapons like cluster munitions, anti-personnel landmines, incendiary weapons, and depleted uranium,” Berkeley, California-based As You Sow said in its new report.

[Related: In Ukraine, US Adds to Barbaric Cluster-Bomb Legacy]

Some of the largest corporate 401(k)s like American Funds, John Hancock Funds and Franklin Templeton Investments were among the most heavily invested in these armaments, while “fund managers that focus on sustainable investing have less exposure to military weapons, on average.”

Seven funds profiled in the analysis — Eventide Funds, Ecofin, New Alternatives, Vert Asset Management, Aspiration Funds, Thrivent, and Kayne Anderson — held no investments in the controversial weapons.

“Many investors, given a choice, would not want to profit from companies that manufacture weapons of mass destruction,” As You Sow CEO Andrew Behar said in a statement.

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Democratic senator keeps breaking conflicts-of-interest law over and over and over again

Members of Congress keep struggling to comply with a decade-old financial disclosure and transparency law — the latest, two federal lawmakers who were late reporting stock and U.S. Treasury transactions.

For the third time in 14 months, Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) missed a 45-day disclosure deadline imposed by the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act.

Carper was as much as two weeks late in reporting his spouse’s U.S. Treasury bill purchases and sales totaling up to $345,000, as well as a PayPal stock sale up to $15,000, according to a June 30 federal financial report reviewed by Raw Story. The STOCK Act only requires legislators to disclose their own, their spouse’s and dependent children’s transactions in broad ranges.

“There was a clerical error,” Natasha Dabrowski, Carper’s communications director, told Raw Story. “Senator Carper is working with the Ethics Committee so he can fully resolve the matter.”

The STOCK Act — passed in 2012 to stop insider trading, curb conflicts-of-interest and enhance transparency — requires prompt reporting of most purchases, sales and exchanges of stocks, bonds, commodity futures and cryptocurrency by key government officials, particularly members of Congress.

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Biden Energy Secretary Granholm Admits False Testimony About Owning Stocks

President Joe Biden’s secretary of energy revealed she gave false personal financial testimony during her Senate confirmation hearing in 2021.

Jennifer Granholm lied to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) during an April 2021 testimony.

“Do you own individual stocks, Madam Secretary?” Hawley asked Granholm in that hearing.

“No,” replied Granholm, “I’m invested in mutual funds.”

Hawley lamented the Biden administrator’s perjury in a Friday Twitter post: “She lied to me.”

Biden’s energy secretary claims her unequivocal denial of stock ownership was just a mistake on her part.

Fox News further reported:

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm admitted in a letter Friday that she made a false statement when she recently told lawmakers she didn’t own any individual stocks.

While Granholm divested from a variety of stocks in 2021, she acknowledged in the letter — which was sent to Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee leadership — that she maintained shares of six companies. On April 20, however, Granholm testified under oath that she had sold all of her shares of individual companies.

“As you know, as part of the confirmation process before this Committee, in 2021 I divested from assets that could be in conflict with my official duties,” Granholm wrote in the letter obtained by Fox News Digital. “I did, however, retain assets that were determined by Government ethics officials to not conflict with my official duties.”

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Busted: These 6 members of Congress violated a federal conflicts-of-interest law

At least six more members of Congress have violated the STOCK Act by failing to disclose transactions — up to $376,280 collectively — within a 45-day federal deadline, according to Raw Story analysis of congressional financial documents.

The majority of the late disclosure dollars came from Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL) who was late in disclosing up to $300,000 in stock transactions from a joint trust.

He is joined by five other lawmakers who were late in disclosing transactions in the $1,000-to-$15,000 range: Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI), Rep. Russ Fulcher (R-ID), Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), Rep. Deborah Ross (D-NC) and Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD).

The lawmakers aren’t alone in violating the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act this week.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who last year led Democratic House leadership’s self-aborted effort to ban congressional stock trading, violated the STOCK Act with up to $265,000 in late financial disclosures, Raw Story reported on Wednesday.

Raw Story also broke the news last week that Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) was late in disclosing up to $5 million in U.S. Treasury note purchases.

The ongoing violations come at a time when a bipartisan group of lawmakers have introduced several similar bills aimed at banning congressional stock trading.

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NBA Takes Steps to Ease Cannabis Restrictions: This Week in Cannabis Investing

The NBA took a major step forward this week by allowing players to invest in and promote cannabis brands. 

Michele Roberts, a former executive director of the NBA Players Association and now a member of the board of directors at Cresco Labs (CRLBF(opens in new tab)), previously predicted that NBA would consider changing its policies around cannabis. 

As of the terms listed in the leagues’ new collective bargaining agreement, cannabis will also be removed from the banned substances list for players. This is a welcome change for a cannabis industry seeking additional sources of capital while it continues to erode the old-world stigmas created by previous generations. 

We’ve seen a number of professional athletes getting involved in the cannabis industry after their sports careers. They are a group that is keen on the benefits cannabis provides for pain and inflammatory management, and many are also passionate about making a difference. Former NBA veteran Al Harrington’s Viola Brands(opens in new tab) immediately comes to mind as a trailblazer here. We’re excited to welcome more athletes, especially those as passionate about building their brands and business ventures as they are about their active profession.

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Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State

The response to the “Covid-19 pandemic” has much in common with the birth of the Third Reich. Agamben (2021, 8), for example, likens the emergency legislation passed in 2020 to the suspension of the Weimar Constitution in 1933, and Davis (2021b) explains how, through a raft of legislation being rammed through Parliament while the population’s attention is focused elsewhere, the UK is being turned into a constitutional dictatorship. UK government agencies now have the mandates to commit crimes with impunity; protests will be effectively criminalized or shut down under extraordinary police powers; online dissent will be censored; and journalists will no longer be allowed to report any information deemed contrary to the “national interest” (Davis 2021b).

The “Covid-19 pandemic” functions as the Big Lie on which this is all premised, i.e. a lie so huge that ordinary people would not imagine it to be possible. To quote Mein Kampf:

“Because the […] masses […] are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”(Hitler 1969, 134)

As Rancourt et al. (2021) demonstrate scientifically, there was no viral pandemic, only what Davis (2021a), based on several hundred pages of argumentation, calls a “pseudopandemic,” modelled on the fake “swine flu pandemic” of 2009 (Fumento 2010). Yet, because of the propaganda and the applied behavioural psychology deployed as part of the psychological warfare targeting the unconscious mind, cognitive dissonance prevents many people from seeing or admitting this, even when presented with the evidence. Propaganda specialist Mark Crispin Miller reflects: “I used to think it tasteless to compare our system to Nazi Germany. I no longer think so” (2021, 30 mins).

Hitler was, perhaps, the first to see that liberal democracy can be subverted by playing on the unconscious fears of the masses. If an existential threat is presented, the masses can be induced to sacrifice liberty for the promise of security. At a visceral level, they are

“far more satisfied by a doctrine which tolerates no rival [promises security] than by the grant of liberal freedom. They neither realize the impudence with which they are […] terrorized, nor the outrageous curtailment of their human liberties, for in no way does the delusion of this doctrine dawn on them.”(cited in Fromm 1942, 191)

This is the model of imposing authority in a climate of terror. The masses can be terrorized into surrendering their liberties, and it will never occur to them that they have been lied to on a monumental scale — that the threat was fictitious. Thus, for example, while Hitler lambasted international bankers and reparation payments for bringing Germany to its knees, the truth was that German reparations payments fell to around one eighth of previous levels following the Hoover Moratorium (1931) and Lausanne Agreement (1932), the Bank for International Settlements managed Nazi gold, and the Nazis continued to honour their Young Plan obligations even during World War II.

The same playbook of using a Big Lie to generate mass fear for authoritarian purposes has been evident in “Covid-19.” Klaus Schwab practically announced as much in June 2020:

“Most people, fearful of the danger posed by COVID-19 [in a] a life-or-death kind of situation […] will agree that in such circumstances public power can rightfully override individual rights. Then, when the crisis is over, some may realize that their country has suddenly been transformed into a place where they no longer wish to live.”(Schwab and Malleret 2020, 117)

By the time the lie is exposed, it is too late, “for the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying” (Hitler 1969, 134). Again, Schwab seems familiar with this principle: there will be no going back to how things were, because “the cut which we have now is much too strong in order not to leave traces” (cited in Clark 2020). Schwab’s protégé, Yuval Noah Harari, also belongs to the conspiracy of expert liars: “If you repeat a lie often enough,” he claims, “people will think it’s the truth. And the bigger the lie, the better, because people won’t even think about how something so big can be a lie.”

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Pelosis Sold Google Stock One Month Before DOJ Announced Antitrust Lawsuit

Democratic California Rep. Nancy Pelosi and her husband, Paul, unloaded more than $1.5 million in Alphabet stock one month before the Department of Justice announced an antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant.

The Pelosis sold 30,000 shares of Alphabet, the holding company for Google and several other firms, on Dec. 20, 21, and 28. They received between $1.5 million and $3 million for the total sale, netting capital gains of more than $600, according to a financial disclosure form Pelosi, filed on Jan. 12. The DOJ announced its lawsuit against Alphabet on Tuesday.

Pelosi’s office did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment on the matter.

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Paul Pelosi exercises up to $5 million in Google call options ahead of stock ban bill unveiling

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, exercised call options on $1 million to $5 million worth of stock for Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, as legislation was being drafted to ban Capitol Hill lawmakers and immediate family members from purchasing individual stocks, according to House document dated Oct. 14.

The transaction date of the House’s Periodic Transaction Report is Sept. 16. At that time, several different stock ban bills had been proposed in the House. The House Democratic leadership’s version was rolled out about one week after Pelosi, a wealth investor, exercised his call options.

A call option is a financial contract that gives the buyer the option, but not the obligation, to buy a stock, bond, commodity or other asset.

Speaker Pelosi ultimately did not put the stock ban legislation up for a vote before the House recess began. 

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SEC Fakes Approval For New Climate Regulations From Activists, Foreign Investors While Ignoring American Companies’ Mass Opposition

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is relying on a network of foreign investors to present an illusion of broad support for the agency’s proposed climate disclosure rule, which threatens to increase structural risks to the American economy.

In March, the trade agency outlined new regulations requiring firms to report their estimated energy emissions. While the SEC technically only has jurisdiction over publicly traded companies, the broad nature of the agency’s proposal aims to coerce private businesses into carbon calculations that track the behavior of their customers. Firms that fail to comply with government standards are subject to fines and lawsuits.

The new rules are “a disingenuous power grab by the SEC,” Will Hild, the executive director of Consumers’ Research, said in an interview.

“By requiring the corporations the SEC regulates to make scope 2 emissions disclosures, those corporations will be forced to require the businesses they source from to calculate and disclose their emissions or stop doing business with them,” Hild told The Federalist. “So even if a business is private (not publicly traded) but their customers are public companies, then the SEC will have effectively forced them to participate in the disclosures scheme.”

According to an analysis of the SEC’s proposal from the Western Energy Alliance, a coalition of predominantly small independent oil and gas producers, more than 80 percent of asset managers cited by the agency as supportive of the new regulations are foreign. Just 7 percent of American asset managers support the disclosure rules.

The white paper from the Alliance published in June outlines how activist investors are masquerading as representative of majority sentiment on Wall Street despite just a handful of firms forming multiple coalitions. According to the report, seven major climate change advocacy organizations cited by SEC as behind the agency on mandated disclosure include the same investor coalition groups working in close collaboration. It’s as if the same 50 members of Congress formed 100 different caucuses that pledged support to particular legislation to show proof of consensus.

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