BlackRock has finally come for our utilities.
Here’s this, from a new article by Katya Schwenk at Jacobin:
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has its tentacles in all facets of American life. The behemoth is buying up grocery brands, dental practices, apartment buildings, and nursing homes. But the opaque industry of private equity has mostly stayed away from electric utilities, the regulated companies that supply power to homes and businesses, because they often don’t yield quick returns.
That’s changing. Last year, the BlackRock subsidiary Global Infrastructure Partners and a Canadian pension fund announced a $6.2 billion deal to buy Minnesota Power….
That deal faced tremendous pushback, and is not yet official, but here’s where things get really conspiratorial: after a judge issued a heavyhanded ruling against the acquisition, unions and “clean energy” advocacy organizations have come out of the woodwork to support the BlackRock takeover—Schwenk writes that when the proposed deal was announced, BlackRock executives “put the climate transition at the center of their pitch.” The “clean energy” groups with their “climate crisis” boogeyman strike again.
Schwenk also uncovers some rather incestuous connections too:
In at least one instance, union comments bear the fingerprints of an attorney working for BlackRock, document metadata shows.
And:
One of these [clean energy] groups is currently advertising a benefit event sponsored by Minnesota Power and the law firm representing BlackRock in the deal.
And, it’s not just BlackRock. Another big player on Wall Street, Blackstone, is also in on the game, which recently announced its plans to acquire “a major electric utility in Texas and New Mexico” if permitted to do so.
So why are these global investment firms turning their attention to our energy suppliers? Well, because the AI demand is set to drastically drive up energy consumption, and in a world of wind turbines and solar panels, that energy is going to be expensive.
From Occupy Wall Street to “Don’t touch my globalist corporate overlord and his profits!”, leftists have a dizzying intellect (if it can even be called that). They really are the useful idiots we keep accusing them of being.
Image from Grok.