Now that Kamala Harris is leading in presidential polling, one of the big questions on Wall Street and corporate America involves her economic agenda: Will it be a carbon copy of the progressive crap show known as Bidenomics?
She did, after all, sit quietly while her boss, Joe Biden, and his Federal Trade Commission chief, Lina Khan, blocked sensible deals and filed dopey antitrust cases against Big Tech.
She said nothing when Biden’s chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission turned what was an investor-protection agency into an enforcement arm of woke economics.
Harris, after being anointed by party bosses as the Democratic presidential candidate, says she wants to whip inflation now.
But before Biden’s defenestration as the party nominee, she was his VP and right there ready to break the tie in a closely divided US Senate to approve trillions in spending that eventually stoked inflation, a nasty tax on the working class.
Yes, her progressive street cred is impressive, but now that her Wall Street supporters are looking for campaign cash from more moderate C-suiters, they are spreading the word that Kamala 2.0 is much more ideologically fluid.
She likes fracking. She loves the business community. Her hubby, a plugged-in media and entertainment attorney, represented big business, so she understands it as an engine of economic growth.
From what I hear, the money on the sidelines is skeptical — and it should be. Late this past week in a much-touted economic speech, she began musing about price controls on groceries, something they do in Venezuela or the old Soviet Union, and other freebies.
To counter that, the Harris fund-raisers are trotting out more “Kamala is a moderate” evidence in the person of Brian Deese, an alleged economic moderate and former financier who joined her campaign’s advisory team.
They say Deese will likely have a big role in her administration if she’s elected, an assurance that Harris — despite her rhetoric — won’t govern as a Bernie Sanders lefty.
I have my doubts, and not just because I think Harris is a liar. I also have doubts about Deese’s “moderate” street cred.
As I report in my new book “Go Woke Go Broke; The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America,” Deese worked in the Obama administration and most recently on Biden’s economic team.
In between is where he spent three years at BlackRock. He came to the firm after helping negotiate Obama’s entry into the Paris Climate Accord, which seeks a net-zero future for carbon emissions that the Trump administration exited because the accord did little to address climate problems but led to higher gas prices for average Americans.
Bad for America, but a perfect résumé to become Blackrock CEO Larry Fink’s internal advocate to inculcate the controversial Environmental Social Governance investing at the firm.
Before ESG became a key plank in the nation’s culture wars, it was a big moneymaker inside BlackRock because it allowed the firm to charge investors higher fees on virtue-signaling investments.
Profiting at first from ESG
Deese was very successful at his job, former employees say. BlackRock attracted billions of dollars in assets from pension funds run by progressive pols, lefty sovereign-wealth money managers and individual investors who want to save the planet while they invest.
In late 2020, Deese left the firm and soon joined the Biden White House as head of the National Economic Council, essentially picking up where he left off by infusing woke policymaking into the White House’s failed economic agenda.
Back at BlackRock, things also went sideways. As I show in my book, the beginning of 2021 is when consumers began rebelling against all forms of corporate wokeness.
Fink himself was publicly pilloried by red state pols for infusing politics into investing, forcing oil companies to cut back on drilling when gas prices were spiking.
BlackRock lost assets under management from investors who identified the firm with the progressive left. And ESG funds were outperformed by low-cost index funds, adding to their taint.
As we all know, even with good headline employment numbers, Americans are down on Biden’s economy because of inflation and weak wage growth, something Harris is looking to shake with her “moderate” makeover, and other maneuvers.
My guess is that this makeover may work well with the economic illiterates in the mainstream media, but it’s going to be a hard sell with corporate types.
Her price-gouging scheme presumably had Deese’s blessing and is being mocked by anyone who took Econ 101.
Maybe that’s why I hear even Democrat donors on the fence want to know whom Harris might appoint in key economic spots beyond Deese before they fork over any money.
