Larry Fink’s 2022 Letter Takes Us Back to 1984; FEP Responds to His Preposterous Claims

In his 2022 annual letter to CEOs issued this week, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink sent an Orwellian message to corporate executives claiming that the Leftwing social agenda he’s been pushing on the private sector for years is really somehow the epitome of caring, non-partisan capitalism rather than the ideological whims of Larry Fink himself.

Spoiler: this agenda is just the hard-left political program, and what it seeks is no kind of capitalism at all.

Fink’s alarming “doublethink”-filled missive attempts to convince corporate America that his strongarming of companies to impose climate-risk measures and to engage in workplace discrimination based on surface characteristics such as race is all in the name of capitalism: “Stakeholder capitalism is not about politics. It is not a social or ideological agenda. It is not ‘woke.’ It is capitalism, driven by mutually beneficial relationships between you and the employees, customers, suppliers, and communities your company relies on to prosper. This is the power of capitalism,” his 2022 letter reads.

If pushing American companies into adopting arbitrary, political carbon-reduction goals and selecting and promoting directors and employees alike based on skin color, sex and sexual orientation rather than skills and experience “is not a social or ideological agenda” or “woke,” then nothing is. And that’s exactly the indoctrination plan Larry Fink has in mind when it comes to corporate America.

Larry Fink’s highly ideological demands – following the exact definition of the “woke” agenda – is precisely what’s being pushed by BlackRock.

For example, take Fink’s climate change agenda as laid out in BlackRock’s 2021 Stewardship Expectations publication, which sets forth the company’s “Global Principles and Market-level Voting Guidelines” for that year. In laying out its voting guidelines, the publication makes clear that it will impose consequences on anyone opposing Fink’s climate-hysteric, politically driven carbon-elimination goals. The publication states that through mid-2020, BlackRock “focused on a universe of 440 carbon-intensive companies…in which [its] clients invest. Of these 440 companies, in addition to voting against 55 directors, we put 191 ‘on watch’, meaning they risk votes against directors in 2021 unless they demonstrate significant progress on the management and reporting of climate-related risk.” (emphasis added).

This isn’t the power of capitalism determining the fate of these directors; this is the power of Larry Fink. Indeed, the guidelines do not hesitate to threaten: “Where we believe companies are not moving with sufficient speed and urgency, our most frequent course of action will be to hold directors accountable by voting against their re-election.” The message to corporate America therefore is loud and clear: get on board with Larry Fink’s agenda or be voted out. Given BlackRock now controls more than $10 trillion of other people’s money, Fink’s threat is more powerful than ever.

Thankfully, not everyone has been brainwashed and intimidated by Larry Fink’s tactics. The same day Fink released his letter, the West Virginia Treasurer, Riley Moore, announced he was ending his state’s relationship with BlackRock over Fink’s climate agenda that threatens West Virginia’s economy while turning a blind-eye to Chinese carbon emissions. It’s reassuring to know that even if the private sector is tempted to fall prey to Larry Fink’s indoctrination, some public officials are still not afraid to stand up to his dictates, and his insistence that the sky is green and the grass is blue — and that he’s acting neutrally for the benefit of all stakeholders rather than to make himself an unelected economic dictator while pushing his personal policy preferences on the whole country.

This leads me to close by mentioning perhaps Fink’s most ironic, Orwellian statement of them all in his 2022 letter. Interestingly, it comes in the context of Fink’s acknowledgement that COVID-19 has eroded the American people’s trust in traditional institutions. Fink warns, “Political activists, or the media, may politicize things your company does. They may hijack your brand to advance their own agendas.”

What a thought-provoking warning for Fink to issue. Every CEO reading Fink’s letter should stop and think very carefully about his statement and ask themselves: Who is really trying to politicize their company and hijack their brand? Seems the answer is Larry Fink himself.



The National Center for Public Policy Research is a communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems. We believe that the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility provide the greatest hope for meeting the challenges facing America in the 21st century.