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Advancing American Freedom founder Vice President Pence today issued a statement on Biden’s veto of the Anti-ESG Resolution that was passed with bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate.

“Democrats and Republicans in Congress recognized that American workers deserve a say in where their hard-earned savings are invested,” said Advancing American Freedom founder Vice President Mike Pence. “Unfortunately, the Biden administration is entrenched in woke corporate culture so deeply that it has put the prosperity of the American people at risk. We must reject the unelected cabal of bureaucrats, regulators, and activist investors who seek to promote companies based on their adherence to left-wing values.”

Background:

Pence’s organization, Advancing American Freedom, has been leading conservatives pushing for the resolution with a coalition letter to Congress signed by over 100 conservative leaders and organizations, and also ran ad campaigns in Arizona and Montana calling for support of the resolution. Senator Tester of Montana voted yes on the resolution.

In April of 2022, Vice President Pence delivered remarks at Rice University, calling out those who sought to weaponize the U.S. financial system to “destroy energy producers from within.”

Vice President Pence also has written two nationally-syndicated pieces in RealClearMarkets and the Wall Street Journal calling for conservatives to take up the mantle against the Radical Left’s ESG agenda.

Mike Pence served as the 48th Vice President of the United States

In America, the freedom to succeed has always included the freedom to fail. Or at least it used to.

Now we live in a world where certain politically favored businesses are propped up, backstopped and bailed out by government no matter how reckless they may be. That is exactly what happened during the 2008 financial crisis, and that is what is happening now with the banking panic set off by the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. Government is behind the bar pouring drinks, and some banks are going on another raging bender.

Just like in 2008, the cause of the current panic is excessive risk taking in the private sector that has been aided and abetted by government. To recap the 2008 fiasco: Congress pushed hard to expand homeownership and encouraged relaxed lending standards. Banks subsequently underwrote risky mortgages to subprime borrowers, which were then purchased by the government-sponsored firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and repackaged into mortgaged backed securities. When subprime borrowers began to default, the whole system melted down along with our entire economy.

This time, the characters and setting are slightly different, but the plot remains the same. Under the Biden administration, Democrats have increased spending by over $10 trillion – more than the economies of Japan, Germany and Australia combined. This spending spree fueled record inflation, inevitably requiring the FED to raise interest rates.

Meanwhile, in the private sector, SVB engaged in risky borrowing and lending on behalf of California’s donor class while committing billions of dollars to woke projects fighting climate change. The bank boasted that it was ‘living its values’ by pursuing left-wing environmental, social and governance goals and donating millions of dollars to liberal nonprofits. When interest rates went up, their long-term bonds imploded and SVB was left holding the bag.

But SVB is not solely responsible for misallocating its resources on left-wing priorities; the Biden administration actively encouraged them to do so. Rather than ensuring the strength of our banking system, Biden ordered bank regulators to push an environmental agenda. At the time of SVB’s collapse, the Federal Reserve was rolling out its latest climate-risk guidelines.

In 2008, I led the opposition to bailouts, and I continue to oppose bailouts now. We cannot have one set of rules for ordinary Americans and another set that takes special care of big tech, big banks and other favored industries.

Bailouts always beget more bailouts. I warned of the moral hazard created by the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) in 2009, asking ‘where is all of this going to end? Just more handouts, more bailouts, and certainly…TARP is just going to be a down payment if we intend to bail out every failing bank in the country.'[1] Indeed, as we are seeing today, TARP was only the beginning.

Instead of encouraging dangerous behavior in the private sector, government should allow bad actors to bear the brunt of their bad decisions. We have bankruptcy laws for a reason. Bankruptcy is an orderly process that allows a failed business to restructure or be bought out by a solvent competitor – ensuring that the strong survive and the weak fall to the wayside, which is critical for maintaining a functioning free market.

The alternative is what we have today: banks make foolish decisions enabled by imprudent government policies and the American people pay the price. Of course, President Biden says taxpayers won’t pay for the bailout, but that is disingenuous – every American with a bank account will pay higher fees to replenish the billions spent by the FDIC to backstop failing banks.

To add insult to injury, Americans will also be paying to guarantee the deposits of many Chinese companies that were SVB customers. Perhaps that is a good first step towards reform: stop insuring the deposits of companies that do business in China or Russia.

But ultimately, we have to stop the insanity of bailing out failing businesses. No business is ‘too big to fail.’ Government should no longer choose winners and losers. Only then can we preserve a vibrant, healthy and flourishing free market.

Read more at DailyMail.com.

Free Speech is and always has been the foundation of American democracy. Our founding fathers knew better than anyone that it was one of the most powerful tools against tyranny, which is why the world over, then and now, free speech is nowhere to be found in nations where the people aren’t free.

Naturally, the First Amendment remains one of, if not, the most important elements of the Bill of Rights for preserving our freedom and keeping the federal government in check. Our Constitution and its protection of freedom of speech is the envy of many nations. Thus, it is all the more disappointing that American corporations – especially Big Tech seem so eager to dispense with it.

Just last year, a report from the Media Research Center found more than 640 instances of bans, deleted content and restrictions placed on social media accounts that criticized Biden over the previous two years. Posts that were punished did not even need to be actual “disinformation.” The Heritage Foundation, for instance, was censored by Facebook for explaining that high gas prices and inflation were a result of Biden administration policies. Big Tech bans against speech from conservatives have even gone so far as to target conservative comedians on YouTube and posts that selected Joe Biden quotes that made him look bad.

The mission to snuff out “disinformation” at the expense of free expression is shared by both Big Tech and the Biden administration.

After the release of the “Twitter Files,” it was clear that Twitter began functioning as a subsidiary to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, spreading Russian propaganda to create a cover to dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop story, and locking out conservatives like Kayleigh McEnaney from their accounts for speaking out of turn.

And as it turns out, the State Department has sent over $300 million dollars to a non-profit that funds the British owned Global Disinformation Index (GDI). The GDI feeds blacklists to ad companies with the intent of starving websites and outlets that peddle “disinformation.” The list includes the conservative Washington Examiner and at least 2,000 other websites. The GDI also reportedly attempted to convince companies to punish conservative websites that suggested the coronavirus may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, which has now been backed by the Energy Department and the FBI.

GDI also listed the 10 “riskiest” news organizations including the New York Post. The freedom of the press is very much at stake.

In a lawsuit filed last year, state officials named Joe Biden, the Surgeon General, the head of the Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and many others as defendants. The lawsuit alleges that the federal government threatened Big Tech companies to censor conservative speech in ways that they could not. But the untold story is how willing these corporations were to carry out these tasks as reports show they worked in tandem to censor conservative views online. The censorship even included biblical viewpoints on marriage, sexuality and gender.

Americans, especially black households, suffer as a result of the extreme censorship of Big Tech.

Families that can’t afford to pay for subscriptions to news organization sites like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post or the Washington Times, rely on social media to get badly needed information about the issues and public policy debates of the day. Censorship means that task is harder and biased. And because black households tend to have lower incomes, they need this access most.

Sadly, many on the Left are still willing to dismiss this on the basis that it is “necessary to protect American democracy.” This line of thought, unsurprisingly, has become the unique calling card of the progressive Left, and is often used to justify unprecedented levels of government control that ignore public consent, ultimately hurting Americans and especially black Americans.

Just like the myth that black people are not capable of getting an ID, posts and reports that reveal a record number of blacks voted in the last election in Georgia are treated as disinformation by Big Tech.

Ultimately, what the Left fails to understand is that free speech is, as Fredrick Douglass put it, “The dread of tyrants.” Many malevolent rulers across the globe wish they operated in an environment where Big Tech and progressives were working together to limit free speech.

When we cede power to the federal government and Big Tech to restrict speech, everyone loses. Black Americans and America at large have nothing to gain from giving others more power over how they think, speak or see.

Horace Cooper is chairman of Project 21 and a board member at the National Center for Public Policy Research.

Paul Teller is the Executive Director of Advancing American Freedom, Mike Pence’s nonprofit organization.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Read more at DailyCaller.com.

Biden says he will not even begin to discuss the kind of reforms that could put our nation back on the path of fiscal solvency.

Today, President Biden is releasing a plan that he claims will trim $3 trillion off the deficit and save Medicare from financial collapse. In reality, what we already know about the president’s plan indicates it will likely be a mishmash of shell games, budget gimmicks, and massive tax hikes that will harm economic growth while merely delaying Medicare’s insolvency by a few more years.

On its current trajectory, Medicare will be unable to make good on its bills in 2029, triggering automatic cuts that will slash health-care benefits for millions of elderly Americans who rely on the program. The president and his team of economists and Ph.D.s want to kick the can down the road and let others deal with the long-lasting structural problems that have plagued the program for decades. Is this really the best we can do?

If Biden truly wanted to get us out of the financial hole we find ourselves in, there is a much simpler solution available to him: Stop digging. That is, Biden could single-handedly eliminate $1.3 trillion from the deficit by repealing the costly executive orders issued during his first two years, especially his unconstitutional student-loan-forgiveness plan, which remains on hold pending a Supreme Court decision. Instead, Biden is intent on adding more than $1 trillion to America’s growing mountain of debt.

The reason Biden is doomed to fail at reducing the deficit is that he refuses to acknowledge the heart of the problem: It’s not that we tax too little, it’s that we spend too much. Yet Biden and his team refuse to cut one dime of spending.

With tax collections already at an all-time high, there is simply not much additional revenue that can be squeezed out of American taxpayers. In 2022, Americans paid an amount in taxes equal to nearly 20 percent of U.S. GDP — just a fraction less than our ancestors had paid to fuel the Allied war machine during World War II, when the top marginal income-tax rate was 94 percent.

Assuming any additional rate hikes don’t shove our precariously balanced economy into a full-blown recession, they will certainly shrink our economic output and lead to lower net revenue collected, as Reagan economist Art Laffer famously observed.

Every day under President Biden, we are falling deeper into in an economic pit that we cannot tax our way out of. If we fail to turn things around soon, the next generation will bear a debt burden totaling $100 trillion or more by 2050.

It is time for political leadership to acknowledge reality. Denial has allowed the fiscal problems before us to fester like a cancer. In 1965, entitlement programs such as Social Security (which Biden’s proposal does not even begin to address) and Medicare constituted one-third of the national budget. In the intervening years, mandatory spending has metastasized to 76 percent of the budget, dwarfing all other spending, including national defense.

President Biden’s policy is insolvency. Biden says he will not even begin to discuss the kind of reforms that could put our nation back on the path of fiscal solvency. Every year that we wait means more debt and more painful solutions. The American people deserve better.

Biden’s latest budget of runaway spending and taxes makes clear that we need new leadership. We need leaders who will level with the American people, who will lead our nation to the kind of commonsense and compassionate reforms that will preserve these programs for Americans who need them most, and who will save America from the unprecedented debt crisis that our children and grandchildren are currently facing.

Read more at NationalReview.com.

Both chambers of the United States Congress recently came together in bipartisan fashion to protect the American people against a conspiracy to weaponize their retirement accounts. Thanks to efforts led by Advancing American Freedom (AAF), a resolution to overturn Biden’s “woke 401(k) rule” is now on its way to the Resolute Desk.

While many had been sleeping on this issue, bureaucrats at international institutions, state governments, and agencies across the U.S. government were pushing financial institutions away from their fiduciary standards for decades towards a dangerous politically-driven investment standard known as Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG). While the old standard formed a bond of trust between an American and the institutions that handled his or her hard-earned money, the new standard of ESG empowered bad actors (and coerced otherwise well-meaning ones) into poor investment decisions based not on the expectation of return in value but an attempt to use peoples’ savings to push certain Leftist values on the free market.

In Nov. 2022, the Biden administration, the chief culprit in pushing the ESG agenda, sought to overturn that golden standard of fiduciary duty to American workers by encouraging the managers of their pension funds and 401(k) retirement accounts to pour their life’s savings into a risky set of investments that score highly on the arbitrary ESG standards set by unaccountable activists and bureaucrats.

Fortunately, Senator Mike Braun and Congressman Andy Barr led a bold congressional initiative to overturn the Biden administration’s dangerous ESG rule through the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which allows Congress to strike down bad rules recently issued by the federal government. AAF created a national advocacy campaign in support of the CRA, garnering bipartisan support in the House and the Senate through targeted advertisements, grassroots activism, and coalition leadership. As a result of AAF’s campaign, Senator Manchin (D-WV) cosponsored the effort and Senator Tester (D-MT) supported it on the Senate floor.

Despite the bipartisan support for the rollback of this rule, President Biden has broadcasted his intentions to betray the popular will and the interests of the American people by issuing the first veto of his administration. In doing so, he is sending a clear message that his progressive agenda is a higher priority than the financial security of more than 150 million Americans. For an administration that attempts to brand itself as “the most pro-worker Administration in history,” the actions of the Biden administration, made manifest in this announced veto, say otherwise.

It is a tenet of a free society that people be able to use their own money as they see fit. Forcing Americans into ESG investment strategies is not only politically inappropriate; it is fiscally irresponsible. Conservatives have taken the first steps to secure Americans’ financial futures, and now we are calling on President Biden to sign the joint resolution and rebuke pension politics.

Read more at DailyCaller.com

A nonprofit organization founded by former Vice President Mike Pence is launching a major ad campaign to combat a controversial investing movement that critics decry for pushing “woke” political causes.

Advancing American Freedom on Wednesday announced a six-figure ad campaign in Arizona and Montana calling for support on a resolution introduced by Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., and Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., that would roll back the Biden administration’s ability to regulate how Americans’ retirement accounts are managed with respect to ESG criteria.

ESG, short for environmental, social, and governance investing, is based on the concept that investors should use these three broad categories when evaluating where to put their money, prioritizing progressive values and “social responsibility” when making financial decisions.

The Biden administration recently implemented a new rule that allows managers to factor environmental and social issues into investment decisions for the retirement funds of more than 152 million Americans.

Beyond the ad campaign, Advancing American Freedom also recently led a coalition letter, co-signed by over 100 conservative leaders and officials, calling on members to support the resolution.

Pence has been an outspoken critic of ESG, decrying it in speeches and op-eds.

ESG has become a politically explosive issue over the past couple years.

The theory underpinning ESG is that corporations should deemphasize their traditional responsibility to maximize value for shareholders and instead make new commitments to alternative stakeholder groups, serving other interests and society at large.

Many investors now use ESG as a rating system to measure a company’s advancement of policies designed to address climate change, increase corporate board demographic diversity, and support a progressive “social justice” agenda, among other initiatives.

However, critics of what they describe as “corporate wokeness” have been mobilizing against the march of ESG advocates, arguing the financial movement is a way to push left-wing causes through business rather than the legislature.

The ad campaign by Advancing American Freedom comes as speculation grows that Pence may join the 2024 Republican presidential primary field.

Next week, the former vice president is heading to South Carolina, the state that holds the third contest in the GOP presidential nominating calendar. He’s also spoken out on a range of prominent issues in recent days.

Read more here at Foxnews.com.