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Governors and other leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) from Northern Nigeria have demanded that the presidential ticket of the party be zoned to the southern part of the country.

The governors stated their position in a public statement signed by 10 of them and the leader of the party in Sokoto State, Aliyu Wamakko.

A total of 22 of Nigerias 36 states are governed by the APC. Fourteen of the governors are from the North, while eight are from the South.

Only four northern APC state governors did not sign the statement. Two of them, Yahaya Bello of Kogi and Abubakar Badaru of Jigawa, are among the APCs 23 presidential aspirants.

The 10 Northern APC governors that signed the statement are those of Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Niger, Nasarawa, Zamfara, Gombe, Borno, Plateau and Kebbi.

The statement by the Northern governors comes a few days after President Muhammadu Buhari told APC governors that he wanted to pick his successor and needs their support to do so.

Mr Buhari did not, however, name his preferred candidate, thus leaving room for speculations.

At the time of this report, Mr Buhari was meeting with the 23 presidential aspirants of the APC.

Before the stance of the northern APC governors, their colleagues from the south had unanimously stated that the partys presidential candidate should be from the southern part of the country.

Read the full statement by the Northern APC governors below.

APC governors and political leaders from the northern states of Nigeria today met to review the political situation and to further support our Party in providing progressive leadership amidst our national challenges. During our discussions, we welcomed President Muhammadu Buharis invitation to governors and other stakeholders to contribute to the emergence of a strong presidential candidate for the APC.

After careful deliberation, we wish to state our firm conviction that after eight years in office of President Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential candidate of the APC for the 2023 elections should be one of our teeming members from the southern states of Nigeria. It is a question of honour for the APC, an obligation that is not in anyway affected by the decisions taken by another political party. We affirm that upholding this principle is in the interest of building a stronger, more united and more progressive country.

We therefore wish to strongly recommend to President Muhammadu Buhari that the search for a successor as the APCs presidential candidate be limited to our compatriots from the southern states. We appeal to all aspirants from the northern states to withdraw in the national interest and allow only the aspirants from the south to proceed to the primaries. We are delighted by the decision of our esteemed colleague, His Excellency, Governor Abubakar Badaru to contribute to this patriotic quest by withdrawing his presidential aspiration.

The APC has a duty to ensure that the 2023 elections offer a nation-building moment, reaffirming that a democratic pathway to power exists for all who value cooperation and build national platforms. This moment calls for the most sober and inclusive approach to selecting our partys candidate, and we call on all APC leaders to fulfil their responsibility in this regard.

Signed, 4th June 2022:

1. Aminu Bello Masari Governor of Katsina State

2. Abubakar Sani Bello Governor of Niger State

3. Abdullahi A. Sule Governor of Nasarawa State

4. Prof. B.G. Umara Zulum Governor of Borno State

5. Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai Governor of Kaduna State

6. Muhammad Inuwa Yahaya Governor of Gombe State

7. Bello M. Matawalle Governor of Zamfara State

8. Simon Bako Lalong Governor of Plateau State

9. Senator Aliyu Wamakko Former Governor of Sokoto State

10. Dr. A.U. Ganduje Governor of Kano State

11. Senator Abubakar Atiku Bagudu Governor of Kebbi State

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2023: Northern APC governors meet, want presidency zoned to the South - Premium Times

Blair urges progressives to rebuild atrophied muscles of self-discipline. For much of the left, Blair said on Clintons program, its not clear that their main goal is really to win power or wield it: Its primary purpose is to make itself feel good about itself, right? To convince itself that its principled, right? But that is in the end, something that leads you to self-indulgence. Unless progressives commit to reclaiming the center in culture wars, Blair added, theyll remain vulnerable to some loose remark from someone being exploited by the right and will be hammered day in, day out. Thats just not competent politics.

A reasonable question: Who cares what these superannuated politicians have to say? A reasonable answer: Even now, a generation after they came to power, Clinton and Blair are still the emblematic representatives of a distinct brand of progressive centrism.

That description is faint praise to some ears, and criticism to others. But this is an apt moment to recall a time when it was invoked unambiguously as a compliment.

Blairs appearance on Clintons podcast marked the 25th anniversary of a then 43-year-old Blair coming to power as prime minister in Britain in May 1997. Shortly after Blairs victory, Clinton who at 50 had been inaugurated for his second term a few months before arrived in London on a working visit. The two leaders held a news conference in the garden of 10 Downing Street in which they held forth with absorbing fluency on the lessons of their dual success.

I was a White House reporter at the time, and the news conference remains one of my vivid memories in six years covering Clintons presidency. Most journalists, like many others in the U.S. political class, tended to vow Clintons centrist New Democrat image through the prism of narrow political messaging. By these lights, it was essentially a set of defensive tactics, designed to reassure voters that Clinton was not a more traditional interest-group liberal like Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis.

Blairs victory, and seeing two energetic young leaders standing side-by-side with obvious mutual respect, suddenly made plain how inadequate it was to view Clintonism as merely slick salesmanship and tactical improvisation. It was plainly something more a set of ideas about how progressives should govern in a modern economy and an increasingly interconnected world. Blairs election, in combination with the successes of similar politicians in other countries, clearly indicated these ideas were on the march globally.

Then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, center right, and his wife Hillary, left, pose in front of London's Tower Bridge with then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, right, and his wife Cherie, center left, before dining in a nearby restaurant.|Greg Gibson, File/AP Photo

The brand of politics Blair and Clinton stood for now often called Third Way, a phrase then not yet in vogue in the United States started with a critique of the alternatives. The problem with traditional liberalism was that it was stuck in a rut more responsive to its interest groups than the broader public interest, insufficiently attuned to the imperative of economic growth. The problem with the post-Reagan, post-Thatcher right was that it had turned brutish and backward-looking enmeshed in racial and sexual prejudice, indifferent to the challenge of expanding opportunity to people who didnt already count as societys winners.

These shortcomings meant that an energetic, disciplined politics of the center was the best hope for creating a humane, rational, prosperous global order in the 21st century. Expanded global trade, technological disruption and a burgeoning, super-wealthy entrepreneurial class could be good things so long as government protected the most vulnerable and expanded opportunity with targeted assistance in education, childcare and healthcare.

In the 1997 news conference, Clinton referred to the vital center, while Blair invoked the radical center. Both men invoke precisely the same terms in the new podcast. While both leaders are sometimes portrayed as expedient and constantly calibrating politicians, whats striking is the degree of consistency in their worldviews across a quarter-century. Whats different is that in 1997, just on the brink of the 21st century, Blair and Clinton were describing the world as a fundamentally hopeful place. Now we have had nearly a generation of real-world experience with that century marked by war, climate change, virulent nationalism, tribalistic identity politics and a malevolent media ecosystem trafficking in misinformation, commercialized contempt and nihilism. In the podcast, even natural optimists like Clinton and Blair strike notably downbeat notes.

Their conversation invites two questions: Why has that brand of politics, in the ascendancy in 1997, spent most of the years since then in retreat? And is there any relevance to their examples now?

The first answer, of course, is that they paid the price for policy and personal misjudgments. Within months of the Downing Street news conference, Clinton was engulfed in scandal. He survived that, but his ability to challenge his own party and lead a new centrist coalition was sharply limited. Blairs robust support for the Iraq War decimated his popularity and gave him culpability in one of the great policy debacles of this generation. The Clinton-Blair brand of centrism, which cheered free markets and was friendly with Wall Street, was damaged further by the 2008 financial crisis.

Other problems shadow their desire to assume the elder statesman role. Blair was for a time the most unpopular former prime minister in modern British history. He embarked on what many admirers regarded as a disappointing lifestyle of lucrative corporate consultancies and tabloid gossip about a jet-setting social life. Clinton lowered his public profile as the #MeToo movement put accounts of his itinerant past in a more glaring light, and prompted stories about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, who loaned Clinton his airplane.

But both men seem eager to reclaim their political voices. Clinton in September will revive annual summits of the Clinton Global Initiative, which has been dormant for years after he suspended it during Hillary Rodham Clintons 2016 presidential run. Blair has been evangelizing for his brand of centrist policy responses to issues ranging climate change to right-wing populism through his Institute for Global Change.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, right, and former President Bill Clinton hold an on-stage discussion at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Monday, Sept. 13, 2010.|Matt Rourke/AP Photo

More so than Clinton, Blair seems eager to confront politicians he disagrees with. Of his Labour Partys problems, Blair rasped: We suffered the last election defeat, which was terrible. And I say [to fellow progressives] What makes you think if theyve been voting conservative for three elections, what they want is a really left-wing labor party, when theyve been rejecting a moderately left-wing party?

Blair told Clinton the problem isnt lack of demand for centrist politics, but that few people are defining the center in a compelling way: We are not splitting the difference between left and right, but youre trying to understand the way the worlds changing and apply eternal values to a changing situation. I think thats the best position for progressive politics. And I think it usually wins when it offers that.

Can this brand of politics compete in a world where extremism often seems like a rational response to the dysfunction and despair of conventional politics? The answer, as ever, is compared to what.

Clinton borrowed his phrase The Vital Center from a landmark book of that name in 1949 by the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Late in his life, Schlesinger appreciated the recognition but was uneasy about the association. His Vital Center did not refer to U.S. domestic politics, and it did not mean middle of the road politics. It meant the robust liberal alternative to fascism totalitarianism on the right and communist totalitarianism on the left.

Something like that context exists today, far more than in 1997. From Russia flows a backward-looking vision, based on nostalgia for a lost age that Vladimir Putin and his admirers believe can be reclaimed through violent nationalism. From China flows a futuristic vision of a new world empire in which technology can be turned into an instrument of surveillance and state control. What both visions have in common is the crushing of individual liberty, free press and the right to dissent. In the center between those two are Western democracies. For the moment, they are hardly vital, but instead are snarling, demoralized, dysfunctional.

Blair said he remains optimistic because of human spirit which I believe is basically benign, even though people can of course behave very badly that human spirit is what will us through ultimately, but it needs agency. It needs us to get behind it and do it.

Blair and Clinton may be damaged messengers, but that message is still valuable. The alternative to the vital center is the dead center and an increasingly ugly future.

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Bill Clinton and Tony Blair Have a Warning for Progressives - POLITICO

Anger over issues such as the mask mandate galvanized families like these seen at the Hillsborough County School Board in Tampa, Fla., last year into running for school board. Progressive groups are taking a leaf out of their playbook. Octavio Jones/Getty Images hide caption

Anger over issues such as the mask mandate galvanized families like these seen at the Hillsborough County School Board in Tampa, Fla., last year into running for school board. Progressive groups are taking a leaf out of their playbook.

A lot of people who run for school board are parents or teachers; 19-year-old Maryam Zafar is neither.

"I have a lot of like, really close experience to a big chunk of the people that we are supposed to be serving as a school board," she said. "And just because of my age, people automatically know that I have a unique perspective, whether they've heard it or not."

Zafar is a student at the University of Texas-Austin, and also a 2020 graduate of McNeil High School, in the Austin, Texas, suburb of Round Rock.

"I am really privileged to have gone here; it gave me a lot of opportunities, but it wasn't always a healthy or safe space for me and my friends, especially in regards to sexual harassment and assault," she said in the courtyard of Round Rock High School on a recent spring afternoon, as students left school for the day. "I was in ROTC, which was the Air Force program in my high school. And so one big part of my job that I kind of undertook as my responsibility, was in trying to handle any sort of harassment case that came up."

That experience, she says, made her want to be a school board member in that district. To prepare for her run, Zafar has done trainings with the progressive group Run for Something.

The group has for years recruited people to run for many different offices, but cofounder Amanda Litman says they are putting new effort into school boards.

"One of the things we realized after 2020 was we have to focus in on these local positions like school boards," Litman said. "There is such a need for broad progressive focusing on these local positions. There are more than 80,000 elected school board positions across the country. About 21,000 of them are up this year."

Interest in running for school board is up nationwide. Only 25% of school board races are unopposed this year, down from 35% last year and 40% in 2018, according to Ballotpedia.

Because school board elections are overwhelmingly nonpartisan, it's hard to quantify who or what is behind all that energy.

But then, there has been an undeniable groundswell of conservative enthusiasm around school politics in the last few years, most notably around national issues like race, LGBTQ issues, and COVID. Groups like Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education are among the groups working to harness parents' frustration.

Progressives like Litman, at Run for Something, are hoping to make sure they have their own source of organization not to mention funding to counter the enthusiasm from the right.

"The far right is investing a ton in outside PAC spending. We have seen that the Leadership Institute, which is the Koch Brothers-funded nonprofit that does conservative training for operatives and activists, has been running for programming on school boards all year long," Litman said. "Moms for Liberty is focusing hard on school board positions and candidate support. So they're doubling and tripling down. Here we have to as well."

It's not totally new for national-level politics to become a part of school board elections in the '90s, conservative parents targeted the teaching of sex education and evolution. Likewise, opposition to the No Child Left Behind policy galvanized some parents during the George W. Bush presidency.

But the political landscape has vastly changed.

"What's different this time is the coordination, the financing and then social media really being able to spread a very consistent message to so many school districts so quickly," said Rebecca Jacobsen, professor of educational policy at Michigan State University, "whereas in previous eras, before internet and social media, these things happened, but at much slower paces. And in some ways, that slower pace gave rise to alternative voices, voices that maybe moderated the discussion."

And she says she fears that that kind of polarization at the local level could have worrying long-term effects for the public school system.

"Schools really are sort of the last holdout in our support for a big public institution, "Jacobsen said. "And so I think that that is maybe the more important impact of this than anything else, whether the policy becomes X or Y. I think whether we continue to believe that our local schools are good for all kids and that I want to continue sending my children there and supporting taxes. That, to me, is the bigger question."

Round Rock has seen national-level tensions play out locally one turbulent September meeting, where parents and board members clashed over masking, culminated in two arrests.

Zafar says that she's worried about meetings having been politicized.

"I have definitely seen that here," she said. "We've had a lot of disruption in our school board around mask mandates, and it's there has been a lot of legal action taken about that, and it's been a disruption to focusing on student outcomes and on the health and wellness of students."

At a Board of Trustees meeting this spring, Christy Slape said that social media and YouTube have helped galvanize area parents like her. She came to the meeting to speak about books she thought were, in her words, too sexual. She had first heard about the books when a fellow parent complained to the school.

"That just launched a whole basically like a snowball of parents wanting to know more about what books were in the classroom, and then other books being available in the libraries," she said. "And so across the country, there has been just a snowball effect of parents wanting to check their libraries and see what books are available in their libraries."

Slape did speak, but books were not on the agenda that night. Overwhelmingly, this board meeting was not about cultural flashpoints but instead, district concerns like student recognition and staff pay increases. That's a point that can be obscured by viral video clips of rowdy school board meetings: local school-board politics are very often not about national cultural conversations but instead, more mundane yet vital local topics, like bond issues.

Along those lines, Litman says she advises candidates to stick to concrete local fixes, as opposed to debates over things like critical race theory.

"You want to, like, really get to the heart of the matter, which is people are anxious about the quality of the school. What can you do to solve for that?" she said. "And usually it's quite boring. But it's also the things that are very specific and tangible that you can fix."

But then, school board members may confront problems they can't fix. The school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has put gun violence top of mind for Zafar, who grew up in the era of school lockdowns.

"It's been a really important issue to me since I was a kid I used to have nightmares about being shot," she said.

But she's also realistic about how much a school board member can do about shootings.

"I don't think we can do much about guns themselves," she said. "I think all we do is safety policies and locking people down and making sure people have the education to know what to do in a lockdown."

Meanwhile, Litman says she hopes members can have influence beyond their schools.

"I really think in many cases, the place for school board members is what can they do to push state legislators? How can school board members use their political platform and their bully pulpit to help advocate for broader statewide change?" she said.

While national politics have filtered down to school boards, in other words, her hope is that some members' political views will filter upward.

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Progressives try to counter right-wing school board anger - NPR

When Congress voted to spend tens of billions of dollars on military aid to Ukraine, all six members of the Squad voted yes. So did the rest of the Progressive Caucus. Bernie Sanders voted for it in the Senate.

That was a serious mistake. The conflict in Ukraine is looking more and more like a proxy war between Russia and the United Statesin fact, Seth Moulton of the House Armed Services Committee openly called it a proxy warand the consequences of deepening American involvement could be catastrophic. A particularly troubling portion of the $54 billion aid package is earmarked to the CIA for unspecified reasons.

Some Republicans did vote no on the aid. Does this mean, then, that Republicans are now the real anti-war voices in Congress, as some have suggested? That idea doesnt stand up to scrutiny. After all, those Republicans who voted no told us their reasons for voting that way in public statementsand for the most part those reasons dont seem to have much to do with promoting peace.

Instead, most cited cost as their main objection. Some said European nations should be picking up more of the tab since the conflict is taking place in Europe. A common theme was that the money would be better spent on militarizing the southern border.

Rather than being horrified at the prospect of escalating a conflict that could blow up into a wider war, some of the Republicans who voted no expressed enthusiasm about the Ukrainian cause (while saying that someone else should pick up the tab) and some expressed frank indifference to the whole thinga posture typified by Marjorie Taylor Greenes recent tweet about having sworn an oath of allegiance to the United States of AMERICA not the United States of Ukraine.

To give one of the strangest devils in the Congressional GOP her due, Greene has actually expressed support for the United States seeking peace in Ukraine in the past, although its worth noting that she wrapped even that call in the language of anti-China hawkery and the danger of pushing Russia into Chinas hands. And shes an outlier within the Republican no votes for having ever having talked about peace when shes talked about Ukraine.

As disappointing as it is that the progressives didnt stick to their principles in this vote, almost none of the Republicans who voted against the aid package have ever even pretended to have such principles in the first place. Indeed, many have a recent record of extreme hawkishness and several of them seem pretty enthusiastic about escalating tensions with China. This could easily lead to an even more destructive conflict than the one in Ukraine, given that boots on the ground seem to be very much on the table in discussions of a U.S. response to a possible war in Taiwan.

These anti-war Republicans seem to be all about anti-China brinksmanship. Why exactly are we supposed to believe they have principled objections to anti-Russia brinksmanship?

In their public statements they said they were voting against more funding for Ukraine because were spending too much money on European freeloaders and Ukrainians should figure out another way to pay for their war because they would prefer that we spend the money making the United States a fortress. Its a little much to say that their reasons really have something to do with a desire to de-escalate the conflict.

Outside of Congress, there actually is a faction in American politics that does want to bring about peace in Ukrainethe socialist Left. Jacobin, for example, has run numerous articles denouncing Russian imperialism and expressing solidarity with Russias heroic anti-war movement but also warning of the dangers of ever-more-direct U.S. involvement and calling for a negotiated settlement. So has this magazine. So has The Nation. So has In These Times.

Noam Chomsky was widely slandered as a Putin apologist for his advocacy of peace negotiations. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was pilloried by the mainstream media (very much including Fox News) and even denounced by the White House Rapid Response Director for the same reason.

The sad fact, though, is that no one in Congress fully shares the socialist Lefts positions on this issue. None of the Republicans or mainstream Democrats do, and even the most left-wing members of Congress have been unreliable allies on this and related foreign policy debates. Even Bernie Sanders advisor Matt Duss, the closest thing in Washington to a left-wing foreing policy thinker, has suggested that those in favor of a diplomatic settlement are advocating that Ukraine surrenders.

The Left has had some success in recent years in inserting some of our big domestic policy issues like Medicare for All into mainstream political discussion. On foreign policy, though, were still a long way from hearing anyone in the halls of power advocate for our positions.

Congressional progressives should be focusing their energies on pushing for a negotiated de-escalation of the conflict, with the United States having a direct seat at the tablesomething that Matt Duss seems to have forgotten that Bernie Sanders called for in an op-ed in the Guardian back in February. Ukrainian interests arent being served by prolonging the war with the professed goal of weakening Russia to the point where its no longer capable of waging warwhich, taken literally, would mean turning one of the worlds major nuclear powers into a failed state. Every day that peace talks dont happen, more Ukrainians die, and the world gets a little closer to a truly disastrous direct war between the United States and Russia.

As Anatol Lieven has pointed out, Russia has already suffered a massive defeat in Ukraine. Theres at least some grounds for hoping that this will make Putin more amenable to a settlement that can save him from humiliation and get the sanctions liftedif hes presented with that off-ramp. Right now, far from offering to sit down and talk, Biden keeps dropping ominous hints about regime change and war crimes tribunals that send the message that the Russians only option is to keep fighting to the bitter end.

We constantly hear from hawks that Putin has no interest in negotiating. Somehow, though, no one who says this ever seems to want to test their hypothesis by having Biden directly participate in peace talkseven though the United States is sending tens of billions in lethal aid, helping assassinate Russian generals and sink Russian ships, and taking the lead in imposing sweeping sanctions on the Russian economy. No serious person could deny that the United States would have far more leverage with Russia in such negotiations than any other country. And the idea that it would be meddling in the sovereign prerogatives of Ukraine for the United States to involve itself in negotiations to settle the conflictbut its not meddling to do everything I just describedis brain-meltingly ridiculous.

Back in March, Ilhan Omar raised a number of concerns about the possible bad consequences of flooding Ukraine with weapons that will in some cases end up in the hands of extreme right-wing paramilitaries or make their way to the global black market.

These remain extremely legitimate concerns. You can argue that Omars point is outweighed by the legitimate need of a nation facing imperial invasion to defend itself. Fine. But even so, Omar and the other progressives should have at least made their votes for further lethal aid conditional on the United States immediately entering peace talks to at least try to de-escalate the conflict.

This is hardly the first time that the informal social democratic caucus in Congress (the Squad in the House and Bernie in the Senate) has been a disappointment on issues of war and peace. Jamaal Bowman, for example, voted to fund Israels Iron Dome missile defense system, while AOC shamefully backed down under last minute pressure and changed her Iron Dome vote from no to present.

While Bernie Sanders is (thank God) not friends with Henry Kissinger and was clearly better on foreign policy than Hillary Clinton in 2016 (or anyone in the clown car of centrists he faced off against in 2020), his foreign policy voting record is far from perfect. For example, he joined the stampede of Democrats who, aside from a few honorable exceptions like Dennis Kucinich, voted to authorize the U.S. intervention in Serbia in 1999. His record on Palestine has been mixed, though hes moved to a more full-throated criticism of Israel in recent years. He, too, voted for Iron Dome funding, but at least demanded something in exchangeincreased aid for the victims of Israeli occupation in Gaza.

While its not exactly a secret that Bernie and the Squad are, in practice, often far more moderate and mainstream on any number of issues than we would like them to be, thoughtful leftists have often been understandably reluctant to focus much of our fire on the tiny handful of politicians who are closest to our views relative to the rest of Congress. It can smack of a self-destructive circular firing squad mentality, especially when approached in a flamboyant and click-bait-y way. (See: Dore, Jimmy.) But when left-wing politicians get it wrong on issues this important (or start out getting them right and waver in the face of jingoistic pressure), they deserve criticism. If we care as much about anti-imperialism as we do about Medicare for All and other domestic policy issues, we cant ignore the gap between where Left-aligned members of Congress are and where we need them to be.

Honesty about these issues cuts in multiple directions, though, and we need to acknowledge that allegedly anti-war Republicans like Josh Hawley actually stand much farther from our overall position on questions of war and peace than anyone in the Squad. Crumbling to public pressure and voting to pour more guns and money into a proxy war is bad, but you know whats worse? A foreign policy record like Hawleys. Just in the last few years, Hawley has:

The idea that Hawley, or any of the Republican no voters on the Ukraine bill who were calling for Biden to be impeached over the withdrawal from Afghanistan, is the real critic of militarism in Congress is a bad joke.

The America First element of the GOP sometimes uses rhetoric about how people are suffering at home as wars are waged abroad, but the truth is that they arent that anti-war. They also dont want to do much of anything to help those people suffering at home. For example, all of the most hardcore MAGA populists in Congress voted against capping the price of insulin. Even that was too much of themnever mind doing something truly crazy and socialist like just giving diabetics insulin for free. Thats the Rights alleged populists for you.

It is outrageous that the United States is fighting direct and proxy wars around the world instead of redirecting those resources to helping people meet their basic needs. And we do need to get more members of Congress elected who have better positions on both halves of that equation. The Squad are sometimes inconsistent and unreliable allies, especially on the foreign policy half. Theyre much better than the nothing that the Left had in Congress before they were elected, but still well short of what we need. We should recognize the complexities here with open eyesand apply that same clarity to outright enemies like Josh Hawley.

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Congressional Progressives Need To Do Better on Foreign PolicyBut That Doesn't Mean Republicans Are Doves Current Affairs - Current Affairs

BlackRocks Salim Ramji tries to deflect criticism of his firms progressive political agenda (Letters, May 27). He claims that BlackRock casts proxy votes based only on long-term interests of clients. It needs to define long term, by which it means the benefits of mitigating climate change by leaving fossil fuels in the ground. If a client is a retiree, is long term sooner than death? Is BlackRocks $10 trillion in assets enough to engineer a self-fulfilling prophecy of a premature leap to a carbon-free but energy-deficient future?

Mr. Ramji claims that BlackRock merely wants more disclosure. But detailed disclosures about ESG policies are about as innocuous as progressives disclosing home addresses of Supreme Court justices. He adds that index-fund managers faithfully track an index and therefore cannot divert assets from specific industries. But when BlackRock pressures CEOs of oil companies in the index to spend less on oil exploration, production and distribution, the index return is affected. If the short-term effect of lower-carbon guidance is a lower index return, clients suffer an opportunity costbut no one is the wiser because BlackRock faithfully tracks and matches the return of the index.

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BlackRock Gives Up Neither Power Nor Progressivism - The Wall Street Journal