We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Trishinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to
the premium version of the Federalist dot Com as well. Monitored to be joined
today by Riley Moore, west Virginia's state treasurer, elected back in twenty twenty
and now a candidate for Congress for West Virginia second District. Thank you so
much, mister Moore for joining the show. Oh, thank you so much
for having me. So tell us us a little bit about I'm curious actually,
because you've been exercising your power as the state Treasurer of West Virginia in
some fascinating ways. We're going to get into how you've tackled this enormous problem
of ESG, really innovative stuff. But now you're interested in running for Congress
as well. And I know you've talked about how the and you are running
for Congress. You've talked about how Congress has the power of the purse.
I mean, incredibly awesome and important power. Why go from one office to
the next. What is it that attracts you to this position? Is it
really the power of the purse and how you can sort of tackle some of
these issues that are so close to your heart through that office. Well,
that's part of it, right, And that's what we've been able to leverage
here is our tax dollars to protect our economy, our jobs, our way
of life, our culture in the state of West Virginia. And I think
you could do that same thing in Congress. Certainly, that's part of the
reason why I want to run. But these are also difficult times. And
you know, it's easy to be a member of Congress and easy times,
but we need people to step up. And I think I got a proven
track record. It speaks for itself of accomplishment at the state level. I
don't want to take that record of success and bring that to Congress. Look,
I'm a conservative fighter, and not only now everybody always says I'm a
fighter, but I'm also somebody who wins. And I think that's a big
distinction, right, is that we've got some wins that were chalking up here
in the state of West Virginia, particularly against the ESG movement that have had
national implications now for the last several years since I've been in this office,
and I'd like to apply that at the federal level. I'm sure people would
say, well, you're one of four hundred and thirty five, how are
you going to do that? Well, Look, I was able to do
that as a state treasure in one of the smallest states in the country by
forming coalitions, by continuing to be persistent and pushing forward. I think that's
what it takes to be successful in Congress as well. Now, you made
news this week and I'm really eager to get as some more details on this.
You sent notices just yesterday so Monday, to six financial institutions basically warning
them they might be added to the state's restricted financial institution list after kind of
categorizing them as people who are engaged in these boycotts of fossil fuel companies under
your state's law. Can you tell us a little bit more about the step
that you took, and I know you actually took steps leading up to this.
Maybe you could q listeners not from West Virginia in a little bit on
how you've tackled this in your state, sure, happy to. And I
mean there's a long list of pieces of legislation I've put forward that have addressed
ESG not only on a state level, but also on a national level.
And what I would point your listeners to is really all the way back in
twenty twenty one, I formed a coalition of fifteen states around the country and
we sent a letter to large financial institutions by administration saying, if you continue
down this path the ESG, the states are going to be left with no
option other than two acts. Now, people send letters all the time,
so I'm sure, and they ignore them routinely. But this time we sent
a follow up letter in may Or Parton in November, and we did take
action where we said, look, we're going to start changing our contracting procedures
here in our various states. And we started to do that, and I
decided to say, look, I don't think this is enough. I think
we need to take greater action because we had lived through this already in West
Virginia Obama War on coal. We lost tens of thousands of jobs, devastated
our economy. It's an existential threat to us here in the state of West
Virginia. But it does affect everybody in the country in terms of cost of
energy, your utility bills, I mean even things that show up at the
grocery store. They all travel on trucks and things like that, and price
of gas and everything else going up. Effectset rights passed through. So in
any event, November we started to take that action in twenty one. Then
in twenty twenty two, right at the beginning in January, I became the
first elected official in the United States to divest from Blackrock, and so we
pulled our money in the state treasury out of Blackrock. I'm happy to report
now around this coalition that we formed, we've had nearly ten states that have
also divested from Blackrock, different state treasures around the country. Then in twenty
twenty two, we came up with the after we divested from Blackrock, I
introduced what it's called the Restricted Financial Institution List Law, and that passed in
the twenty twenty two legislative session, and we took our first run at that.
We were the first state again in America to put out a restricted Financial
Institution list. Happy to say we've had eight states follow that as well.
Texas has come in a lot of other big states. And that's the thing.
If West Virginia just does it on its own, it's great. You
know, look, we're fighting for you know, our equities or interests here
in the state, but to have a national movement any big national players like
Texas, and I'm so grateful to Texas, Kentucky and other states Oklahoma and
others that had stepped up and really helped move this forward. So in twenty
twenty two, we ended up putting black Rock, Goldman, Sachs, JP,
Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo on the restricted financial institution
list. So what does that mean. That means if they currently had contracts
with them with US, those contracts were terminated. And that's with any entity
in state government, even the universities. I have the sole contracting authority in
the state of Westernvirginia, and then they are prohibited from bidding on any future
contracts with US. So we ended up terminating quite a bit of contracts with
some of these financial institutions. I just mentioned JP Morgan Chase being one of
the bigger ones of those. But the great news on this was US Bank
was actually the sixth financial institution that received a letter fifth largest bank assets in
our management in the country, and they reversed course and dropped their ESG policy,
and to this day they retained their contract with me here in West Virginia,
our ACCH contract that does about twenty billion dollars a year in transactions.
So now we've moved forward after we've done that, and we've taken another look
at this this first list that we had put out and folks that we now
prohibit from doing business with state government here in West Virginia. As I mentioned,
those are folks that we're either authorized to do business with or recurrently.
Now, any financial institution out there can bid on any of these contracts that
we have. And every state does this. I mean we don't unless you're
up there in North Dakota. We don't have a state bank, right,
I mean, there's basically no states do. So we have to bid these
services out with merchant service, ACCH, you name it, a whole bunch
of others things, you know, managing your cash management, cash flow and
all these other things. So City Bank and some of these others who could
bid on these, we have found that they appear to be engaging in boycott
to the fossil fuel industry. What does that mean that by policy they refuse
to do business with any fossil fuel company, So they are prohibiting access to
capital based on the industry that they're in. It's all political. It's not
based on risk, it's not based on return, it's not based on capital,
it's not based on collateral and these other types of things. So for
us, if anybody who's sitting out there saying is this constitutional, absolutely it
is because we have a conflict of interest here. If I hand over tax
dollars generator from the fossil fuel industry here in West Virginia to an institution whose
policies are ESG in which they are trying to diminish those industries and then thereby
diminish the funds at which they are managing, that is a conflict of interest
for us. I'll give you an example, severance tax, which is paid
when anything is taken out of the ground coal, gas, or oil.
Last fiscal years, roughly about a billion dollars. Well, the state budget
of West Virginia is four point seven billion dollars, so that's a pretty good
chunk of change for us. So that's where that conflict of interest comes into
play. There's several other things that we've done as it relates to ESG in
pass into law, and we've really been a leader on here in the state.
But I've talked for a while, so I'll kind of pause and see
if you have any follow ups. So, no, that was extremely helpful.
We've definitely talked about ESG many times on the show before, but actually
that was a really useful breakdown, especially because there's so much media coverage suggesting
and actually it advances some of these nonsense studies and reports about how ESG is
actually a great investment, that it's better for people's portfolios. But it sounds
actually like you, based on your experience in West Virginia, and there's plenty
of research that shows the contrary, you found that to be absolutely not true.
And in an interview I wanted to ask you about this too. I
think you were talking to maybe it was Politico, and you said, I
was approached by coal operators who say they are facing problems maintaining their operations because
of the restrictions on access to capital. Folks will say that it's not happening.
It's absolutely happening. So it actually sounds like the way that you started
dealing with this issue is because you heard that it was happening. Could you
tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, I know it for a
fact. They can say whatever they want, but I know that some of
these large banks and others were cutting off access to capital. Some of these
coal companies been doing business with some of these guys for a long time and
they said, no, we've got to decarbonizer our portfolios. Sorry, I
can't do this anymore. So I know it for a fact. But I
do know this that we're winning because I've had coal companies now come to me
and say, for the first time in a few years now, we have
had some of these banks and larger financial institutions coming back to us and saying,
we'd like to talk about doing business again. So we are winning.
We are winning. And that is something that I really can't emphasize enough because
we talk about problems all the time and what's happening to us and how terrible
this is is Republicans, Oh, what are we going to do? The
left is so crazy? Yeah they are. And it's one thing to highlight
the problem, it's another to do something about it. And that's why I've
been exercising my authority that's been given to me by the voters of the state
of West Virginia, because look, I can sit here and tell them that
they're being screwed, but guess what, they already know that they already know
that they would like to be to do something about it. So that is
what we've been doing here in West Virginia. And I certainly feel like we
are winning because we're starting to see some of the cracks and all this,
particularly if you look at the last proxy voting season and how Black Rocks State
Street Vanguard, how these guys I mean in single digits supported some of these
activist shareholder resolutions, like you rightfully pointed out, I mean ESG Securities.
Third joke, the asset managers, they love them because the expense ratio is
so high on it, so people are basically paying for the premium and feeling
good about what they're doing, and they're trying to tell them, man,
we got these high returns on this. Well, if you look in the
previous year, these like ESG et s, they're overloaded on tech stocks and
ESG does one thing and the capital markets is important to understand, they lack
diversity. There's no diversity, so you can't hedge, right. So as
the tech stocks went down and they're overweighted on those and the energy stocks rally,
they missed that rally, right, and so people lost money. And
that is if you go back to the more modern portfolio theory that essentially created
ETFs to begin with, right, the idea behind these kind of like passive
investment vehicles that are out there, like you know that tracks E s and
P five hundred or something like that is to maximize or a pardon me.
The idea was essentially to have consist returns and minimize risk. Well, you're
not doing that, right, So it goes contrary to kind of the modern
portfolio theory. Really, so I think it's interesting that they're even able to
advertise these things in the way that they are. I mean, maybe that's
somebody gets elected to Congress. Take a look at the SEC and how they're
actually advertising some of these index funds and these other things. I mean,
I think it's very fascinating that we allow this to happen. History, economics,
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a burning question I had for you. You know, Larry Fink will talk
about how people like Larry Fink, Larry Fink himself have tried to sort of
disguise what they're doing, and I'm curious, actually, just from the outside,
it seems to me that what's really happening is they're trying to say they're
not investing in ESG as a way to respond to the public pressures against ESG
while still doing ESG. But also at the same time that is a success.
You know, even that they're feeling public pressure, that's a success on
behalf of the anti ESG movement. You know, leaders in that movement like
you's the what's really happening here? Are they? Are they just getting a
little bit more secretive and veil or is this really progress against ESG? I
think there's real progress against ESG, but it's certainly segmented. I'd say amongst
the lending institutions, the banks of this country. You do start to see
some movement on that. Some of these large asset managers like a black Rock,
I think they're trying to have it both ways, and they've been doing
that for a while. Right. Vanguard was the first to really take an
about face on this and really call out like, look, you can't just
be pushing ESG and also be a good fiduciary, right and that and that's
the thing, right, I mean that you know, they're perhaps the end
of the day, violating the fiduciary duty in some of this and the way
that they're managing their money. Now, so you've seen some are trying to
change the language around ESG, do it in a different talk about it in
different terms, right, I mean we've seen that they're the mass of languages
and acronyms and all that. Yeah, yeah, you know, but look,
I'm acutely aware of that everybody is. Now. What I do know,
as I did state, is that talking to actual producers of fossil fuels
and things like that, there is progress there. Now. Look, obviously
you got the S and the G as part of this, and I that's
the other part of this kind of big fight. I think to them,
they were thinking the E would be the easiest part, right, but they're
working on the social aspects and the governance and all this other. So that's
why it was so important for state like West Virginia, and we've had other
states now follow this to revise in law our proxy voting policy. Now that's
kind of a for people that don't follow what a proxy vote is, kind
of a complicated issue, but essentially, at the end of the day,
the way this works is we got a pension fund thirty billion dollars, give
or take, and we have tens of thousands of votes that get cast.
Now we're not sitting there casting all of these votes. Use proxy advisory firms
and black Rock and some of these others. Though in how some of this,
and there's iss and Glass lewis involved in this, which, by the
way, control like ninety five percent of the market space on proxy advisory.
That's a whole other problem. But we passed a law that said our proxy
votes can no longer be cast for any ESG measure on any publicly traded board
that is out there. That is a very important thing because when you say
Blackrock has and I don't know what it is as we sit here today,
you know nine ten trillion dollars assets under management. It's assets under management.
It's other people's money, that's not their money, and they're using that to
be able to leverage power. This is how through proxy voting they're able to
change the composition of boards. Like Exxon Mobiles is a great example, right,
that happened a few years back, and they were able to put activist
members onto exon mobile and they voted then to push to reduce oil production and
refinery by twenty percent and invest twenty percent in green energy. Well, I
guess we probably could have used that here more recently. So you know,
look, I'm not a oil expert, but I imagine for an oil company
is probably better to produce more than less. So that's where you get into
this issue of voting in a manner that only takes kind of the pecuniary interest
in the consideration. That's a risk and return and that's what we got back
to, and that's the standard that we're trying that we must be met with
our proxy votes. But that's really where a lot of this power lies is
in the proxy voting. Right. That's why it's so important to take back
control of your voice and your vote and your pension fund. That's why it's
important what they try to do there in Congress. But the Biden administration vetoted
it the Congressional Review Act and bring back the Trump rule that protected people's private
retirements for one case, right, things like that from ESG considerations. But
Biden was successful, unfortunately, And if I'm elected to Congress, I'm going
to do my best to ensure that we turn that back. But I do
think that there, as you rightfully stated, there's some changing and language and
things like that, but we are making progress though on a lot of different
fronts. Here US Bank, I said, I mentioned the example of US
Bank, but Bank of America, which if you'd asked me a couple of
years ago is probably going to be one that was going to receive one of
these letters. Perhaps has changed their policy as well. Talk to them recently
and they've gotten criticism now from the other side. But the reason we're going
to win in this, I believe, is we're not asking for like Republican
esg. What we're asking is for the free market to remain free. That's
all we're asking for. We're not asking for special favors for you know,
fossil fuel companies or gun companies are in no special favors. All we're asking
for is for dollars to flow towards returns and not ideas. It's yeah,
you had a great quote where you so you're asking for banks to act like
banks. Yeah, okay, the left like somebody the water on this and
to make it sound like Republicans have suddenly become anti business, But of course
it's just as simple as acting asking banks to act like banks. Can you
talk a little bit about the backlash. It sounds to me like this has
been very popular policy in West Virginia would be very popular basically in any you
know, part of the interior of the country, maybe outside of you know,
Manhattan and Washington, d C. And LA and maybe Chicago. But
I imagine this has been met with a lot of support from people in West
Virginia. I think you've spoken one interview about how some of the you know,
industry groups, banking industry groups, were not happy about it at first,
about some of the legislation that you worked on at first. But just
what's the experience of pushing back against the ESG been like in West Virginia.
Yeah, there was a bunch of lobbyists came in here and tried to stop
this unsuccessfully, but you know that that was that was pretty interesting to be
to be to be sure. I mean, we had big banks coming in
here and trying to stop this, and you know, you started seeing op
eds from random people popping up all over the place. I'm sure you know,
black Rock or whoever had different lobbyists, and I see them hiring folks
all the time in different states. They were working hard in Texas, very
very hard down there to try to turn this back. Obviously though they had
a very strong Mike interlockerer down there is a called the Comtroller. It's Glenn
Hager. He does a wonderful job and yeah. I mean, there's kin
a lot of pushback on this, and then you get a lot of it
from I've talked about proxy voting from really kind of the institutionalized deep state that
exists even in a place like West Virginia, people that think they know better
than me, somebody who is elected by the people to represent their interests on
a board rather than some bureaucrat who's been there for thirty some odd years and
thinks they should have all the say in this. And that's the thing,
is like, I mean, you just got to stand up, pushback,
fight against this, stand on your principles, and you know you're going to
get some positive results. I think. Yeah. And the other thing is,
I mean, probably the biggest thing with ESG and just the state of
West Virginia and ESG is such a fascinating case study of the hypocrisy of the
left right now, because I wanted to ask about how these sort of normal
fault lines, or what the act pretended the left acts like our normal fault
lines between the working class and conservatives of the working class and the business community.
In West Virginia, you're seeing up close you have the business community sacrificing
workers on the mantle of you know, virtue signaling about these very luxurious social
causes. And is that a dynamic that you hear resonates with people that is
frustrating to people when they see that play out. I mean, how does
all of this actually affect people working in coal in your state? Working in
other industries in your state? Yeah, I mean our coal miners, yeah,
workers, I mean, any of those folks. I will tell you
this. I mean, here's an interesting story for you. The United mind
Workers of America, the union, the UMWA here in West Virginia. I
heard from tons of their members, I mean countless numbers of them supporting what
I am doing. Now that's not something very typical, right, have labor
unions out here supporting what you're doing. But not only that, I had
pipeliners, welders who are pipe fitters and pipeliners all over the country. I
got several thousand thank you letters from union members, which is you know.
I called one of the guys up. I'm like, hey, the the
head of the union, so thank you so much for these thank you letters.
I've never really got a bunch of thank you letters from trade union before.
And he's like, well, we haven't written too many Republicans before,
So it's very interesting times that we find ourselves in and kind of a convergence
of mutual interest, particularly when you're talking about kind of blue collar work around
the trades, whether it's union or non union or otherwise, that all these
folks want to do is just go to work. They just want to go
to work. And the average coal miner in West Virginia is making like ninety
thousand dollars a year. That it is a very good living. They like
these jobs. These are good jobs. We've been doing these jobs for a
very long time. They're safer now than they've ever been. And you got
to think in southern West Virginia, you got like an average house is sometimes
one hundred thousand less than one hundred thousand dollars a year, and that's basically
what you make in a year. That's pretty good deal. That's a pretty
good deal. And you're able to live, I mean, kind of a
lifestyle here in this country that unfortunately no longer exists in many places where if
you do want to have just one parent working and one parent being able to
stay at home and raise the kids, and you know, it's a really
kind of idyllic scenario and situation that we've been able to maintain sometimes here in
West Virginia, but not all the time, right because some of these places
they come take our jobs and they destroy our industries, which we saw with
Obama. A lot of our guys end up working at Walmart and places like
that, and I mean that is that's not living. It's just not you
know, God bless everybody who has to work there. But you know,
you're going from coal miner making ninety thousand dollars a year to door greet or
at Walmart. That's pretty hard. That's tough, you know. And this
whole like we're retrain these guys, that's nonsense. They like these jobs.
We need coal. The world needs coal. You got China, Indonesia,
India building coal fired power plays at a breakneck speed right now, and they
need coal. Why would we not mind it and exported to them. It
doesn't make any sense at all. So it's all of this is self inflicted
wounds that we have here in this country. And you know, if I
get elected to Congress, what I'd like to see is not only that we're
energy independent, I want to be an energy superpower. Because we actually are
one. We're blessed by God with a tremendous amount of natural resources here in
this country, where we could start to leverage those resources overseas and places like
that, where we have surplus energy that we are exporting, and instead of
constantly having to use our military to protect our interests abroad, we could start
using resources like this. And of course even you know, rarest minerals that
we have here in the States can usher in different different projects when it comes
to electric vehicles, renewables in general, you don't have to offshore all if
you know, even hypothetically I want to do a so called transition to renewables,
we have plenty of resources here in the States. And that's the last
question I was going to ask you is, I know you spent a long
time actually working on national security issues when you worked in Congress. Can you
talk just about the sort of overlap between national security and the push towards ESG
ways that it's maybe imperiled the security of people here in the United States and
our leadership on the world stage. Well, yeah, there's no doubt that
it has. And like I it's a long story, longer than this podcast
would allow. But you know, I started my career off as a welder.
I was working in a mining operation first, not coal, the trap
rock kind of open pit mind stuff. And so I've worked both sides of
this, and I did end up going to the Hill and being a staff
member there and had kind of interesting experience and perspective. But yes, I
mean, look, I'll give you a great example. Right now, you
have this war going on in Ukraine, and wouldn't it be something that it
would be pretty fascinating right now if they would allow us to build pipelines export
natural gas instead of right now the Biden administration is shutting down the export of
natural gas. We can't build any pipelines. We've been trying to build Mount
Valley pipeline over here in West Virginia, which you might be familiar with that
with the whole Joe Mansion battle and the Senate over that thing that's been going
on for fourteen years. Fourteen years. I mean it begs the question of
what has happened to this country. We built the Empire state building in a
one year and forty five days. We can't build a pipeline in fourteen years.
It is weakening us tremendously. And let's say you're somebody who agrees with
this green energy and energy transition. The energy transition to me is nonsense,
but fine if you agree with it, and you want solar panels and things
like that. We have rare earth minerals here in West Virginia. We have
them here. We have them here, We could do that here. You
want electric vehicles, you want to be able to make those batteries. We
have these things here in the United States many times, though, like in
West Virginia, it's co located in coal deposits and you can't get financing many
times to be able to extract the cold, to be able to refine the
rare earth minerals. We have everything we need in this country to be so
much more self sufficient and then be able to project power in a different way
that complements our military projection of power, but it is not the sole manner
in which we do that more often than not. Now that we were able
to project kind of economic power, obviously, the reserve currents, we are
the reserve currency of the world, and that's great, but we do see
China and other countries, particularly China, trying to undercut that right now,
we need to be thinking of other levers of power that we can have out
here. I don't like using the term soft power. I guess you could
think of it like that, but this is really hard power. I mean,
Russia's over there, they cut the gas off to Europe whenever they want.
Wouldn't it be great if we're in a position to have that kind of
leverage so we're not constantly, always trying to always having to sacrifice resources and
manpower and potentially lives to be able to protect our interests abroad. Right Yeah,
absolutely, in the Middle East as well. Just there's so much power
here that we export elsewhere because of our dependence on them. Yes, yeah,
I mean you see that happen all the time. I mean we could
change I mean, look, oil, just like any of this. It's
a fungible commodity that goes in the marketplace, and it's going to change the
manner in which it trades. But you know Opek over there wants to start
throttling in production. Jess what price oil goes up? Well, not if
we flood the market, you know. I mean, we could be on
the other side of this and really be in the driver's seat on a lot
more so on oil productuction, natural gas, call you name it. I
mean, it just makes all the sense in the world. You're going on
Tim Poole's show tonight, aren't you. Yeah, I am there you go.
Well, people can hear more of West Virginia State Treasurer Riley more on
till Timpoole's show. You can follow him on his social media And just want
to thank you State Treasurer Riley Moore, congressional candidate for West Virginia's second district,
for joining Federal stradio hour today. Well, thank you so much for
having me on. I will be on Tim Poole tonight. It's a short
drive because I'm out in the eastern Pinon Handle. He's out in my direction,
which is actually pretty cool for us. So, but in any event,
tune in. Follow me on social media Riley Moore WV that's my Twitter
and Facebook. Check me out. And if you're from West Virginia, you're
listening to this primaries May fourteenth, please vote. Yeah. Tim's got a
wild compound out there. It's a heck of a play. Nice to see,
so that'll be very interesting to watch. Again. You can can watch
Riley Moore on Tim Poole. You can follow them on social media. I'm
Emily Dashinski, culture editor here at the Federalists. We'll be back soon with
more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the prey A.
You got me right, well you