Never underestimate California lawmakers’ willingness to embrace the most outlandish gun-control proposals. Other states are taking a stand against “woke” banking discrimination. California is not one of them. There is an effort to make it mandatory.
SB 637, introduced by state Sen. Dave Min, requires California’s public finances to stop doing business with any banks or lenders that have business relationships with firearm manufacturers. The bill would have an impact on all aspects of the state’s finances, including municipal bonds, capital projects, and the state’s debt.
It would be easy to say that California is going in the opposite direction of Texas with the Firearm Industry Nondiscrimination (FIND) Act. That’s the law that says corporate banks can’t compete for state or municipal contracts if they have discriminatory policies. These corporate banks are free to discriminate if they wish, but they will be unable to profit from Texas taxpayer-funded contracts.
U.S. Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.) and U.S. Sen. Steve Daines have introduced similar legislation in Congress (R-Mont.). Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND) introduced the Fair Access to Banking Act, which would require banks to provide access to services, capital, and credit based on objective risk assessments of individual customers rather than subjective broad-based decisions affecting entire categories or classes of customers. Several states, including Iowa, Montana, Kentucky, and West Virginia, are considering their own FIND Acts. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently announced that his state will seek similar legislation.
The difference between these laws and California’s legislation is that California’s proposal requires corporations to discriminate solely because firearm manufacturers make guns.
That’s nothing to sneeze at, given that California’s economy is on track to be the world’s fourth largest, with a projected value of $3.4 trillion. The World Economic Forum predicts that it will overtake Germany’s economy.
According to the OC Breeze, the California Treasurer’s Office oversees the state’s debt and investment portfolios and manages approximately $3.1 trillion in banking transactions in a fiscal year. California currently has $63.3 billion in outstanding General Obligation bonds.
This isn’t the first time California has wielded its economic might to discriminate against the firearm industry. California Public Employees’ Retirement System, or CalPERS, is one of the largest public employee pension funds in the country. Entire industries have been on the CalPERS blacklist including tobacco and fossil fuels. Of course, gun control activists who have been having little luck in passing irrational legislation, are also targeting pension funds nationwide to urge divestment.
The problem is that fund managers owe a legal, fiduciary obligation to their investors – those people putting money into public retirement funds. Fund managers aren’t picking the best-performing portfolios, rather they are investing other people’s money to buy special interests – in this case denying investment into firearm-related businesses at the behest of the gun control industry.
Tucker Carlson, of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, reported in 2020 that Yu Meng, who was the Chief Investment Officer at CalPERS, “long engaged in shareholder activism to advance leftwing causes in this country like gun control and have been very aggressive about it.” At the same time, CalPERS invested Californians’ public employee retirement funds into companies that supply the Chinese military.
Meng resigned from CALPers in 2020, and the public fund was later sued by a former board member for alleging that CalPERS improperly held a closed-door meeting about Meng’s exit, and has since refused to release records about it or the fund’s assets.
None of that seems to concern Sen. Min. In fact, he sees his radical antigun efforts as a springboard to higher office. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) announced she would not seek re-election in 2024. The scramble to replace her began before her official announcement, with U.S. Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) throwing her hat into the arena. State Sen. Min sees this as his opportunity to take his antigun agenda from California to Washington, D.C. Rep. Porter endorsed Sen. Kim to replace her in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Sen. Min’s legislation and his political ambitions show the clear threat to Americans’ rights when special interests use the levers of government to pick and choose which rights are favored and disfavored.