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Horowitz: JPMorgan Chase joins the war on America’s energy

Horowitz: JPMorgan Chase joins the war on America’s energy

JPMorgan Chase has decided that it’s better for the company to join the progressive environmental gods than to continue supporting the great American energy miracle that has brought so much prosperity, stability, and job creation to this country. Has the Left finally won the war for the heart and soul of corporate America?

During the company’s annual investor day on Tuesday, the giant bank announced it would no longer be financing loans for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic and would divest from financing coal plants or mines. It also announced it would be divesting from any company that gets the majority of its revenue from coal by 2024.

When the Left can’t win at the ballot box or in a democratic debate in legislatures, it seeks recourse through the courts, or even better, the culture and markets. In this case, groups like Rainforest Action Network bullied the bank into submission, publishing a report showing JPMorgan Chase to be the single biggest lender to the oil and gas industry.

At Tuesday’s announcement, JPMorgan committed to investing in $200 billion worth of projects in support of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. That is the company’s credential in the elite world that will make its profits kosher – sort of an extortion that the progressives make companies pay as the cost of doing business in a political system they control.

However, it is never enough for the leftist anarchists, who are now demanding the bank also pull out of financing drilling in the lower 48 states as well.

It’s truly hard to overstate the economic miracle that oil and gas drilling has ushered into our job market. We have now become the global superpower of oil and gas production and exports, to the point that even the conflict with Iran in January did not cause a spike in energy prices at all.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), American crude oil production has hit an all-time record of 13 million barrels per day (bpd). That is an astounding 46 percent increase in production since Trump took office in January 2017.  Poor states like New Mexico have benefited enormously with more state revenue and jobs, as oil production has increased 250 percent since 2012.

The more we drill for oil and gas, the more we recover. Far from running out of resources, proven reserves of crude oil have increased by 12 percent since 2017 and have more than doubled over the past 13 years. Likewise, proven reserves of natural gas increased to 9 percent since 2017 and more than doubled since 2005 to 504.5 trillion cubic feet.

Yet the flat-earth progressives are trying to reverse all that progress, which will result in regressive price increases and job losses for the most vulnerable citizens.

The revelation from JPMorgan comes as BP announces it is withdrawing its membership in the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the Western Energy Alliance, and the Western States Petroleum Association due to concerns about the environmental stances of those trade groups. “Our priority is to work to influence within trade associations, but we may publicly dissent or resign our membership if there is material misalignment on high-priority issues,” said BP chief executive Bernard Looney in a February 12 announcement.

The cancel culture and boycott campaigns of the Left, coupled with a very weak Republican Party, have ensured that the cultural inertia is moving in one direction. Whereas the Left always controlled academia, media, and entertainment, its recent conquest of the corporate world is the key to actually moving the needle of anarchist socialist policies. We are seeing this with corporations boycotting ICE as well.

However, the growth in extremism among those on the Left provides conservatives with an opportunity to finally make these companies pick sides.

Until now, Republicans have allowed corporations to promote fiscal and cultural Marxism on the cheap by saving them from high taxes and a few targeted regulatory issues that they care about. Meanwhile, as we bail out the companies, corporate America has become the number-one enforcer – even more effective than the media and academia – of promoting open borders, endless Middle East migration, weak-on-crime laws, anti-religious-liberty policies, mindless multiculturalism, eco-socialism, and the transgender agenda. Even on fiscal issues, they support the welfare state, Obamacare, and all the regulations that help them shut out competition.

The one missing issue from the Democrats’ portfolio of corporate bosses is the tax issue. If the corporations empowered Democrats on that issue too, they couldn’t survive. Thus they keep the Republican lifeline against Democrats raising taxes and still promote the rest of the progressive agenda. And remember, government-run health care is the single biggest driver of our debt, and that is being fueled by big business.

These businesses also count on traditional establishment Democrats to ease off them when it counts, even as they talk tough to jazz up their activists. Well, now Bernie Sanders is changing all of that. He will actually put them out of business. So now it’s time for conservatives to make them pick sides. They either jump off the bandwagon of progressivism, or we will step back and allow the Bernie Democrats to hurt them at their bottom line. They must remember we’re all in the same sinking ship that they helped destroy.

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