00:00:00.000Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wasn't playing the usual D.C. good old boy political theater
00:00:10.420when he hauled Black Rock, State Street, and Vanguard into federal court in the Eastern
00:00:15.480District of Texas. I think we're all looking at our state laws and trying to figure out how do
00:00:19.220we best protect our constituents, the people that are investing in the funds that the state manages.
00:00:25.500And I think every state has different laws. This is a new area. This is a new idea.
00:00:30.000relatively new over the last couple of years for companies like BlackRock.
00:00:33.680And so some of us may have to go back to our legislature and encourage them to pass legislation
00:00:38.700to protect our people who are in these retirement accounts.
00:00:42.920If we are going to be the leader in AI, which we presently are,
00:00:47.820it's just going to require trillions of dollars of investments.
00:00:51.780And if we don't invest in it, China will be the global leader in this.
00:00:56.600And so to me, it's not whether this is a must.
00:01:01.180We need the U.S. economy to grow at 3%, especially with the growing deficits the federal government has.
00:01:07.900And so much of this money, not just the project, is going to be coming from the private sector,
00:01:13.140from savings accounts, from pension accounts, from insurance companies, on and on and on.
00:01:17.780He and a coalition of red state attorney generals allege the three giants of passive investing that assembled controlling stakes across every major publicly traded U.S. coal producer,
00:01:30.880then used Climate Action 100 Plus and the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative as a coordination mechanism to force those companies to slash thermal coal output by more than half by 2030.
00:01:44.8802030. The result, according to the complaint, was a manufactured constriction of supply that drove
00:02:00.800electricity prices higher for ordinary Americans, while the asset managers collected the upside on
00:02:07.600their remaining energy holdings. A Trump-appointed judge largely refused to dismiss the antitrust and
00:02:14.620consumer protection claims in August of 2025, sending the case into Discovery instead of
00:02:21.280letting the defendants walk away with a procedural win. Vanguard already slipped out the side door
00:02:27.720with a stipulated dismissal, but BlackRock and State Street are still in it. Discovery will
00:02:33.500pry open the emails and voting records they have treated like state secrets.
00:02:38.180Andre Merlin, you are the founder of RTE, the major company that transmits the electricity