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By Claire Heddles

April 21, 2025

The biggest check to Donald Trump’s 2025 inaugural committee came from the meat processing company Pilgrim’s Pride, the same company that pleaded guilty to conspiring to fix chicken prices in 2021.

The company, which boasts that it produces almost one in every six chickens in the U.S., donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration. In 2021, Pilgrim’s Pride reached a plea agreement with the Department of Justice’s antitrust division over a conspiracy to rig chicken prices, and agreed to pay a $107 million fine.

Two Brazilian billionaire brothers hold a majority stake in Pilgrim’s. Their related investment company also pleaded guilty in 2020 to charges over bribing government officials and was forced to pay out $256 million under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Trump in February paused enforcement of the act.

Pilgrim’s Pride gave the single-largest donation to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which received more than $239 million in total in the lead-up to Trump’s swearing in. It was more than double Trump’s record-setting inauguration haul in 2017, according to a Federal Election Commissioner filing late Sunday.

Trump still hasn’t disclosed the other donors to his transition effort, which is a separate fund that is typically restricted to $5,000 donations and required to be made public if the president accepts government services. Trump didn’t accept those services, so there was no legal limit to the amount of money he could accept secretly. Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, said last year that the donor list would be made public, but they have not released it.

Brothers Wesley Batista and Joesley Batista — who hold an 82% stake in the chicken company — and their affiliated companies J&F Investimentos S.A. and JBS S.A. were investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for “illicit payments made in Brazil from 2009 to 2015 pursuant to which, among other things, JBS S.A.received support from a government official to obtain financing,” which helped facilitate their acquisition of Pilgrim’s Pride in 2009. (Pilgrim’s Pride’s leadership says they were unaware of what the brother’s were doing, according to recent investor disclosures.)

JBS S.A.had to pay out almost $27 million in fines, and each of the brothers paid civil penalties of $500,000.

“Engaging in bribery to finance their expansion into the U.S. markets and then continuing to engage in bribery while occupying senior board positions at Pilgrim’s reflects a profound failure to exercise good corporate governance,” SEC regulator Charles Cain wrote in 2020.

The brothers’ related firm J&F Investimentos also reached a plea deal with the Department of Justice in 2020 and agreed to plead guilty to “one count of conspiracy to violate the anti-bribery provisions of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,” according to information in Pilgrim’s Pride’s investor reports this month that was included in connection to the brothers’ reelection to Pilgrim’s parent companys’ board of directors.

Trump in February paused enforcement of that law for 180 days, writing that enforcing the anti-corruption law against “routine business practices in other nations not only wastes limited prosecutorial resources that could be dedicated to preserving American freedoms, but actively harms American economic competitiveness.”

Pilgrim’s Pride did not respond to NOTUS’ request for comment about why they donated such a large amount to Trump’s inaugural committee. The White House referred NOTUS to a spokesperson for the inaugural committee who did not respond to a request for comment.

“It should not be possible for moneyed interests to buy their way into better treatment by the United States government,” Max Stier, president of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, told NOTUS. Pilgrim’s Pride’s donation, “has all the hallmarks of just that problem,” he said.

Claire Heddlesis a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.

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on August 15, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris began outlining her economic agenda, which includes fighting excessive prices by enacting a federal ban on price gouging.

Most states already have some kind of law banning price gouging in at least some circumstances, but Harris’ new proposal would create the first ever federal ban on price gouging on groceries and empower the Federal Trade Commission to enforce these new consumer protections.

Yet Fox News and others in the media reacted by falsely mischaracterizing Harris’ proposal as setting price controls, denying that price gouging exists in the food industry, and ranting about communism.

* ## An FTC investigation revealed price gouging by major supermarket chains, and there have been many cases of price fixing in the food industry

{ Fox guest Kevin O’Leary:}: “It's been tried before in countries like the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba. Doesn't work. So obviously that's not going to happen.” Fox News, *The Story*, [8/15/24]

* Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones: “This has always been the plan. You will eat the bugs! Kamala Harris’ Proposed Price Controls May Lead to ‘Communism, Mass Starvation, End of America.’” Twitter/X, [8/18/24]

related

  1. ### Fox goes to bat for supermarket price gouging as VP Harris prepares to call out corporate greed

08/15/24 11:20 AM EDT

  1. ### Conservative media defend Trump’s corporate tax cuts and make false claims about Kamala Harris’ proposed 28% rate

08/20/24 4:33 PM EDT

  1. ### Economists blame the Fed for jobs report missing expectations. Trump sycophants instead blamed Kamala Harris.

08/02/24

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02042021/meat-dairy-lobby-climate-action/

Top U.S. meat and dairy companies, along with livestock and agricultural lobbying groups, have spent millions campaigning against climate action and sowing doubt about the links between animal agriculture and climate change, according to new research from New York University.

The study, published this week in the journal Climatic Change, also said the world’s biggest meat and dairy companies aren’t doing enough to curb their greenhouse gas emissions, with only a handful making pledges to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

“These companies are some of the world’s biggest contributors to climate change,” said Oliver Lazarus, one of the study’s three authors, now a doctoral student at Harvard University. “They’ve spent a considerable amount of time and money downplaying the link between animal agriculture and climate change."

the research, which builds on data first published in 2017 and 2018 by the advocacy group GRAIN and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), is the first peer-reviewed study to document the individual carbon footprints of meat and dairy companies.

The authors found that, as of last summer, only four of the 35 companies—Dairy Farmers of America, Nestlé, Danish Crown and Danone—had pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

JBS, Cargill, Hormel, Fonterra and Smithfield had not. China-based Smithfield has since pledged to be carbon-negative by 2030 and Brazil-based JBS, the world’s largest meat processor, announced last week that it would reach net-zero by 2040. A spokeswoman for Hormel said the company was “on a path to zero” and plans to set a target for greenhouse gas reductions by 2023.

These commitments, the authors say, are short on specifics or focus on carbon dioxide reductions, while the bulk of emissions from animal agriculture comes from methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas. In some cases, the companies’ commitments don’t address emissions from their whole supply chain.

JBS, for example, has said in public statements that it does not assess land-use change—a major source of agricultural greenhouse gases—from third-party suppliers. These are emissions, the company said in 2019, “over which the Company has no responsibility or indirect responsibility.”

Overall, animal agriculture is responsible for more than 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. According to calculations by GRAIN and IATP, the five largest livestock-based producers—JBS, Tyson, Cargill, Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) and Fonterra—emitted more greenhouse gases than ExxonMobil. The NYU researchers said they’re not aware of more recent and accessible company-level data, although a 2020 report from IATP found that emissions from individual dairy companies climbed in the years since the GRAIN assessment.

Recent reports, including from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have found that cutting emissions from agriculture is critical for controlling runaway climate change. But the new research found that only seven of the 16 countries where the largest livestock producers are based mention animal agriculture in their plans to meet the targets of the Paris climate agreement.

While the Paris agreement focuses on individual country’s emissions—and their potential to reduce them—the authors of the new report looked at how these companies’ future emissions compared to the emissions reductions pledges of their home countries. They determined that emissions produced by Switzerland-based Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, and New Zealand-based dairy giant, Fonterra, were so high that they would eclipse their respective home country’s emissions pledges, in effect consuming the entirety of those countries’ emissions budgets. Denmark-based Arla, the largest producer of dairy products in Scandinavia, will account for 60 percent of Denmark’s total emissions.

“Those meat and dairy emissions would actually completely wipe out the emissions (those countries) say they’re going to be emitting according to their Paris agreement pledges,” said Jennifer Jacquet, an associate professor in NYU’s Department of Environmental Studies and one of the authors.

In taking this approach, the authors say, they’re assigning responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions to countries on a corporate basis.

“The Paris agreement suggests that Brazil is responsible for what happens in Brazil. What we said was: What if Brazil was responsible for JBS or China for Smithfield?” Jacquet said.

The authors said they were following the pattern of seminal studies on the fossil fuel industry, whichcalculated historic emissions from individual companies and then assigned responsibility to those companies.

“Essentially what we’re trying to do is build out the climate responsibility of meat and dairy producers,” Jacquet said.

A spokeswoman for Fonterra said its carbon footprint was “46% lower than other major milk producers” and that the company was “actively working on tools and technologies to reduce emissions and help New Zealand reach its climate change commitments.”

Filling a Research Gap

The next goal of the study, Jacquet said, was to examine how these companies and their lobbying groups have fought climate regulation in Congress and before the Environmental Protection Agency, and to analyze how they’ve shaped a narrative around animal agriculture’s role in climate change.

The authors calculated that U.S. agribusiness, which includes meat and dairy companies and also other agricultural companies, spent $750 million on national political candidates from 2000 to 2020. The U.S. energy sector, by comparison, spent $1 billion.

The same agribusinesses spent $2.5 billion on lobbying from 2000 and 2019, compared to $6.2 billion by energy and natural resource companies.

The authors said these companies also spent their lobbying money on issues beyond climate change, including the Farm Bill and farm subsidies. But, they wrote, “it is often difficult to disentangle the two as policy decisions on crop incentives, land-use, and animal production methods have large implications for the extent and intensity of the animal agriculture sector’s emissions.”

The report also looked at the contributions of individual companies. Exxon spent roughly $17 million on political campaigns and more than $240 million on lobbying during the 20 years studied. In the same time frame, Tyson gave $3.2 million to political campaigns. But relative to each company’s revenue, Tyson spent double what Exxon spent on political campaigns and 33 percent more on lobbying.

Industry lobby groups—the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Pork Producers Council, the North American Meat Institute, the National Chicken Council, the International Dairy Foods Association and the American Farm Bureau Federation, along with its state members—spent nearly $200 million, much of it lobbying against climate and environmental regulations, from 2000 to 2019, the authors found.

A spokesperson for the National Pork Producers Council said the organization voted against a cap-and-trade bill specifically because it “would have converted massive amounts of cropland to forest” at a time when pork producers were already struggling to gain access to feed.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the North American Meat Institute (NAMI), the new study said, published or funded research downplaying the emissions from livestock production, often pointing to the low percentage relative to overall U.S. emissions.

Sarah Little, a spokeswoman for NAMI, said the report referenced outdated documents. “NAMI members are at the forefront of research and innovation to strengthen meat’s contributions and ambitious commitments to healthy diets and protecting our environment. The U.S. meat sector has dramatically reduced its impact on the environment in recent decades, including by reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions…. This study was already outdated the day it was researched.”

The nine U.S.-based companies covered in the report emitted 6 percent of overall U.S. emissions, the study found, but emitted about 350 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That’s on the same scale as Brazil, which has the highest carbon footprint from animal agriculture and where the top four livestock companies emitted about 380 million metric tons of the greenhouse gas annually. But that amounts to about 28 percent of that country’s emissions.

“The US industry really leans on Brazil’s terrible carbon footprint to compare to its own,” Jacquet said, but domestic agriculture is “high in terms of absolute emissions.”

The report also notes that the U.S. companies’ emissions totals presented in the study don’t include those connected to production outside of the U.S.

The authors pointed out in an interview that there’s been ample academic research into the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to influence public discourse, but that a similar body of research into the agriculture industry’s efforts has not yet emerged. That could largely be attributed, they said, to the fact that very little agricultural research is done outside of industry-influenced universities or by independent researchers.

“It’s not surprising that they’re this active in shaping climate discourse,” Lazarus said, referring to the livestock companies. “What we’re trying to do is show the extent to which that has largely been ignored.”

Georgina Gustin

https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/forests/money-to-burn-how-iconic-banks-and-investors-fund-the-destruction-of-the-worlds-largest-rainforests/

no lnx many

Forest burning - Reuters

Article / Sept. 23, 2019

MONEY TO BURN

More than 300 banks and investors back six of the world’s most harmful agribusinesses to the tune of $44bn

Barclays, HSBC and Santander among high street names behind companies implicated in rainforest destruction.

Iconic investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley also among key financiers.

The burning of the Brazilian Amazon this summer illustrated in the most graphic way possible humanity’s war on the planet.

But such scenes play out every year in rainforests all around the world to make way for big agribusiness, away from the horrified stare of global television audiences. These forests are earth’s front-line defence against climate breakdown. One famous study published in 2017 estimated that forests and other ecosystems could make up more than a third of the total carbon mitigation by 2030 needed to limit global heating to a 2° Celsius rise.

Yet between 2001 and 2015, over 300 million hectares of tree cover was destroyed: nearly the size of India. About a quarter of this loss was driven by the production of commodities such as beef and palm oil, according to a recent study. It also found that in south-east Asia alone, deforestation for growing commodities such as palm oil is responsible for as much as 78% of tree cover loss. This is madness.

That being the case, it is unsurprising many banks and investors proudly trumpet policies on ethical dealing, promising not to pump money into companies that fell and burn precious rainforests. There is only one problem: the same financial institutions often break their own policies at will, making them barely worth the paper they are printed on. A Global Witness investigation now exposes the sheer size and scale of these financial flows – and reveals how a veritable A to Z of global finance is enabling the destruction of the world’s biggest rainforests.

The companies razing forests to produce palm oil, beef, and rubber are currently able to secure financing for new projects at commercially attractive rates from banking hubs in the US, Europe and Asia. Global Witness investigated the financing of six huge agribusinesses: three operating in the Amazon, two in the Congo Basin, and one in New Guinea.

Global Witness has discovered that between 2013 and 2019, they were backed to the tune of $44 billion by over 300 investment firms, banks, and pension funds headquartered across the globe. The household name institutions our exposé highlights will be familiar to anyone who has looked at the skyline of Wall Street or Canary Wharf, read a quality newspaper or opened a current account.

While some of these institutions have developed their own deforestation policies, there is no penalty if they ignore them – and they often do. Governments’ failure to regulate the financing of deforestation has left the foxes in charge of the hen-house. Members of the public may be shocked to learn the institutions they bank with enable the sort of apocalyptic destruction witnessed in the Brazilian Amazon this summer.

Ordinary people’s pension funds and investments are channelled into companies revving up the climate crisis, stripping indigenous peoples of their ancestral lands and destroying the forests home to untold numbers of species.

Over the last decade, many financial institutions have committed to tackling deforestation, so often associated with human rights abuses or corruption. One group of 56 investors To inspect full datasets see bottom of page.jpgmanaging approximately $7.9 trillion in assets has urged the palm oil sector to commit to no-deforestation policies. Some 12 banks adopted the Soft Commodities Compact, aiming to achieve net zero deforestation by 2020 in the soy, palm oil, beef and pulp/paper supply chains of around 400 companies with combined sales of 3.5 trillion euros.

But there remains little transparency and accountability over how banks put commitments into practice, and signatories now admit they will miss the 2020 target. Meanwhile, the world’s largest financial institutions continue to sink vast sums into companies either levelling forests themselves or via other companies, often in blatant violation of their own deforestation policies and public commitments.

The NGO Global Canopyassessed 150 financial institutions and found nearly two-thirds had no policy covering four key forest-risk commodities, beef, soy, palm oil and timber. Yet as our investigation shows, even existing policies are widely ignored.

One of the most biodiverse regions in the world is being cleared, mostly to make room for a single species: cattle. Image credit: Getty Images

Global Witness can now reveal some of the largest names in global finance – Barclays, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Santander and Standard Chartered among them—provided tens of billions of dollars in financing between 2013 and 2019 to companies either directly or indirectly deforesting the largest rainforests in the world. Leading investment banks including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley are also implicated. And what you are about to read only scratches the surface of a global systems failure.

WHAT WE DID

Global Witness commissioned research from Dutch not-for-profit analysts Profundo into backers of six of the major agribusinesses most implicated in destruction of climate-critical rainforests. They used databases of loans, investments and other types of financing kept by Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters Eikon, Orbis and others, along with company reports and websites to build up a picture of how these companies finance their operations. It was impossible to determine which specific ground-level activities this money financed - but such funding is critical to agribusinesses’ expansion.

This sprawling piece of data journalism reveals with new starkness the golden sinews that link London, Berlin and New York City to the dwindling rainforests of the Amazon, the Congo Basin and the island of New Guinea. These are the three largest uninterrupted rainforest regions in the world.

Still standing: the Amazon remains the biggest rainforest in the world, and a vital check on climate change. Image credit: Getty Images

THE BRAZILIAN AMAZON

A few years ago, deforestation in the Amazon was declining, partly thanks to government action. But that progress is being undone under the rule of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, with cattle ranching the biggest culprit, according to numerous industry studies.

The three largest beef companies in the Brazilian Amazon, JBS S.A., Marfrig Global, and Minerva Foods, account for more than 45% of the region’s cattle-slaughtering capacity. All three have committed to measures that should help protect the forest. Yet their supply chain is tainted by deforestation – and famous names in finance help keep them afloat.

JBS, the world’s biggest meatpacker, has a history of buying animals from deforested areas. A decade ago, responding to pressure from Greenpeace, JBS signed an agreement not to buy cattle from suppliers that had deforested land after October 2009. They also vowed not to source cattle from suppliers that used slave labor or infringed on indigenous communities’ lands.

Finally, JBS committed never to purchase cattle from suppliers embargoed by the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama) for illegal deforestation, nor from suppliers that raised, reared, or fattened cattle on land overlapping with protected areas. In 2009, JBS became a party to a similar agreement with the Federal Prosecutor’s Office in the Amazonian state of Pará.Since then, however, the company has made a mockery of these commitments:

In 2015, JBS was accused by the Brazilian Federal Police of having bought hundreds of cattle from the mother of an alleged land-grabber described by the police as the “largest deforester of the Amazon”. The suspected land-grabber has been tried and is awaiting verdict. JBS said it has blocked the sourcing of cattle from the land-grabber’s mother and claimed that auditing had shown the company was over 99% compliant with its Greenpeace commitment.

In 2017, Ibama discovered two JBS slaughterhouses had bought 49,468 cattle from embargoed areas, for which the company was fined 24.7 million reais, almost $8 million at a 2017 conversion rate. Global Witness estimates these cattle purchases may have required up to 38,000 hectares of deforestation. JBS denied the purchasing claims, saying it does not buy animals from farms involved in deforestation of native forests or areas embargoed by Ibama.

Last year, the Amazonian state of Pará published an audit of JBS that found breaches of its commitments covering almost 20% of its 2016 cattle purchases. Global Witness estimates the cattleJBS bought that year from ranchers responsible for deforestation may have required an area the size of 65,000 football pitches. JBS said they had been hindered by the lack of detail on the criteria for analysis and by discrepancies in the databases of public sector institutions. It said it had selected an auditor with a "conservative" view in the cases where there were doubts about the information.

An investigation carried out by Repórter Brasil, the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in July alleged the company was still purchasing cattle from embargoed areas. JBS denied this claim.

JBS told Global Witness the issues raised about the company’s environmental policies make “no sense” because it had “implemented rigorous systems and controls” and “does not purchase from farms involved in deforestation”.

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Given these transgressions, it might be surprising JBS can attract mainstream financing at all. In fact, it enjoys support from some of the world’s wealthiest banks and investment managers. After a family-owned holding company that is the largest shareholder, its second-largest investor is BNDES, the biggest development bank in the Americas. BNDES held over $2.7 billion of JBS stock as of April 2019.

It is perhaps unsurprising Brazil’s development bank would aid the expansion of the country’s biggest companies. (BNDES did not respond to Global Witness’s inquiries.)

GettyImages-1083137734 2.jpg

Remaining silent: BlackRock was one of numerous banks and investors that did not respond to Global Witness’s questions. Image credit: Bloomberg

But where else does JBS receive financial succour? Step forward the US and Germany.

For JBS’s next largest investor is the American Capital Group, which claims to manage over $1.7 trillion in equity and fixed income assets for millions of investors. According to our research, it held shares in JBS worth over $800 million as of March 2019.Then comes BlackRock. Headquartered in New York with offices in 30 countries, this is another of the richest and most powerful financial institutions in the world, managing more than $6 trillion in assets. As of May 2019, these investments included over $218 million of JBS stock. Global Witness could find no deforestation policy on either fund’s website. Capital Group declined to comment on Global Witness’s findings, and BlackRock did not respond to our enquiries.

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Since 2017, Deutsche Bank’s environmental policy has stated it will not knowingly finance projects or activities involving the clearance of primary moist tropical forests. As of April 2019, however, it held over $11 million in JBS shares. In addition, albeit pre-dating the policy, in 2013 it loaned the company $56.7 million.

This is not the first time Deutsche Bank has been accused of irresponsible investments.In 2013, Global Witness revealed how two Vietnamese companies, bankrolled by Deutsche Bank, leased vast tracts of land for rubber plantations in Laos and Cambodia - with disastrous consequences for local communities and the environment.

A Deutsche Bank spokesman said they were unable to comment on client relationships, but added: “We can reaffirm that we take our responsibilities for the environment and society very seriously. We apply our environmental and social risk management policies and procedures in the assessment of any new or existing client relationship. The information you provided is much appreciated and will be considered in any potential decision we have to take.”

How to finance a rogue agribusiness

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https://theintercept.com/2019/08/30/amazon-rainforest-fire-blackrock-jbs/

...FINK, the influential chief executive of BlackRock, which manages more than $6 trillion in investments, wants the public to know that he is using his enormous power to press companies to “serve a social purpose.” Fink — a Democratic donor who reportedly promised to help Joe Biden get elected president — wrote to businesses his firm invests in last year to urge them to consider their “impact on the environment” and the threat of climate change.

“Stakeholders are pushing companies to wade into sensitive social and political issues,” Fink wrote in a follow-up letter this year, “especially as they see governments failing to do so effectively.”

That desire to be seen as an ethical investor has not, however, stopped BlackRock from contributing to the climate crisis by providing significant financing to the world’s biggest meatpacker, JBS, which has been caught year after year buying cattle raised on illegally deforested Amazon land.

At least some of the thousands of fires burning huge swathes of the rainforest in Brazil, eroding a crucial safeguard against climate change, appear to have been started by cattle farmers. Cattle ranching is “the largest driver of deforestation in every Amazon country, accounting for 80 percent of current deforestation rates,” according to researchers at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

As Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post reported this week, cattle ranchers in Brazil “have been pushing their herds into the Amazon, clear-cutting and burning the forest as they go” to meet the surging demand for beef exported by Brazilian agribusiness firms to mainly China, Iran, Egypt, Russia, and the United States.

Related
A Top Financier of Trump and McConnell Is a Driving Force Behind Amazon Deforestation

About a third of that beef is exported by JBS, the spectacularly corruptBrazilian meat-packing conglomerate BlackRock is heavily invested in. But even as Fink publicly urged business leaders to consider their environmental impact, BlackRock increased its stake in JBS by $41 million between 2016 and 2018, according to research conducted for Friends of the Earth.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, The Guardian, and Repórter Brasil revealed in February that a giant ranching company that was fined for using deforested Amazon land delivered hundreds of heads of cattle raised in the Amazon to other farms the firm owned for fattening. Cattle was later sent from those farms to slaughter at JBS plants.

It’s not just private American capital that is funding the destruction of the Amazon. Public money is at work, too. President Donald Trump has been compensating American farmers hurt by his trade war to the tune of billions of dollars, and $62 million of that has gone to JBS, because the company has an American subsidiary.

As Colorado’s Greeley Tribune reported in May, “JBS USA secured nine contracts for federal purchases of JBS pork since mid-January, totaling nearly 18.5 million pounds of pork for $40.1 million. That’s in addition to previously awarded contracts for nearly 9.8 million pounds of pork for $22.3 million. In total, the company, a subsidy of Brazil-based JBS SA, will receive $62.4 million from the program, which is meant to mitigate trade war impacts to local farmers.”

In 2016, Fink was angling to become treasury secretary under Hillary Clinton.Fink was on the short listto replace Tim Geithner as President Obama’s treasury secretary, and in 2013, hired Cheryl Mills, a close aide to Clinton, at BlackRock. Just ahead of the 2016 election, he was endorsed for the position by Steve Schwarzman,a top Republican donor and the co-founder and CEO of Blackstone. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., had promised to work to block any Clinton nominees from BlackRock.

BlackRock began as a fund inside of Blackstone, but Fink and Schwarzman had a falling out in the 1990s that led to a split. As The Intercept reported earlier this week, Blackstone is also heavily involved in deforestation of the Amazon, through its financing of highway and port projects that facilitate agribusiness.

According to a recent study by Amazon Watch, a nonprofit monitoring group, AgroSB, the JBS supplier, was fined in 2017 and 2018 by Brazil’s main environmental agency, known by its Portuguese acronym IBAMA. That agency has lost a quarter of its funding since January, when Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right former army captain, took office promising to roll back protection for the Amazon to boost agribusiness. Government data provided to Reuters by opposition lawmakers showed that the cuts to IBAMA’s budget included a 23 percent reduction in funding for the prevention and control of forest fires.

This summer, the New York Times reported, “Ibama was unable to carry out operations in the state of Pará, where deforestation has been soaring, because the local police officers would not provide backup.”

As the Amazon burns, Bolsonaro has mocked environmentalists for nicknaming him “Captain Chainsaw,” disputed data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research showing that deforestation in the Amazon was up 88 percent in June compared to the same month in 2018, promised “to develop this wonderful region called the Amazon,” and even promoted a conspiracy theory that local environmentalists, not ranchers, had started the fires there.

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