The President of the United States will block an “unacceptable” text, according to his spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre.
Mo12345lemonde with AFP
The US Congress adopted on Wednesday 1 ER a law limiting responsible investments in pension funds, which should lead President Joe Biden to use his right of veto for the first time.
Republicans are standing against the idea of taking into account environmental, social or governance criteria in financial decisions. They believe that this is an ideological posture.
In Congress, they targets a measure put in place by the Ministry of Labor in January, which facilitates this type of investment in American pension funds.
The Republican Andy Barr, author of the law providing for the dismantling of this measure, estimated that it “politicized the pension funds of the Americans, and endangered”.
This law was approved Tuesday in the House, and adopted on Wednesday in the Senate by 50 votes against 46. Several Democratic senators voted with the Republicans. Among them, the senator of the mining state of Virginia-Western Joe Manchin, already known for having torpedoed many climatic and social ambitions of Joe Biden.
first veto of the presidency Biden
The President of the United States is determined to block an “unacceptable” text, according to his spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre. “He will veto this law if she arrives on her office,” she warned Wednesday before the vote in the Senate. It will be the first veto of the presidency Biden.
This text has also been widely criticized by environmental organizations. “Preventing people from taking into account the financial risks linked to climate change, whose effects they already feel, will only serve to affect their savings,” said one of them, the Sierra Club, in a Communiqué.
This text is the latest example of extremely harsh cultural debates, dividing the United States on questions of gender, sexual orientation or climate.
In August 2022, the governor of Florida Ron Desantis, a rising star of the hard right and a supplier of “wokism”, had already ordered the bankers managing the pension funds by his state not to take these criteria into account. He urged to “give priority to the financial security of the inhabitants, rather than to the fanciful notions of a utopian future”.