Florida is taking steps to eliminate Chinese influence in state spending and stop the operations of “woke corporations.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis met Tuesday with the two other State Board of Administration trustees, Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis, and Attorney General Ashley Moody. They voted to make policy changes on how proceeds of more than 30 funds and the state’s retirement system investment plan are spent to “combat woke corporate ideology and malign foreign influence.”
“If you look at how these major companies behave when faced with Chinese disapproval, they censor what the CCP tells them to censor, and we see groveling apologies,” DeSantis said. “Go back a generation, and the idea of the American elites was, ‘If we allow China into the WTO and give them most favored nation status, that will make China more like us.’ This experiment has failed, and it has endangered our nation’s national and economic security.”
DeSantis will ask the state Legislature to make statutory changes to further prevent Florida’s taxpayer dollars from being invested in China and bring manufacturing jobs to Florida instead of Chinese goods to strengthen the state’s fiscal footing.
The governor added that the SBA trustees’ vote sends a message “to those in corporate America who prop up a genocidal, authoritarian, imperialist regime that they will not do so with Floridians’ money.”
Tuesday’s action follows steps from DeSantis this summer to protect Florida from foreign influence.
In August, the governor listed Ben & Jerry’s parent company Unilever as one of the state’s “Scrutinized Companies that Boycott Israel” after Unilever announced it would remove its products from Judea and Samaria.
Additionally, DeSantis signed legislation in June for better vetting procedures for financial connections that seek to use taxpayer-funded grants or contracts. Just the News reported that under the law, universities and colleges must now disclose foreign donations and grants of $50,000 or more to the state, and state agencies and political subdivisions must report foreign donations and grants of $50,000 or more to the state, according to the law.
