Brad Lander won’t be New York City comptroller much longer — and that’s good news for Gotham’s rank and file.
It’s not just because Lander is a knee-jerk leftist who rivals Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani when it comes to his out-of-touch patter on economic policy.
He’s also a dullard seemingly unaware of the core function of the job he’s held for the last four years.
Lander, as the city’s chief fiscal officer, is the fiduciary, investment adviser and custodian of the city’s $300 billion pension fund system.
He’s supposed to make sure the funds are invested in securities that grow in value so they can “fully fund” the retirement accounts of all the city’s police, firefighters and teachers.
Those accounts are not fully funded, and the shortfalls are poised to grow once Mamdani gets into office.
Recall the mayor-elect’s pledges to raise taxes and turn the city into Moscow-on-the-Hudson, which will certainly cause more businesses and high earners to leave.
Now Lander wants to oust BlackRock from managing city retirement money because it refuses to embrace his weird green energy agenda, which envisions a future of windmills and bicycles along the streets of New York instead of cars — and energy bills that no one can afford.
Consider: BlackRock doesn’t suck at money management, it’s actually quite good at it.
Its CEO, Larry Fink, is considered among the best risk managers in the business.
BlackRock’s big crime is that it doesn’t want to be an accomplice to Lander’s wacky, unrealizable and maybe illegal campaign on the climate — i.e. reducing carbon emissions with brute force.
In Lander’s mind, the stocks of companies that drill for oil, frack natural gas, keep our lights on or make sure the AC works in the summer are pure evil.
The comptroller, of course, prefers those that embrace green energy — like those useless windmills off the coast of New Jersey that give the state some of the highest electricity bills on the planet.
What’s more, Lander literally wants the city to demand that all of BlackRock’s clients’ portfolios — not just the NYC retirement system’s — comply with his whims under threat of NYC yanking its funds.
Dumb and dumber
It’s among the most narcissistically dumb ideas to ever come out of a public official.
Let’s get real: little Brad Lander ain’t doing nothing to stop global warming; China keeps polluting and adding to carbon emissions every day. So does India and the rest of the developing world.
Plus, those green stocks often really do really suck (Google “Solyndra”) while companies that invest in good old-fashioned crude like ExxonMobil — with a five-year spike in its shares of nearly 200% far outstripping the S&P — really don’t.
BlackRock’s CEO, it should also be noted, is an odd target for Lander.
Fink was one of the key proponents of so-called Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing, which took into account carbon emissions of companies in which it invested.
He got a bad rap from the political right for it, and BlackRock lost business — that is until Fink clarified the company’s position: As Fink told Lander years ago, the NYC comptroller can’t dictate what BlackRock does for the Texas state pension.
Plus, if BlackRock sold all of its $225 billion in energy-related stocks — the largest energy slug owned by any money manager — it would probably crash all major stock market indices.
How is that good for NYC retirees?
It isn’t, of course.
It shows how little thought Lander probably put into this attention-grabbing charade as he reportedly gears up to run for a seat representing lower Manhattan and progressive parts of Brooklyn in Congress in the 2026 midterms.
It also shows why lefty Manhattan Borough President and former City Councilman Mark Levine, who will replace Lander as comptroller, should just ignore his predecessor’s recommendation.
Levine probably won’t, of course, given how progressively cringey NYC politics has become.
I should point out that neither Lander nor Levine has the complete final say over where managers of the city’s retirement system invest all that money.
That say belongs to the trustees of the funds, of which the comptroller has one vote, while the mayor appoints members as well.
That doesn’t mean Lander should be given a pass in the court of public opinion for making this an issue.
Nor should he be given a pass when it comes to his legal obligations as city comptroller, i.e. maximizing returns in the retirement system, as opposed to tilting at windmills.
A fully functioning government should take action before Lander or whoever replaces him does even more damage to a city that has been losing population and business for years.
But our local prosecutors (Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, et al) are too busy jailing citizens defending themselves from criminals to make sure a raging leftist doesn’t defund pension funds that are already underfunded — and bound to get worse as the city goes full-on socialist under our new mayor.
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