California Scheming II
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the wrong person’s wearing a mask here
A MILLION HERE AND A MILLION THERE…: California ‘Anti-Poverty Activist’ And Dem Mega-Donor Pleads Guilty To Massive Carbon-Credit Scam.
Joe Sanberg, a top California Democrat activist who decried the corruption of big Wall Street banks and started a company marketed as the “cleaner” alternative, actually propped that company up through blatant fraud, he admitted Thursday.
Sanberg and other high-profile Democrats started the carbon-credit platform and online banking app Aspiration Partners Inc., promising to plant trees and not invest in polluting industries. Its motto was “clean rich is the new filthy rich.” It was once a star of the “environmental, social, and governance (ESG)” movement that blended corporate finance with leftist politics, and counted actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr. as investors.
But it was instead a scheme as corrupt as any on Wall Street [well, there’s a lot of competition for that title — Ed] with Sanberg concocting fake customers for his tree-planting services to try to dupe investors into a $2 billion valuation, the Department of Justice said. Sanberg faces up to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of wire fraud, according to the Department of Justice.
Sanberg is a key player in California politics, a Gavin Newsom donor who personally spent $11 million backing a ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage to $18 an hour. Voters blocked the initiative by one percentage point in 2024. A 2019 Atlantic story headlined, “Joe Sanberg Dares Trump to Call Him a Socialist,” said “the multimillionaire investor says the Democrats’ progressive agenda is best for jobs and economic growth.”