Posted on 08/22/2025 3:08:56 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Top Dem donor and Gavin Newsom backer raised $300 million by touting "Corporate ESG Business" based on fake revenue.
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, 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.”
But “this so-called ‘anti-poverty’ activist has admitted to being nothing more than a self-serving fraudster, by seeking to enrich himself by defrauding lenders and investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to Bill Essayli, the Acting U.S. Attorney of the Central District of California.
Aspiration was...
(Excerpt) Read more at dailywire.com ...
Wouldn’t a multimillionaire investor be the best anti-poverty activist by giving his multi-millions to poor people?
A fraudster building a fraud business based on the fraud of the global warmageddon doomsday cult.
'Course, the only people who ever benefit from demonicRAT programs are the demonicRATS who run the programs.
Algore’s Carbon-Credits were always a Scam
That one little phrase screams "Run away!!"
Fools and their money are soon parted. Suckers.
Everything about Democrats screams “Fraud!”
Rush Limbaugh used to say that a conservative was just a Liberal who got mugged.
Looks like Leo and Robert got mugged.
Wonder if this scam gets all the way back to Canada’s PM Mark Carney?
What’s this? A corrupt lib? How could such a thing be?
I have long called it the selling of Green Indulgences by the Church of Gaia. That’s exactly what “carbon credits” are.
It happens occasionally, doesn’t it? /S
California is awash with corruption with each gambit used to rip off the public treasury. They turned the homeless problem into a money making scam. The Train to nowhere made Billions for a select few. All things they do must be suspect.
I dare call him a jailbird.
He is associated with another group as well:
SC group spreads word about earned income tax credit
Morning News Sunday (Florence SC) ^ | March 24, 2019 p. 1A | Matthew Christian
Posted on 3/24/2019, 10:24:14 PM by Steve Schulin
FLORENCE, S.C. – A new organization in South Carolina has made a mission out of making sure that those who are eligible take advantage of the earned income tax credit on their 2019 federal and state taxes.
Working Hero South Carolina is a statewide campaign led Rania Jamison. The organization is an offshoot of a California-based organization founded by Joe Sanberg that has helped 2 million people receive more than $4 billion in state and federal taxes.
“Working Hero Action was founded in California by a rags-to-riches guy named Joe Sanberg,” said Jamison, the state director of Working Hero South Carolina. “He has become a millionaire, but he has decided to invest money into working to end poverty. He believes that the best way to do that is to elevate the earned income tax credit.”...

joe Sanberg_
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.