Ohio politicians want voters to believe the state’s exploding data-center industry, its pension investments, Wall Street money and Republican political network are separate stories.
I don’t believe that anymore. Follow the money and they increasingly look like one story.
Start with U.S. Sen. Jon Husted. As lieutenant governor, Husted helped sell Ohio as a data-center destination, celebrating multibillion-dollar expansions by Amazon Web Services and others. Now that voters are discovering that giant data centers can mean enormous electricity demand, infrastructure costs and tax subsidies, Husted has reinvented himself as a ratepayer protector.
That’s convenient.
It gets more interesting when you follow Wall Street’s money. Employees identifying Blackstone and KKR as their employers have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to Husted’s federal campaign, and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman personally contributed the federal maximum. Those are individual contributions, not corporate donations—but they matter because Blackstone and KKR are becoming financial giants of the AI/data-center boom.
Blackstone, KKR and Apollo are pouring staggering amounts of capital into AI computing, data centers and the power infrastructure needed to run them. Carlyle-backed Ark Data Centers already operates facilities in Ohio. Ohio pension systems simultaneously invest billions through private equity, private credit, real estate and other alternative-investment structures involving this same Wall Street universe.
Ohio taxpayers subsidize the data centers. Ohio ratepayers help build the electrical infrastructure. Ohio pensioners provide Wall Street capital. Wall Street collects the fees. And Wall Street executives and employees contribute to politicians.
Maybe every piece of that is perfectly legitimate.
That’s why we have auditors.
Unfortunately, Ohio’s Auditor Just Joined SFOF
Ohio Auditor Keith Faber should be the obvious person to follow this money.
Instead, in 2026 Faber joined the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF).
Ohio Treasurer Robert Sprague was already there.
SFOF is particularly interesting because historically it didn’t merely bring Republican financial officials together to complain about ESG. It took sponsorship money from financial companies—including Fidelity, Invesco, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan and, historically, KKR—while providing its financial supporters access to state treasurers and other officials.
That’s quite a business model.
And Ohio is deeply embedded in the SFOF story.
Former Ohio Deputy Treasurer Seth Metcalf became president of SFOF’s board. Metcalf later became the QED figure at the center of Ohio’s bizarre STRS controversy.
And who did SFOF prominently feature and honor while Metcalf headed its board?
Vivek Ramaswamy.
Ramaswamy subsequently launched Strive Asset Management and became one of America’s loudest anti-ESG investment crusaders.
Now he wants to be governor of Ohio.
Metcalf. Sprague. Ramaswamy. Faber.
At some point, SFOF stops looking like a footnote.
Ohio Investigated the People Who Questioned STRS
The irony is almost too perfect.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost aggressively pursued STRS reform trustees Wade Steen and Rudy Fichtenbaum over their relationship with Metcalf and QED.
How much STRS money did QED ultimately receive?
Zero.
Meanwhile STRS continued putting billions of dollars into its existing investment structure and paying substantial investment-staff bonuses.
That’s where Ohio’s investigative enthusiasm suddenly became much less impressive.
Faber himself audited STRS in 2022. Even that audit raised concerns about investment bonuses and secrecy. More recent academic research raises an even more disturbing question: Did STRS have two performance numbers and use the more favorable one when calculating bonuses?
That deserves investigation.
Instead, Ohio spent years attacking the reform trustees who questioned STRS.
Now Faber wants Yost’s job.
He is running for Ohio Attorney General.
Meet the New Boss?
That’s what should concern Ohio teachers.
Yost demonstrated just how aggressively an Ohio Attorney General can use the power of his office against pension reformers.
What evidence is there that Faber would change direction?
He audited STRS without fundamentally disrupting its investment establishment. He has now joined SFOF, an organization intertwined with the same Ohio political-financial network he should be scrutinizing. And I have yet to see anything suggesting that Attorney General Faber would turn Ohio’s investigative machinery away from pension reformers and toward the people actually receiving billions of dollars of pension and infrastructure money.
I hope he proves me wrong.
Because Ohio has a spectacular forensic audit sitting in plain sight.
Follow Husted’s campaign money.
Follow Ramaswamy and SFOF.
Follow Sprague and Ohio’s public money.
Follow STRS and the private-market managers.
Follow Blackstone, KKR, Apollo, Carlyle and Blue Owl.
Follow the data centers, power plants, tax exemptions and electric bills.
And follow the investment bonuses.
Ohio already knows how to investigate pension trustees who challenge the establishment.
Now let’s see Keith Faber investigate the establishment.
https://zeteo.com/p/kreifels-war-on-woke-cash-grab-alaska
The CommonSense 401k Project 