Wednesday this week is a big day for shareholder meetings, and a big day for proxy voting – mostly voting against a full scorecard of truly deplorable proposals submitted by various members of the As You Sow (AYS) Coalition. The first three proposals listed below are our Free Enterprise Project (FEP) proposals. We ask you to vote for the first two, and against the third, for reasons we explain below. Then we’ve listed a whole series of AYS proposals that we hope you’ll join us in voting against.
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Do remember that you do not have to wait until Wednesday to vote on all of these proposals. While Wednesday will be a crazy day for us, it does not have to be for you. You can vote your proxies at any time until midnight on Tuesday. We sure hope you’ll join us in doing so.
Thank you for your help in these vital matters!
Weekly Resolution Votes
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May 27, 2020
Vote FOR our proposal at Amazon to remove the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a gatekeeper to the Amazon Smile program. The Smile program is a well-intentioned and generous effort by Amazon to donate up to one-half of one percent of the purchase prices of participating customers, at Amazon expense, to non-profit organizations selected by the customers. The problem arises because the company is using the SPLC to filter out “hate groups” that are ineligible for participation. The SPLC – once a genuine force for civil rights – has descended into a hate group of its own, using its leftover prestige to target charitable organizations with different political leanings than it; suffering racism and sexual harassment scandals; firing its long-time leaders for misdeeds; and being described by a former employee “mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals.”
The Amazon Smile program is great. Amazon using the SPLC to exclude worthy charities from participating is an easily avoidable scandal. Our proposal aims to help them end that scandal.
Read more about FEP’s efforts to keep SPLC and other bigoted organizations from pushing right-of-center organizations out of our shared public life starting on page 52 of our Investor Value Voter Guide.
Proposal 12 in Amazon’s Proxy Statement.
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May 27, 2020
Vote FOR our proposal at Twitter to push the company toward adding “viewpoint” to its employment non-discrimination policy. At too many Silicon Valley companies, including Twitter, left-wing activist employees are working to silence voices from the center and the right – both customers in their tweets and employees in their day-to-day affairs. We Americans, including and especially the left, learned more than half-a-century ago the hard lessons about the evils of McCarthy-style blacklists in both public and private employment. It’s infuriating that left-wingers, who benefited from the national consensus against harassing employees because of their political beliefs or participation, now want to wage those same harassment campaigns against the right. Our proposal is an effort to shut down this harassment and discrimination at Twitter.
Read more about FEP’s efforts to end blacklisting and other viewpoint discrimination starting on page 20 of our Investor Value Voter Guide.
Proposal 4 in Twitter’s Proxy Statement.
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May 27, 2020
Vote AGAINST our proposal at Chevron that deals with Chevron’s direct and grassroots lobbying.
Wait, what?
You read that right. We want you to vote against our proposal. You see, companies only have to entertain one proposal on any given topic each year. And every year the As You Sow (AYS) Coalition submits proposals seeking to stop companies from undertaking sensible, pro-business lobbying efforts that are in their companies’ and American consumers’ best interests, preferring that the lobbying field be cleared for unions and left-wing organizations to have it their own way in state legislatures. The result would be to turn every state in the union into an economic basket case like Illinois, New Jersey or Connecticut. So we submitted this proposal to block those AYS efforts at Chevron this year, and to inform shareholders of the AYS coalition’s efforts.
Read more about AYS coalition efforts to drive business interests out of lobbying efforts starting on page 37 of our Investor Value Voter Guide, and specifically about how we blocked AYS's Chevron proposals on page 40.
Proposal 4 in Chevron’s Proxy Statement.
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May 27, 2020
Vote AGAINST a series of proposals at Exxon submitted by various AYS coalition organizations. These proposals include:
- A proposal to ease the rules by which shareholders can independently call meetings of Exxon’s board, which would have the effect of allowing huge, left-leaning institutional investors (i.e., investors who get to vote your shares held in mutual or pension funds for their narrow political benefits) additional control over corporate boards for peripheral purposes;
- A set of proposals designed to raise Exxon’s costs in doing its core business – offering low-cost energy to consumers around the world – by adding layers of additional reporting that the AYS coalition would use to push the company even further in the direction of expensive, ill-considered and counterproductive “green energy” production; and
- A pair of proposals designed to push Exxon out of necessary pro-business lobbying to leave the lobbying field to favor-seeking and economy-destroying radical left-wing and union interests.
Read more about FEP objections to these sorts of proposals throughout our Investor Value Voter Guide, particularly beginning at page 9 (the “environmental policy” hustle) and page 37 (lobbying restrictions).
Proposals 5-9 in Exxon’s Proxy Statement.
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May 27, 2020
Vote AGAINST a series of proposals at Amazon submitted by various AYS coalition organizations. These proposals include:
- A proposal that would require Amazon to censor for content the products it sells or allows to be sold on its site. This proposal is particularly pernicious considering Amazon’s disgraceful ongoing reliance on the SPLC as a judge of appropriate content (as discussed above in this email); and
- A pair of proposals that would extend the AYS Coalition’s obsession with racial and sex-based quotas, and attempts to gin up division and mistrust on those potentially explosive grounds, both worldwide and into every decision the company makes.
Remember, though – please vote FOR our Amazon Proposal No. 12, regarding Amazon’s relationship with the SPLC, discussed above.
Read more about FEP objections to these sorts of proposals throughout our Investor Value Voter Guide, particularly beginning at page 28 (race- and gender-based quotas and divisiveness) and page 52 (banning conservatives from national public life).
Proposals 8, 10 and 11 in Amazon’s Proxy Statement.
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May 27, 2020
Vote AGAINST a series of proposals at Facebook submitted by various AYS coalition organizations. These proposals include:
- A proposal that would require Facebook to curtail political advertising, a further step in the coordinated effort to choke right-of-center fact and opinion from social media entirely;
- A pair of proposals that would work together to put a far-left, “woke” social-justice warrior at the head of Facebook’s board of directors, further closing social media to right-of-center thought; and
- Yet another proposal trying to inject every aspect of American working life with divisions, strife, quotas and government interference on racial and sex-based grounds.
Read more about FEP objections to these sorts of proposals throughout our Investor Value Voter Guide, particularly beginning at page 33 (the Facebook Trifecta of proposals, one of which was withdrawn, but two of which are referred to above).
Proposals 5, 7, 8 and 11 in Facebook’s Proxy Statement.
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In response to the liberal left’s outsized influence over corporate proxy ballot matters, the Free Enterprise Project (FEP) has debuted its first annual Investor Value Voter Guide to educate investors who want to vote in line with conservative and religious values.
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The Free Enterprise Project (FEP) is the liberty movement's only full-service shareholder and activism group that is effective in pushing corporate America back to neutral and out of the culture wars. Donations are tax-deductible and greatly appreciated.
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