Taking On Deluded and Reckless Corporate America

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John,

2020 was an incredible year for our full-service shareholder activism and education program, the Free Enterprise Project.

The National Center’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP) grilled executives over their support of the Big Government left at 43 corporate shareholder meetings and filed 25 shareholder resolutions.

The resolutions had a stunning 70% success rate this year: Nine of them made it into proxy materials, educating millions of shareholders on corporate shenanigans; five of them were adopted as policy by corporations; and one blocked two liberal shareholder resolutions from even being considered.

As a result of our efforts, shareholders at John Deere, Costco, Boeing, Eli Lilly, Starbucks, Netflix, and Twitter voted on FEP proposals calling for greater ideological diversity on their boards and at their workplaces.

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Prudential, and Walgreens negotiated with us to withdraw similar resolutions in exchange for adopting formal written policies to seek greater ideological diversity by pursuing conservative candidates for future board vacancies.

Free Enterprise Project’s media outreach was nothing short of stunning.

FEP staff were interviewed, cited and quoted over 3,300 times – or almost 10 times per day!

Among the most notable media outlets were Reuters, the Associated Press, Fox Business’s “Mornings with Maria,” Bloomberg, CNN, and The New York Times. Free Enterprise Project staff were also interviewed on radio 85 times, on television 16 times, and were published 35 times.

And I’m pleased to tell you that our Free Enterprise Project is SO effective that some of the largest corporations in America now fear it.

Which corporations?

PepsiCo, for starters.

I’ve written to you before about corporate support of the radical Black Lives Matter organizations.

Amazon, Airbnb, DoorDash, Nabisco, Microsoft, Unilever, and Fitbit have together provided BLM with tens of millions of dollars in funding, indirectly underwriting the violence that has gripped many of our urban centers.

Until recently, PepsiCo supported BLM too, through its Gatorade brand. But in October, our Free Enterprise Project launched an online petition campaign to pressure PepsiCo to stop funding BLM.

In a matter of days, our campaign generated more than 500 grassroots actions against PepsiCo, and it proved too much for the company. PepsiCo terminated its funding for BLM.

There’s so much more our Free Enterprise Project did in 2020 that I’d like to share with you, but in the interest of space, I’ll just focus briefly on a couple of the most notable:

FEP played a key role in President Trump’s Executive Order requiring Chinese corporations to meet accounting standards set by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board to be listed on American stock exchanges.

FEP played a key role in regulatory changes at the U.S. Department of Labor designed to rein in financial managers who indulge in left-wing political activism with the funds they manage.
FEP led a campaign to end left-wing bias of AmazonSmile, which bars some conservative organizations from participating in its grant program. Amazon did so by giving the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) the authority to determine which organizations are qualified. The effort received significant media attention and was used by U.S. Representatives Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) as the basis for questioning of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos under oath during a congressional hearing.

FEP debuted the first-ever conservative investor tool, the “Investor Value Voter Guide,” to help Christian and conservative investors vote their shareholder proxies in a manner consistent with their values.
FEP launched a corporate accountability coalition called “Back to Neutral” to coordinate a conservative movement-wide effort to pressure Corporate America to stop supporting left-wing causes and return to neutral.

We’re especially proud to have played a key role in President Trump’s Executive Order on China!

This year, with your renewed support, we will look to build on this success by launching a major new effort on China. We recognize that China is our nation’s greatest economic and geostrategic enemy. The COVID-19 crisis only made this clearer.

While it is unlikely that the Chinese leaders can ever be motivated to change their behavior, we can – through our Free Enterprise Project – motivate U.S. corporations to change their behavior toward China.

Thanks to the support of visionary conservatives like you, the National Center plays a key leadership role in fighting against corporate assaults on the conservative values you and I share through our Free Enterprise Project.

John, may I count on your support at this crucial time as we engage the battles ahead in 2021? I ask you to use this opportunity to make a tax-deductible contribution today.

As you have seen, we are facing a more radicalized, more motivated left-wing than ever before. To save freedom in America, we have to keep confronting them!

Please take this important opportunity to help the National Center for Public Policy Research achieve even bigger success in 2021.

I thank you so much for standing with me and the National Center for Public Policy Research.

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In Liberty,

David A. Ridenour
President

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The National Center for Public Policy Research is a communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems. We believe that the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility provide the greatest hope for meeting the challenges facing America in the 21st century.

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