06 May 2024 Conservative Shareholders Denounce DEI, Decarbonization and Disarmament

Washington, D.C. – Shareholder activists with the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP) will present proposals at six shareholder meetings this week — American Express, Intel, General Electric, Progressive, Ford and Duke Energy.

On Tuesday, May 7, FEP will confront American Express, Intel and General Electric (GE) at each company’s virtual shareholder meeting.

At the American Express meeting, FEP will stand up for the rights and privacy of legal gun owners by presenting Proposal 7, which demands transparency about the company’s potential flagging of customer purchases at gun and ammunition stores.

In its supporting statement, FEP questions “whether the best choice is not to track these lawful and constitutionally protected purchases in any way, as well as the dangers associated with sharing any information gathered with government representatives whose use of the information can only be to surveil and harass those who exercise their lawful right to keep and bear Arms.”

At the General Electric (GE) meeting, FEP will present Proposal 5, asking GE to analyze the risks of its carbon-reduction commitments in light of research that calls into question the wisdom of such efforts.

“General Electric has voluntarily committed to being a net-zero company by 2050,” notes FEP in its supporting statement. “The Company has done so even though it has failed to report on its evaluation of the technological or financial feasibility of such commitments. Given the SEC’s climate and ESG enforcement actions, the Company must exercise caution and provide transparency about such commitments.”

At the Intel meeting, FEP will present Proposal 4, which asks the company to create a committee to assess the extent to which Intel is undermining its financial sustainability by aligning itself with a type of radicalism that is rejected by large swaths of the market.

“Recent events have made clear that company bottom lines, and therefore value to shareholders, drop when companies take overtly political and divisive positions that alienate consumers,” FEP says in its supporting statement, noting Intel’s strong support for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and its controversial Equality Act, as well as the $7,800,000.00 it donated to the discredited Black Lives Matter movement and related causes.

On Thursday, May 9, FEP will confront Ford and Duke Energy at each company’s virtual shareholder meeting.

At the Ford meeting, FEP will present Proposal 6, which requests an audit of the extent to which the company’s electric vehicle (EV) supply chain is reliant on child labor.

“According to reports from the media, government, and third-party watchdogs, EVs and the batteries that go in them are a serious human rights concern,” notes FEP in its supporting statement. “Cobalt mining in the DRC is often done by children… Many of these children are injured and killed in these conditions… Nonetheless, companies like ours are building business plans around EVs that effectively rely on these violations.”

At the Duke Energy meeting, FEP will present Proposal 6, which seeks an audit of the financial assumptions that the company relied on in adopting its decarbonization policies, and requests the company to consider other research.

“The Company brags about ‘lead[ing] the largest planned coal exit in the country,'” notes FEP in its supporting statement. “Meanwhile, the Company will have invested more than $2 billion in solar energy by 2024. These investment decisions presume the normative IEA NZE is possible and is based on true assumptions, but it is unclear what, if any, analysis the Company has done to protect company assets should NZE prove unsound.”

Finally, on Friday, May 10 at the Progressive Corporation meeting, FEP will present Proposal 5, which requests an audit of the company’s DEI program, and specifically the financial risks that DEI poses to shareholder value.

“Progressive has possibly implemented illegal racial quotas,” notes FEP in its supporting statement, citing company goals and statistics. “In just the past year, a corporation was successfully sued for a single case of discrimination against a white employee resulting in an award of more than $25 million. The risk of being sued for such discrimination appears only to be rising. With over 50,000 employees, Progressive likely has at least 37,000 employees who are potentially the victims of this type of illegal discrimination because they are white, Asian, male, or straight.”

More information about this proposal, as well as other key votes, can be found in FEP’s mobile and web app, ProxyNavigator.

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The National Center for Public Policy Research, founded in 1982, is a non-partisan, free-market, independent conservative think-tank. Ninety-four percent of its support comes from individuals, less than four percent from foundations and less than two percent from corporations. It receives over 350,000 individual contributions a year from over 60,000 active recent contributors. Contributions are tax-deductible and may be earmarked for the Free Enterprise Project. Sign up for email updates at https://nationalcenter.org/subscribe/.

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