07 Mar 2024 Conservative Group Launches Proxy Navigator Tool to Fight Woke Corporations
Washington, D.C. – Today, shareholder proponents at the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP) launched Proxy Navigator, a new tool in the fight to hold woke corporations accountable to their shareholders.
Proxy Navigator offers institutional investors an alternative to the expensive and left-wing proxy advisory services Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis while providing retail investors of all sizes a free and efficient means of voting their shares in accordance with their values and business judgments.
The app (also available on the web at https://proxynavigator.com/) allows users to quickly and easily automate the voting of any or all of their proxy ballots in whole or partial accord with FEP’s real-time voting recommendations. Those recommendations will be available shortly after the proxy ballots come out.
The app also provides neutrality v. wokeness ratings of covered companies by a growing number of analysts, as well as a real-time stock ticker and general company news.
The app could be game-changing as ISS and Glass Lewis have an outsized influence on the proxy voting process. Seventy-one percent of all shares are held by institutional investors, and ISS and Glass Lewis together control over 95% of this market.
At the same time, individuals — who hold roughly 29% of the total shares — rarely vote, voting their proxies only 28% of the time.
Scott Shepard
“The whole environmental, social and governance (ESG) nightmare has been propelled by investment-house executives using other people’s money to push their own partisan personal policy preferences,” said Free Enterprise Project Director Scott Shepard. “It’s been a disaster. With Proxy Navigator, shareholders — the real capitalists — can speak to companies for themselves so American businesses can recover from the woke fever dream.”
With the average Russell 3000 proxy running 80 pages, most small investors simply don’t have the time to follow and respond to shareholder proposals. An investor with a portfolio of just 30 stocks, for example, might need to spend several hundred hours reading their proxies, and even then, he or she might not understand them.
Institutional investors, including many state pension funds, who favor fiduciary duty, good business practices and corporate withdrawal from partisan politics face a similar hurdle. Few have dedicated staff for reviewing their proxies, which can number in the hundreds, and consequently, many farm voting out to proxy advisory companies.
Unfortunately, there has been no conservative alternative to ISS and Glass Lewis, resulting in some red states voting against their own interests. For example, both the Teacher Retirement System of Texas (TRS) and the Employees Retirement System of Texas (ERS) contracted their proxy voting out to ISS and ended up voting all their shares in favor of proposals against oil exploration, even though Texas is the U.S.’s #1 oil-producing state.
Companies often view shareholder proposal results as polls of shareholders’ wishes, but have so far only been picking up the politics of ISS, Glass Lewis, BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard executives. Corporate America’s embrace of the radical climate change and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) agendas would never have occurred but for those companies’ collective capture and misuse of the system.
Even small changes in proxy voting can have an enormous impact on corporate behavior, and Proxy Navigator is positioned to bring big changes in support of business sanity.
The app is available now in the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, as well as for download online at https://proxynavigator.com/.
For more information, visit ProxyNavigator.com.
About
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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