03 Apr 2024 Shareholders Ask Disney to Disclose Pattern of Controversial Charitable Donations – Disney Board Says NO!
Washington, D.C. – Today, concerned shareholders from the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP) will present a proposal (Proposal #8) at The Walt Disney Company annual shareholder meeting that would require the Company to disclose on its website charitable contributions of $5,000 or more. This will allow shareholders to better guide the Company’s philanthropic decision making in the future, while steering management away from expensive mistakes. Corporate giving should ultimately enhance shareholder value in line with the Company’s fiduciary duty and must be conducted without undue risk.
Scott Shepard
“According to Disney’s ‘Global Charitable Giving Guidelines,’ Disney may not support organizations that are actively engaged in highly controversial issues. But these days, Disney leaps from divisive disaster to partisan punch up – and shareholders are left to pick up the shattered pieces,” said FEP Director Scott Shepard.
Disney’s 2022 Corporate Social Responsibility Report reveals, despite Disney’s many financial woes, it has donated millions to groups that campaign for radical transformations that most Americans, Disney fans and shareholders oppose. Groups such as The Trevor Project and GLSEN hide their radicalism – and Disney’s risk – behind “storefront” efforts that appear innocuous.
“Partisan fraudsters pretend that The Trevor Project gets homeless kids off the streets and sends them home for Yahtzee. Instead, they spend our money, as a result of Disney CEO Bob Iger’s mismanagement, to push agendas that include destroying female competitiveness in their own sports, putting vulnerable women at risk in homeless shelters, repealing basic religious liberties, and training teachers to indoctrinate our children in radical gender ideology at an age when their primary anatomical concerns revolve around the contents of their noses,” said Shepard. “It doesn’t take a stellar CEO to quickly see that dedicating Disney to this kind of extremist dreck would burn away decades of love, trust and company value.”
A review of GLSEN’s website reveals the extent to which Iger abandoned his duty to shareholders, stakeholders, fans and Walt’s memory by running Disney to advance his personal worldview. GLSEN advocates concealing a student’s preferred gender identity from parents and integrating gender ideology at all levels of curriculum in public schools. Iger’s Disney is prominently listed as a “Senior Corporate Partner” on GLSEN’s website.
“Iger has jammed his fringe obsessions into everything at Disney, and along the way became a Disney villain come to life. Everything he touches turns to woke, betraying Disney’s heart, its fans and its shareholders,” added Shepard. “It turns out that when you hire people to make your movies who hate the people who love your movies and set out to make things they won’t like, you lose those viewers.”
“Bob Iger can’t be trusted to make unsupervised donations, hence our Proposal. He also can’t be trusted to make unsupervised movies, hires, comments to governors or… anyone else at all, really. Word is, the extravagantly self-impressed Mr. Iger once wanted to be president, and he thought he’d at least go down in the business textbooks as the premiere CEO case study: Bob Iger shows you how to smash it. I think he might well get that last one, but with the perfect Disney ironic twist when it turns out that ‘smash’ can mean two opposite things, and that instead Bob Iger will go down as CEO lesson number one: How to avoid following in the footsteps of the anti-Jack Welsh,” concluded Shepard.
The Walt Disney Company annual shareholder meeting will be held on Wednesday, April 3 at 10:00 AM Pacific. The meeting can be accessed via webcast.
View FEP’s Proposal on page 106 of The Walt Disney Company’s proxy statement.
More information about this proposal, as well as other key votes, can be found in FEP’s mobile and web app, ProxyNavigator.
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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