Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Shareholder Activism

January 31, 2014

ICCR Working Inside Progressive Bubble

“A little older, a little more confused,” the late Dennis Hopper once intoned. One month into 2014, the same could be said for this writer. After all, what could be more confusing than members of the religious community employed as willing conspirators in the great organized labor gambit to stifle corporate political speech? Continue Reading...
December 20, 2013

ICCR’s 2013 Proxy Follies

As 2013 draws to a close, it’s time to inventory the year’s proxy resolutions introduced by the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. ICCR, a group purportedly acting on religious principles and faith, is actually nothing more than a shareholder activist group engaged in the advancement of leftist causes at the expense of their fellow shareholders and the world’s poorest. Continue Reading...
November 01, 2013

‘Dark Money’ – A Shaggy Dog Story

“Dark money” sounds menacing and foreboding – a financial nomenclature suggestive of gothic masterpieces like “The Raven” and “The Black Cat.” Whereas Poe’s tales actually contain sinister elements, the phrase dark money is employed by activist shareholders much like the villains of countless “Scooby Doo” cartoons devised illusory ghosts, werewolves and vampires. Continue Reading...
October 17, 2013

Activist Shareholders Are Cereal Killers

The 2013 proxy shareholder season is over, resolutions debated into their respective win/loss columns and reports filed. This hasn’t stopped those shareholder Godflies – the clergy, nuns and other religious on the left – from firing the first salvos for 2014 corporate battles. Continue Reading...
September 27, 2013

Shareholder Activists More Goliath than David

When graying cohorts of nuns, priests, clergy and other religious proxy shareholders hitched their wagon to the Center for Political Accountability’s crusade against Citizens United and corporate political spending, it was reported by most news sources as cute and endearing. Continue Reading...
September 25, 2013

Corporate Political Spending Report a Tool for Business Bullies

The 2013 “CPA-Zicklin Index of Corporate Policy Accountability and Disclosure” was issued Tuesday by the allegedly “nonpartisan” Center for Corporate Political Accountability – the “CPA” of the report’s title lest readers mistakenly read it as the objective analysis of a certified public accountant. Continue Reading...
September 19, 2013

Annual Meeting ‘Godflies’ at Cross Purposes with Investors

“Shareholders’ boardroom clout increases” touts the website at the Interfaith Council on Corporate Responsibility The linked article takes readers to an August 20 essay by Sara Murphy at The Motley Fool in which the author asserts: “New research out today from the Sustainable Investments Institute, or Si2, shows that investors are filing more environmentally and socially themed shareholder resolutions now than ever before, and those resolutions are getting more support during proxy voting than they ever have.” Continue Reading...
August 16, 2013

Have You No Sense of Decency, Sen. Durbin?

Astute Acton readers more than likely are aware already that U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has fired another salvo in the ongoing battle to silence conservative voices. Durbin joins our progressive friends in the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility and As You Sow – both involved in proxy shareholder resolutions that would force companies to disclose donations to nonprofits – in their attempts to declare lights-out on the American Legislative Exchange Council. Continue Reading...