ANTI-WOKE WEDNESDAY: The Committee to Unleash the ESG at the National Public Policy Center's woke WSJ editorial's board's leftist National Legal and Policy... WTF, the anti-woke are exhausting...

Live from the State Street Executive Squash Court, it’s the ESG Industry’s ONLY weekly woke data podcast, featuring BS-Man Matt Moscardi. In today’s Everclear Sunny Gold called May 17, 2023: random ESG headlines, an anti-ESG update, and a word from our sponsor about director elections.

Our show today is being sponsored by ESGauge, your ESG data solutions provider 

DAMION1

1. Random ESG Headlines

1. CEOs Rule!

1. Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to avoid prison, hit with $452 million restitution bill

2. College Dropout and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reconfirms that he has ZERO equity in OpenAI

2. Woke Data Wars

1. Women drinking beer clothed: why are rightwingers melting down over Miller Lite?

1. A commercial pointing to longstanding sexism in beer ads has sparked outrage – and led to a campaign of harassment

2. The newest target? Miller Lite. Conservatives are hopping mad after discovering a two-month-old Miller Lite commercial that was released during Women’s History Month.

3. What exactly is the problem with this ad? Well, it seems that people are taking extreme offense to the fact that the ad humorously points out that there is a long history of misogyny in beer advertising, including Miller’s own legacy of using women in skimpy bikinis to sell lager. Fully-clothed women drinking beer? Woke!

4. “This video was about two things: worm poop and saying women shouldn’t be forced to mud wrestle in order to sell beer. Neither of these things should be remotely controversial and we hope beer drinkers can appreciate the humor (and ridiculousness) of this video from back in March,” a company spokesperson said.

5. Alissa Heinerscheid was fired at Anheuser-Busch after being harassed online

1. A similar harassment campaign is now being waged against Sofia Colucci, the chief marketing officer for Molson Coors. Rightwing outlets are publishing hit pieces targeting the executive and Colucci has reportedly deleted multiple social media account pages because of the harassment. Thankfully Molson Coors is reacting with a little more courage than Anheuser-Busch and refusing to pander to bigots.

2. “People can take issue with our ads or our brands, but we won’t stand by as people personally attack our employees – especially given that these are company decisions, and are never made by one single person,” Adam Collins, Molson Coors’ chief communications and corporate affairs officer, told Newsweek on Tuesday. Which is precisely what the people at Bud Light should have said. Indeed, if Anheuser-Busch had reacted with a little more guts, then conservatives might not have felt so emboldened to start attacking executives at Molson Coors.

3. Stakeholders Rule!

1. “Interesting” proxy votes

1. Intel:  a third-party review of whether the Company’s activities and expenditures related to doing business in China align with its ESG commitments

1. The National Center for Public Policy Research Supporting statement: “Intel touts the virtues of its ESG initiatives … But Intel’s environmental promises and human rights commitments are belied by its cozy relationship with China”

2. 0.043%

2. AIG

1. CEO and Chair Peter Zaffino’s $75M 2022 pay (including his Special RSU Grant worth $50 million if he keeps his job for 5 more years

2. “in light of his exemplary leadership, unique financial, technical and operational capabilities”

3. He’s been CEO since 2021

4. Big NO: 68%

3. Norfolk Southern

1. Nobody is mad at nothing or nobody

2. In fact, CEO Alan Shaw got the HIGHEST percentage of YES votes for reelection out of the entire board: 99%

3. Only safety chair Michael Lockhart received over 10% NO: 88% YES

4. Blowhard Index

1. WSJ Editorial Board Op-Ed The ESG Proxy Vote Ranking: Is your asset manager voting based on the interests of investors or for political agendas?

1. If Americans want to make investment decisions using environmental, social and governance factors, that’s fair enough. It’s a free country. The problem is having a hidden agenda that applies to everybody else. A new analysis says that, even in non-ESG investment vehicles, many asset managers proxy vote in favor of woke shareholder proposals to do racial audits or strangle fossil fuels.

2. a report by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, which examined “4,814 non-ESG branded funds” to see how proxy votes were cast on “50 of the most extreme ESG-oriented shareholder proposals from 2022.” 

3. One proposal wanted Home Depot to perform a “racial equity audit” to identify “adverse impacts on nonwhite stakeholders.” Another called on Costco to set climate targets for “Scope 3” emissions, including due to “land use change” and “deforestation.” Neither has anything to do with the bottom line.

4. Sunshine is what this ESG business demands. Pensioners and investors want a good return. What they don’t want, to pick one example, is for companies that sell paint or hamburgers to undertake costly external audits so that they can self-flagellate about the ills of the world. The Committee to Unleash Prosperity won’t have the last word, but its ranking is a good resource if you’re wondering what your asset manager is doing when you aren’t paying attention.

2. Committee to Unleash Prosperity

1. Led by 4 disgruntled old rich white dudes: why is this always the case?

1. Nepo-baby Steve Forbes 

2. The co-authors of Trumponomics (Arthur Laffer and Steve Moore)

1. Steve Moore co-founded The Club for Growth with 3 other disgruntled old rich white dudes (sound familiar?), one of whom being Harlan Crow, the billionaire in the news lately for being Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ sugar daddy

3. Phil Kerpen who cofounded the American Commitment with a disgruntled old rich white dude and is essentially funded by the Koch Brothers, the OG disgruntled old rich white dudes

MATT1

QAnon Proposal Roundup

Marriott International

• Stockholder Resolution Requesting that the Company Publish a Congruency Report of Partnerships with Globalist Organizations

• The National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR)

• Analyze the “congruency” of voluntary partnerships with organizations that facilitate collaboration between businesses, governments and NGOs for social and political ends against the Company’s fiduciary duty to shareholders.

• Proponent Statement:

• Marriott does not list the World Economic Forum (WEF), Business Roundtable (BR), Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Rockefeller Foundation or Bilderberg Group among its partners or as recipients of contributions;1 however, WEF does list Marriott as a partner,2  BR lists CEO Anthony G. Capuano among its members,3  Rockefeller Foundation lists VP of Sustainability Denise Naguib as a member,4 former Marriott president Fred Malek was a CFR member,5  and past Bilderberg meetings have been held inside Marriott hotels.6 

• WEF sponsorship by Marriott - so they would use their hotels

• Also on the BR board: Lynn Good (Duke Energy), Lance Fritz (Union Pacific), Greg Hayes (Raytheon), Doug MacMillon (Walmart), Scott Kirby (United Airlines)... all… woke?

• The Council on Foreign Relations advisory group includes executives from… India, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, Turkey, Brazil… oil, conglomerates, family wealth… all… woke?  

• Also, FORMER president of Marriott??

• Naguib wrote a blog post about partnering to reduce food waste at hotels 

• Why the inconsistency? Why is the Board concealing these partnerships, amongst others, from shareholders?

• expenditures with third parties must be shown by the Board to be congruent with the interests of shareholders and the Company’s fundamental purpose, which since 1957 – according to Marriott’s own materials – is a hotel business.9

• it’s the radical agendas of these organizations that makes our partnerships with them so troubling

• WEF openly advocates for transhumanism,

• Link to Klaus Schwab book “The Fourth Revolution” about technology advancements and how humans need to manage them - they definitely didn’t read it, it’s almost 200 pages long

• abolishing private property,

• Taken from a prediction video (8 predictions by 2030) that said, “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”... but they leave out the next sentence… “whatever you want you’ll rent, and it’ll be delivered by drone” - they predicted rental Amazon and it’s woke!!

• eating bugs

• The anti woke really hate bugs despite the fact that 80% of the world’s nations eat insects

• social credit systems

• “The Great Reset,”

• The WEF plan to use the pandemic to include more stakeholders in government and corporate action - with an incredibly malevolent sounding name

• Board Response

• The Board recommends a vote AGAINST this proposal

• The Company and its leaders are members of various organizations that represent industry and business interests globally and in the United States. Reasons for membership vary, but generally these organizations provide engagement opportunities with customers, thought leadership forums for executives, and multi-company or multi-industry platforms to engage and exercise leadership on common issues that impact our business and our interests..

• evaluated by our Global Affairs and Public Policy team, the President and CEO, and the members of the senior executive leadership team. 

• We are also transparent about our participation in such groups: we highlight key corporate industry and business association memberships in the public policy section of our annual Serve 360 Report, and our political activities, including our governance and Board oversight practices, are described in detail on the Political Activity — Policies, Oversight, and Disclosure page of our investor relations website. 

• We do not endorse or agree with every policy position, initiative, decision around political spending, or workstream undertaken by the various groups with which we interact, and we believe that preparing a report on each social and political policy position developed by those groups would be so expensive and time-consuming as to be impracticable. 

• The filers: National Center for Public Policy Research

• David Ridenour

• Prior jobs include ED at US Youth Council, a CIA-funded front to infiltrate looking for communists from the 60s and 70s that went bankrupt while Ridenour was there because Congress said US Information Agency couldn’t spy domestically

• At NCPPR since then - per his own LinkedIn write up: The National Center for Public Policy Research is a free market think tank described by Nation magazine as a "crucial gear in the right's propaganda factory."

• Also on the board of groups hoping to stop the Endangered Species Act - he REALLY DOESN’T LIKE that species are endangered

• Scott Shepard (no investment experience), Ethan Peck (from his bio: Ethan is well-versed in woke ideology and the social justice mindset, and is hopeful that traditional American values can be communicated effectively across the aisle. He holds a Master’s Degree in Counter-Terrorism from the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel.)

• Heritage Foundation on the board (EDMUND F. HAISLMAIER)

• Heartland Foundation on the board (Horace Cooper)

• Hoover Institute, Breitbart board member (Peter Schweizer)

… Speaking of the Anti Woke

• The Committee To Unleash Prosperity unleashed a report unleashing grades on how funds unleash wokeness through their votes

• They hand selected the “Fiduciary Free 50” shareholder proposals which they say are, “the most radical proposals related to left-wing activism.”

• They then assign each vote recommendation “FOR” by a fund 0 points, an abstention 5 points, and a vote “AGAINST” 10 points

• They take that as a percentage of total possible votes AGAINST and multiply by 10 to get a 0-10 scale

• They assigned grades A-F (with an “F-” at the bottom for emphasis on F-ness)

• They did this for hundreds of fund families, but concentrate on the “40 most active voters” (the largest, more or less, by funds managed).  The wokest funds are run by:

• Europeans, but this is boring, so they don’t dwell on this

• Smaller funds and Canadian funds, but this is boring, so they don’t dwell on this

• THE BIG THREE:

• Vanguard - A grade!  Not woke!

• Blackrock - C grade - often woke?

• State Street - D grade - WOKE!

• Also, vote recommendations by proxy advisors:

• ISS - F- - ULTRA WOKE!

• Glass Lewis - D - REGULAR WOKE

• Methodology here is fascinatingly stupid! Surprise!

• Choice of the “Fiduciary Free 50” - hand selected!

• Right on Right Crime Alert: 

• Proposal at Twitter considered “radical left-wing activism” filed by the National Legal and Policy Center - it’s an anti woke filing, but in the filing, they didn’t say anything about “helping China” or “thought diversity”, so it confused the Committee to Unleash Prosperity hand pickers

• Proposal at J&J for a racial equity audit filed by… THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR PUBLIC POLICY!  Thanks Scott Shepard and Ethan Peck for joining us on a leftist globalist crusade!

• If the Company is, in the name of racial equity, diversity and inclusion, committing illegal discrimination against employees deemed "non-diverse,"

• Making this worse: Deroy Murdock - no relation - is a fellow at the National Center for Public Policy AND an advisory board member of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity

• Ignores 2nd degrees - Steve Forbes heads Committee to Unleash, was on Heritage with Ed Haislmaier who is on NCPPR

• 24 of the 50 are just anything related to climate change

• The 50 are comprised of:

• Labor union (SEIU)

• Multiple nun proposals

• Trillium

• Arjuna

• As You Sow

• Walden

• Sierra Club

• GRADE DEFLATION!

• They set the bands of A-F not using a straight math scale - ie, there are 5 letters and 10 points, 2 points per letter

• No, they set the thresholds… JUST TO MAKE BLACKROCK A C.

• In fact, had they used basic methodology and make believe, Blackrock and JPM are B, Fidelity and Vanguard are A, and state street is a C.  Meaning - the largest investors in the world… aren’t woke??