WOKE WEDNESDAY: Anti-woke proxy vote dilution, bad members stay bad at 3M and Boeing, and Tariq Fancy's underqualified underqualification quote

Live from the Vanguard voter inaction media closet, it’s the ESG Industry’s ONLY weekly woke data podcast, featuring AnalystHole Matt Moscardi! In today’s snowflake ecosystem called August 30, 2023: ESG voting stocks, history repeats itself, and YOU’RE unqualified not me!

Our show today is being sponsored by ESGauge, your ESG data solutions provider, and Paul will jump on later to talk about some stuff, but let’s get at it!

MATT1

1. Vanguard joins BlackRock in rejecting more ESG proposals from shareholders

1. ANTI-WOKE DILUTION

1. Vanguard reported 359 shareholder proposals that were on E&S strategy, and they voted FOR 2% of them (7)

2. 250 of the 359 proposals were at the largest 250 companies in the country, and we have data on them through Proxymonitor

3. Of the 250 proposals we have data on, fully 51 were “anti-woke” - ideology reports, anti-abortion, etc.

1. THAT’S 20% OF THE PROPOSALS

4. In 2022, Vanguard reported 323 proposals and they voted FOR 9% (27)

5. 216 of the 323 were the Fortune 250, and of those, 29 were “anti-woke” proposals

6. There was a near DOUBLING of anti-woke proposals - from roughly 13% of all proposals to just over 20%

7. Then “anti woke” proposals get, on average, about 3% FOR votes - meaning NO ONE votes for them in reality

2. VANGUARD AND BLACKROCK WERE FRAUDS TO BEGIN WITH

1. In 2020, Vanguard voted FOR 7% of the 264 E&S proposals (18)

2. Anti woke snowflake ecosystem expands to include…

1. Mortgages: 

1. Ditch the Woke Banks: Revolutionizing Mortgage Lending for the American Homeowner

2. “DTWB” is an extension of Kinfolk Mortgages out of Arizona

3. They partnered with United Wholesale Mortgage, a massive publicly traded mortgage broker lead by Mat Ishbia, the new owner of the Phoenix Suns

1. What makes them not a woke bank?  The company is controlled by three brothers! Mat, Jeff, and Justin own 77% percent of the board influence!

2. The board is also just a mechanism to get NBA ownership! Ishbia put Isiah Thomas on the board, who’s also on the board of Madison Square Garden owned by the Dolan family, who owns the Knicks!

3. The handshake graft is definitely not woke!

4. The mortgages are basically exactly the same as Chase’s mortgages though, don’t worry - being antiwoke is a carbon copy of being woke, just smaller and generally slightly more expensive!

2. Alice Cooper?

1. Alice Cooper Calls 'Woke' Ideology 'Laughable,' Slams Trans 'Fad'

2. Cooper said, "I find it wrong when you've got a 6-year-old kid who has no idea. He just wants to play, and you're confusing him, telling him, 'Yeah, you're a boy, but you could be a girl if you want to be.’”

3. Meanwhile, Cooper once used baby dolls to impale onstage and waved their heads on spikes while wearing a full face of makeup who also once said, “I think in the future everyone will be bisexual. And everything would be so much simpler then - you'd just make love with anyone you liked, and it wouldn't matter what sex they were, and maybe it also wouldn't matter what color they were, or what age, or anything, except that you liked them.”

3. In failing up news that we called last week…

1. Trump's fans and critics alike are plastering his mug shot on everything from mugs to t-shirts. Here's a roundup of the merch gold mine.

2. Trump raked in $9.4 million as his campaign sold tens of thousands of mugshot t-shirts and coffee mugs

4. NOT A GLASS CLIFF??

1. Mark Thompson: CNN appoints former BBC director general as chief executive

2. Our data: 

1. One share one vote at Warner Bros Discovery, owner of CNN 

2. David Zaslav has 19% influence, Steven Miron has 14%, John Malone has 12%, Paul Gould has 11%

1. Malone owns Liberty Media mess, is a media dictator

2. Miron is CEO of Newhouse family media dictatorship at Advance, major WB shareholder

3. Paul Gould is MD of Allen & Co, an investment bank that raked in money from merger

3. Women have 11% board influence and 23% representation

4. “Diverse” people have 38% representation, 20% influence - and all three women are “twofers” (woman AND person of color - killing all the birds with one stone!)

5. THE BOARD IS 71% INTERCONNECTED

5. History repeats itself!

1. 3M earplug lawsuit: Company to pay $6 billion over claims it sold defective earplugs to U.S. military

2. From 1999 to 2015, 3M sold US military defective earplugs that caused hearing loss in active military and vets

3. The company did not admit liability as part of the settlement (shock), but is now paying 6bn to cover costs associated with hearing loss to US government

4. Here’s where history repeats itself - or at least, people who makes stupid fuckface decisions keep getting board seats and making stupid fuckface decisions that cost money years later

1. 1999 3M board that ostensibly oversees defective military earplug decision includes: Rozanne Ridgeway, who from 1985 and until her retirement in 1989, was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs with Ken Duberstein who was White House Chief of Staff for Reagan in 1988 and 1989

2. Ridgeway is on the board with Frank Shrontz, who’s Chair Emeritus at the time of Boeing, where she is ALSO a board member

3. Also a board member of Boeing: Ken Duberstein, who is the chair of the nominating committee and will later sit on the board that decides to green light the Max 8 planes!

4. Ridgeway is on the board nominating committee, where she picks out Ed Liddy to join her in 2000

5. Ed Liddy is chosen by Ken Duberstein to join the BOEING board in 2010

6. In fact, we know that more than half of the Boeing board was interconnected, and we know that at least half of EACH the 3M board and Boeing boards are interconnected between 1999 and 2011

7. ONE SMALL GROUP OF PEOPLE CRASHED YOUR PLANES AND MADE YOU DEAF, AND THE COMPANIES PAID OUT ONE TO TWO DECADES LATER!

6. Former BlackRock exec Tariq Fancy: Many ESG experts are ‘underqualified’

1. Why do we keep asking a guy who worked in “ESG” for less than 2 years what he thinks about ESG?