A group of shareholders in America’s largest bank are banding together to fight against the company’s “woke” policies.
Members of a group called The Boardroom Initiative issued a shareholder proposal that rebuked some of Bank of America’s “wokeness,” and though the proposal was shot down, members of the group remained upbeat.
“While the shareholder proposal didn’t pass, this is still a victory for Americans because we’ve drawn a tremendous amount of attention to this issue,” said Ed Renzi, the executive chairman of The Boardroom Initiative.
Renzi is also the former CEO of McDonald’s America USA.
“CEOs have a responsibility to deliver value to shareholders. This includes individual shareholders who depend on their income from their 401(k)s,” he said. “There are millions of Americans, including many retirees living on fixed incomes, who depend on their 401(k) income and are facing record inflation. These Americans are depending on CEOs to deliver value, not cater to left-wing activists. The Boardroom Initiative will continue fighting back against ‘woke capitalism’ and we will be launching new campaigns to empower shareholders and employees in this important cause.”
Bank of America once infamously taught its employees that toddlers are racist during a corporate diversity training program, and taught those employees tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT), including “microagressions,” and “white-skin privileges.”
The Boardroom Initiative wants companies to focus on what they exist to do – maximize revenue for their shareholders.
On its website, The Boardroom Initiative says it will “work to realign corporations with their core business goals through shareholder proposals, advancing viewpoint diversity on company boards, and utilizing digital channels to spread awareness of our mission.”
In many of America’s largest corporations, social justice has gained a foothold in the form of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG), which those companies call “stakeholder capitalism.”
For example, BlackRock, America’s largest investment firm, evaluates companies in its investment portfolio based on criteria that are unrelated to those companies’ financial performances, and sometimes related to their levels of commitment to certain social justice practices.
“Stakeholder capitalism is all about delivering long-term, durable returns for shareholders. And transparency around your company’s planning for a net zero world is an important element of that. But it’s just one of many disclosures we and other investors ask companies to make,” a recent letter from BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said. “As stewards of our clients’ capital, we ask businesses to demonstrate how they’re going to deliver on their responsibility to shareholders, including through sound environmental, social, and governance practices and policies.”
Some worry that judging companies based on their “wokeness” and not their finances could not only push America’s corporations further to the left, but could result in a corporate credit-scoring system based on how “woke” those companies are.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Bank of America” by Billy Hathorn. CC BY-SA 3.0.
“Stakeholder vs. Shareholder” transformative policy initiatives is a major tenet of the World Economic Forum (the Great Reset). The CEO must be a student of Klaus Schwab.