The silly season once again is upon us, and by that your writer doesn’t mean federal campaigning for political office for which he cares little or the prevalence of self-promoting entertainment awards programs for which he cares even less. Instead, he means the 2016 proxy shareholder resolution season, specifically as it applies to nuisance resolutions from religious investment groups having more to do with leftist agendas than rational corporate governance and … well, you know … religion.
The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (marketing tagline: “Inspired by Faith, Committed to Action”) released earlier this month its 2016 Proxy Resolutions and Voting Guide. As of this writing, As You Sow hasn’t released its 2016 Proxy Preview, but familiarity with the past two volumes leads to anticipation of more of the same progressive targeting of publicly held companies on such issues as climate change mitigation, executive compensation and board diversity, and transparency on corporate donations and lobbying efforts (ICCR, at least, seems to have dialed back significantly efforts to curtail the use of genetically modified organisms).
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