Insanity! That’s how Thomas Sternberg, co-founder of Staples, describes Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act. “Incredibly wasteful,” adds John A. Allison IV , a director of BB&T Corp., the ninth-largest U.S. bank. For the past year or so, CEOs and business lobbying groups like the Business Roundtable and the National Investor Relations Institute have been fighting “tooth and nail” [...]

There have recently been plenty of shareholder proposals asking companies to disclose political spending. In fact (as noted in an earlier post ), the share of proposals to the Fortune 100 focusing on political spending increased 84 percent in 2011 from the three previous years. Last week, to mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision (on January [...]

Cross-posted from my blog over at 1913massacre.com: In the most recent essay for his new “On Democracy” series, Bill Moyers picks up on the news that the George Kaiser Family Foundation has acquired the Woody Guthrie Archives for 3 million dollars. Plans to open a new center in Tulsa are already underway. Woody’s papers, drawings and things will be [...]

I’m always thrown by attempts to measure prosperity purely in terms of economic growth or high employment figures. Those measures are too restrictive, and they are also disorienting. Politicians who offer jobs leave me cold, and do us all a disservice. As I’ve written several times, the country is, or ought to be, more than [...]

In 1998, Howie Klein was the president of Reprise Records, and had the privilege of attending a dinner Bill Clinton threw to honor Vaclav Havel. The entertainment that evening was Lou Reed. (Havel is a big fan.) Klein was seated at a table with Senator Dick Lugar, the Indiana Republican, and he remembers Lugar’s reaction to Reed’s [...]

Words are not Rick Santorum’s friends. The Republican presidential candidate has the distinction of having had his own name turned against him. He pleaded — to no avail – with Google to cleanse the Internet of the “filth” associated with santorum. Now Mr. Santorum has turned to etymology. In the most recent Republican debate, he argued that [...]

If it accomplishes nothing else, Occupy Wall Street creates an extraordinary opportunity for a conversation about American values. This became clear to me yesterday morning as I was reading about the Values Voter Summit and tweeted:

#OWS 99% are value voters, too. #vvs

My thoughts had drifted from Values Voters to voters’ values, from the “Premier Conservative Event [...]

A letter from Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has been making the rounds , asking other CEOs to join with him and “forgo all political contributions until Congress and the President return to Washington and deliver a fiscally-disciplined, long-term debt and deficit plan to the American people.” The idea has gained plenty of admirers: “thousands of Americans – [...]

If you haven’t yet read it – and I admit I am late on this, as I am on nearly everything else – have a look at John Cassidy’s profile of Bridgewater hedge fund manager Ray Dalio in the July 25th issue of The New Yorker . Cassidy exerts most of his energy trying to figure out whether [...]

Last Wednesday, the UN Human Rights Council announced its endorsement of the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, developed by John Ruggie. The UN press release called it “an unprecedented step,” the establishment of “the authoritative global reference point” in questions of business and human rights. Unprecedented? Only if you ignore history. In fact, the [...]

A video making the rounds on YouTube and on progressive blogs features the American Family Association’s Buddy Smith telling the story of his run-in with Home Depot Chairman and CEO Fred Blake at the annual shareholders meeting on June 2nd. Smith, whose organization also runs a site called BoycottTheHomeDepot.com , came to the shareholders meeting to present a [...]

While protestors at the JP Morgan Chase annual shareholders meeting in Columbus, Ohio braved the rain and faced off with police, inside the McCoy Center there was a remarkable exchange .

“As a person of faith, my God believes you shouldn’t take advantage of people when they are down,” said Dawn Dannenbring, of the community group Illinois [...]

First, a correction. In my last post about the 2011 proxy season, I wrote that shareholder resolutions requiring disclosure of grassroots political spending brought by AFSCME to Prudential and Bank of America had met with zero support. That is incorrect. ProxyMonitor reported the zero vote tally because the votes had not yet been cast. The two AFSCME [...]

Ernst & Young estimates in a new publication that half of all shareholder proposals in 2011 will deal with environmental and social issues, and support for these proposals is growing. In fact, “83 percent of investors now believe environmental and social factors can have a significant impact on shareholder value over the long term.” Last year, [...]

The trouble is, we’re not in Kansas anymore, and Kansas is no longer the place it used to be. The pursuit of Bin Laden has exhausted our treasure and killed thousands. It has transformed the state in countless ways and extended the reach of the state into our lives. So this brief note, just to [...]