And the whole damned business of the corporate conspiracy to overthrow our government (There! I said it!):
The Nathan Cummings Foundation, a private foundation and News Corporation stockholder, calls on the News Corporation ("News Corp." or "The Company") Board of Directors to disclose to stockholders the use of corporate assets for any and all political spending at or before its October 15, 2010 annual meeting in New York City. Such disclosure is critical in light of recent reports that News Corp. Chairman and CEO K. Rupert Murdoch apparently expended at least $2 million of shareholders' assets to further the political aspirations of his personal friends and to support his own ideological political agenda. That shareholders learned of the contributions through the media and not directly from the Company further underscores the need for full and timely disclosure.
The Board has a fiduciary responsibility in its shareholders to ensure that corporate funds are allocated in ways that serve The Company's interest and will ultimately drive shareholder value creation....
http://nathancummings.net/...
The Cummings Foundation is not the only institution concerned with shareholder rights and the fiduciary responsibility of corporations to their shareholders, not to mention the monstrous growth in corporate campaign fundraising.
In light of the infamous SCOTUS Citizens United decision and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable lawsuit against the SEC rules that give shareowners a bigger voice in corporate board elections, the Council of Institutional Investors plans to file an amicus curiae brief in support of the rules.
http://www.cii.org/...
Billionaire Carl Icahn, ranked 24th in the 2010 Forbes 400, has announced in his Icahn Report the creation of the United Shareholders of America – a voice for large and small shareholders.
One of the biggest problems we face today is the egregious mismanagement and reckless incompetence of many American corporate boards which utterly fail to do their primary job of holding managements accountable.
Many board members are often beholden to managements for lavish pay and perks they get for very little work and oversight. The credit crisis we find ourselves in is a direct manifestation of board members' lack of oversight. Alarm bells should have gone off in board rooms as crisis loomed, but many boards looked the other way.
Our economy has floundered for nearly two years because boards allowed their companies to make vast leveraged investments into faltering mortgage-backed securities. These investments vaporized trillions of dollars in shareholder value and left the banking industry in crisis. Boards gave permission to CEOs to take these risks, which often times they misunderstood, which is like giving the fox permission to guard the henhouse.
Incredibly, some board members make as much as $10,000 a week and soak up expensive trips to the Super Bowl and Augusta aboard corporate aircraft - simply to go to four or five board meetings a year.
Many of these same boards and managements are members of such groups as the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which annually spend huge sums of money in Washington to pass laws favoring managements and boards. These laws are often at the expense of shareholders, which are the true owners of America’s corporations.
We need an aggressive plan to combat this....
http://www.icahnreport.com/...
At the grassroots level (the real grassroots, not the corporate-funded astroturf level) Paul Rogat Loeb reports:
... But when I talked to disgruntled citizens about the takeover of our politics by destructive corporate interests, culminating in the barrage of anonymous attack ads unleashed by the Supreme Court's ghastly Citizens United decision, they quickly became willing to listen.
I am delighted the Democrats are finally hitting back at the US Chamber of Commerce and other Republican front groups for dumping millions of dollars of untraceable corporate contributions into the election, with the total likely to exceed $300 million. But the Democrats need to do more - and ordinary citizens do as well. It is our duty to make the buying of our democracy by corporate groups the salient issue of the coming election and beyond, because it affects everything else that we need to change.
How do we do this in the few remaining weeks before the elections? We need to talk about the ads of all the front groups from the Chamber of Commerce to Karl Rove's American Crossroads and the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity. We also need to highlight the Republican justices who overruled a century of legislative precedent to enact Citizens United, and talk about how Republican senators have stood in unison to prevent requiring corporate interests to at least put their names on their ads.
http://www.truth-out.org/...
November 2, 2010. Be there. Vote! Soldier on in the war against the Corporate Conspiracy to rule America.