Longtime shareowner activist Steve Viederman discusses the notion of community governance, where communities reclaim democratic power of self-determination from corporations and other external forces. Exemplifying community governance is the Fair Trade Towns movement, where communities commit to supporting Fair Trade commodities such as coffee and cocoa. Read the show transcript
Today we measure the speed of money. Woody Tasch discusses his book, [amazon-product text=”Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered” type=”text”]1603580069[/amazon-product]. And Katy Lederer transforms her experience working in the fast money culture of Wall Street into poetry in the book , [amazon-product text=”The Heaven-Sent Leaf” type=”text”]1934414158[/amazon-product].Read the show transcript
The ExxonMobil annual shareholder meeting this year carried high expectations from shareholder activists. Members of the Rockefeller family, descending from the founder of the Standard Oil monopoly that splintered into Exxon and Mobil, attended the meeting to support four different shareholder resolutions on corporate governance and climate change. Of these four, the resolution supported by most Rockefellers asked the company to split the CEO and Board Chair positions. Today’s CWR guest, Bob Monks, has filed this resolution at ExxonMobil since the early 2000s. His struggle to hold ExxonMobil accountable exemplifies the broader struggle to hold corporations accountable described in his new book, Corpocracy. Monks is co-founder of Institutional Shareholder Services, The Corporate Library, Lens Governance Advisors, and a former Labor Department official in the Reagan Administration.
Web extra: Bob Monks chats with CWR co-hosts Bill Baue and Francesca Rheannon about the US presidential candidates’ ability to take on corpocracy. Listen
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Longtime shareholder activist Steve Viederman presented this statement at the ExxonMobil Annual Meeting in May 2008 to introduce resolution 19 asking Exxon to adopt a renewable energy policy. He filed the resolution along with other individuals, families, foundations and religious orders, joined by 20 institutional investors worth over $740 billion in combined assets, including Exxon Mobil stock valued at more than $8.6 billion.