Dear Ms. Jarrett,
I was shocked today to hear that there are rumors that the White House is trying either to block proxy access or to raise the threshold necessary to initiate access to a level which even the largest funds cannot hope to reach.
Given the administration’s explicit support of proxy access – one of the most important precepts of strong corporate governance – such a change of direction, if it were true, would be a serious betrayal of trust.
If we cannot get significant corporate reform through after the kind of economic crisis we have just been through then there is no possibility that the U.S. will catch up to the levels of good corporate governance that are practiced by the rest of the Western world. To put it bluntly, if the level of value destruction, the level of lying, guilt, greed, and cupidity that has just been evidenced by many in the corporate community is not sufficient to warrant a basic tenet of shareholder protection, then it is hard to know what kind of behavior will be.
Corporations are owned by shareholders, not by The Business Roundtable, whose continued denial of global climate change has lost it any of the shreds of credibility that still clung to it.
Please ensure that the House and the Senate retain the proxy access language in the final bill that was in each of the original bills.
Yours sincerely,
Paul Hodgson - Senior Research Associate
