John Deere and Apple Investors to Vote on Liberty Proposals
February 24, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Press Release from the National Center for Public Policy Research:
Pro-Liberty Resolutions to Be Presented to John Deere and Apple Investors This Week
National Center for Public Policy Research Asks John Deere Investors to Support Its Call for Increased Transparency Surrounding the Company’s Anti-Free Market Policy Activities
National Center’s Proposal to Apple’s Shareholders Highlights Dangers of Corporate America’s Fight Against Religious Freedom
Moline, IL / Cupertino, CA / Washington, D.C. – At tomorrow’s annual meeting of John Deere shareholders in Moline, Illinois, and Friday’s annual meeting of Apple shareholders in Cupertino, California, The National Center for Public Policy Research will present two different shareholder proposals aimed at advancing corporate transparency and religious liberty.
“For far too many years, corporate America has been lending its voice, money and power to liberal politicians, causes and organizations. From ObamaCare, to gay marriage to federal energy policy, the past seven years of the Obama Administration has coincided with an expansive growth of corporate statism and corporate liberalism,” said National Center Free Enterprise Project Director Justin Danhof, Esq. “While the exponential growth of cronyism has coincided with President Obama’s time in office, it isn’t coincidental. The National Center’s Free Enterprise Project will bring the fight for liberty to corporate America in earnest this year. The battle starts this week.”
On Wednesday, Danhof will present the National Center’s shareholder proposal to John Deere’s investors at the company’s annual meeting in Moline, Illinois. The proposal, titled “Political Spending Congruency Analysis,” asks the company to report to shareholders when Deere decides to fund or work with anti-capitalist groups or politicians.
“Deere has often taken actions that run counter to its duties as a for-profit, publicly-held company,” said Danhof. “For example, when liberal politicians in Washington, D.C. needed corporate support for their repeated attempts to shackle the economy with cap-and-trade schemes on carbon emissions, John Deere happily obliged. However, after the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project ran advertisements highlighting the economic pitfalls of a federal cap-and-trade program, Deere withdrew from the corporate lobbying coalition supporting such a plan.”
The National Center’s proposal also criticizes John Deere for kowtowing to radical liberal groups and withdrawing from the American Legislative Exchange Council, noting that:
[D]espite the fact that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) works to foster a low-regulation business-friendly environment, the Company publicly ended its affiliation with ALEC in 2012 at a time when anti-free-market activists were perpetuating falsehoods about ALEC and its activities.
“Deere’s leaders are free to continue supporting anti-capitalist politicians and causes,” said Danhof. “We just think that they should tell the company’s investors when they do so. That way, the investing public can make an informed decision. That’s why we urge all John Deere shareholders to support our proposal.”
The National Center’s complete shareholder resolution, and John Deere’s response to it, can be found on pages 67 and 68 of the company’s proxy statement – which is available for download here.
John Deere’s lawyers attempted to remove the National Center’s proposal from its proxy statement; however, the National Center’s legal team prevailed in its arguments before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and won the right to place the proposal before the company’s shareholders for a vote.
The entire legal exchange between John Deere and the National Center, along with the SEC’s decision, can be downloaded here.
At Friday’s annual meeting of Apple shareholders, scheduled to take place at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, Danhof will present a stockholder proposal as part of the National Center’s Religious Freedom Defense Initiative.
The National Center’s Religious Freedom Defense Initiative is working to correct the record about religious freedom laws. The National Center’s proposal to Apple highlights the company’s hypocrisy on the issue of religious freedom and points out the adverse effects on shareholder value that can occur when corporate leaders speak out on issues which they have no expertise.
Last spring, Apple CEO Tim Cook joined with many corporate executives and much of the liberal media in attacking Americans of faith. Writing in the Washington Post, Cook falsely claimed that attempts to enact religious freedom laws in Arkansas and Indiana “would allow people to discriminate against their neighbors.”
“Cook is simply wrong on the law,” notes Danhof. “The federal government and 31 states have heightened religious freedom laws and none of them legalize discrimination against anyone. What Mr. Cook did was taint Apple’s brand with extreme anti-religious bigotry. American society was set up to protect discreet and insular minorities. Today, that has become an Indiana pizza shop and small cake bakers who simply want to practice their religion and not be forced by the government to break their covenants with their Creator. Cook has joined with the mob in trying to destroy them.”
Despite Cook’s outlandish attacks on religious liberty here in the homeland, Apple actually does business in many countries where homosexuality is outlawed and homosexuals are imprisoned and even killed. The National Center proposal drives this hypocrisy home, stating:
CEO [Cook] bashed state-level religious freedom laws as anti-homosexual bigotry saying, “Apple is open. Open to everyone, regardless of where they come from, what they look like, how they worship or who they love. Regardless of what the law might allow in Indiana or Arkansas, we will never tolerate discrimination.” Yet, according to the Washington Post, Apple has a presence in 17 countries where homosexual acts are illegal. In four of those nations, homosexual acts are punishable by death. These company operations are inconsistent with Apple’s values as extolled by our CEO.
The proponent believes that Apple’s record to date demonstrates a gap between its lofty rhetoric / aspirations and its performance.
The National Center’s complete shareholder resolution, and Apple’s response to it, can be found on pages 62 and 63 of the company’s proxy statement – which is available for download here.
Apple’s lawyers also petitioned the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission seeking to block the National Center’s proposal. However, the National Center’s legal team prevailed in convincing the SEC that its proposal was so significant that the company’s shareholders should have a say on the matter.
The entire legal exchange between Apple and the National Center, along with the SEC’s decision, can be downloaded here.
The National Center’s Free Enterprise Project is the nation’s preeminent free-market activist group focusing on shareholder activism and the confluence of big government and big business. In 2014-15, National Center representatives participated in 69 shareholder meetings advancing free-market ideals in the areas of health care, energy, taxes, subsidies, regulations, religious freedom, food policies, media bias, gun rights, workers’ rights and many other important public policy issues. This week’s John Deere and Apple meetings mark its first and second shareholder meetings of 2016.
The National Center for Public Policy Research, founded in 1982, is a non-partisan, free-market, independent conservative think-tank. Ninety-four percent of its support comes from individuals, less than four percent from foundations, and less than two percent from corporations. It receives over 350,000 individual contributions a year from over 96,000 active recent contributors. Sign up for free issue alerts here or follow us on Twitter at @NationalCenter.
Obama Won’t Be Satisfied Until He’s Destroyed Everything
January 13, 2015 by 6 Comments
Right after the fake Sony hack blamed on North Korea, then Russia, then someone in the United States and then the kindergarten kid playing with his mother’s I phone (not really), I told my wife this was all an orchestrated false flag to instill greater fears in Americans so that this freak of nature residing in the Whitehouse could have a good excuse to take further control over the Internet.
Getting not much more than a cursory scowl, this morning my wife made a comment about someone hacking into CENTCOM, to which I replied that this, another fake incident, is just another example of what will propel this freedom snatching criminal to begin to demand more control and restrictions over the Internet.
I really don’t know what it’s going to take before people begin to see that this ass clown, and all of them in Congress, think all of us are really stupid. Most are but not all. But I guess that no longer matters.
I hope you all love your slavery as much as I hate it and everybody who lies, cheats and steals to create it.
I’m glad I’m only a visitor on this condemned planet.
“Washington (AFP) – President Barack Obama said Tuesday the cyber attacks against Sony and the Pentagon’s Central Command highlight the need for toughened laws on cybersecurity.”<<<Read More>>>
Give Up Liberty for a Little Security?
September 19, 2013 by 1 Comment
Casualty of 9/11? Individual Liberty
September 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment
This morning I was reading an article written by Jim Shepherd and found on Outdoorwire, reflecting back a bit on the events of 9/11, twelve years ago today. It is human to mourn the loss of life, it is also human, or used to be, to learn from the events of the short history provided us by those events.
A valuable lesson, that I fear will not be properly learned, is the rush to destroy individual liberty for the sake of “national security.” Liberty makes us secure, therefore seeking to limit liberty becomes the antithesis to security. But we blindly bow and follow.
In Shepherd’s article he states the following:
Recently in Missouri, I pulled into the parking lot of the original Bass Pro Shops when an official-looking government vehicle pulled up. “Got any guns in there,” the driver asked. I pointed down to the sign on the door that reads “No weapons stored onboard” and asked him what government agency he represented.
He hemmed and hawed around, and finally admitted that neither he nor his companion were law enforcement officers. They were TSA “Agents” on the lookout for suspect conduct or behavior. When I asked them if I was considered “suspect” simply because of the vehicle I drove, they told me not to be defensive and drove off.
On the surface, one may ask why these thugs were in the Bass Pro Shops’ parking lot bothering people. It does go much deeper than that. Wasn’t the TSA, under Homeland Security, invented, we were told, to screen passengers at airports? After all, planes from airports were used to fly into and destroy buildings and people and lives.
President Bush, in his deliberate rush to limit our freedoms, created another agency whose goals are nothing more than to limit our freedom and lessen our security while making us believe it is keeping us safer.
Were we told that 12 years after 9/11, when things like the Patriot Act, the creation of Homeland Security, all for the sake of national security, TSA agents would be all over the country, far from our airports, setting up roadblocks and harassing customers in store parking lots? How much more anti-liberty can that be?
And yet who speaks out against this? We have been so programmed to blindly follow government, especially when they say it’s for the good of our safety.
Lessons not learned and they certainly are not cheap.
Cuban Communist Survivor Gives Lesson on Understanding Rights of People
April 30, 2013 by 5 Comments
Day 65 – No Executive Orders
March 21, 2013 by 2 Comments
ATROCIOUS!
Day 65 and perhaps the below photo of President Obama’s broken down limousine is indicative of the man and his mission.
In case you were wondering, there are no executive orders about gun control posted on the White House website. Perhaps we’ll get those after the President gets his college basketball picks taken care of. Well, maybe we better say when the tournament is over with. Well, then again, there’s golf, vacation, golf, campaigning, golf………
Obama Bin Biden!
Joe Biden, the Charlie Mccarthy of the Vatican….oops! Strike that! Joe Biden, the Charlie Mccarthy of Barack Obama said in an interview with NPR……..all kinds of things that made little sense; classic Joe Biden.
One of Obama Bin Biden’s (name comes from the fact that Obama does what Biden has been instructed to tell him to do and Biden then does what Obama tells him to do) complaints about gun ownership, as well as many other ignorant people, is that “military-style” guns have no place in the hands of private citizens. The reasoning, as near as anyone can figure out, is because it looks like really bad or something. We’ve progressed from faulty thinking that inanimate objects take it upon themselves to kill people, to mean looking guns killing more than, well, just killing I guess.
So, here’s a question for Obama Bin Biden. If gun manufacturers made a gun that functions identical to an AR-15 (military-style weapon most hated) but made it look like a ukulele, would that be okay?
Constitution and Liberty
Below is a video of one man’s testimony before the Connecticut Congress on proposed gun control laws. This debate was the result of the Sandy Hook tragedy and the knee-jerk reactions of the jerks who make laws.
Take note at the end of the video. This is where this man states that the Constitution does not guarantee public safety but is supposed to guarantee liberty. The politician speaks and takes exception against the testimony that no solutions can be found that will stop crime.
The irony comes, when the congressman accuses the witness of painting everybody on his congressional panel with the same brush while saying that the act of the lawmakers proposing these gun bills was despicable. Sort of under his breath, the person giving testimony comments that that is how people like him feel by the actions of the lawmakers. And I agree! The congressman is offended to think that a citizen would broadly characterize all Connecticut politicians as being the same and treated the same, and yet the politicians are proposing nonsensical legislation that broad-brushes all Connecticut citizens as being potential criminals, that if they had guns taken away, they wouldn’t act like criminals. Can we say the same about politicians? If we took their microphones and gavels away from them, would they still act like elite lunatics?
Our Federal Government Determined That it Will Control and Censor the Internet With or Without SOPA/PIPA
January 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment
It’s blatantly disgusting! And any American who willing stands by to allow our government to employ such Stalinist-like control and censorship over the one remaining mechanism to express freedom of speech, belongs in an internment camp.
While some of us are focusing on stopping SOPA/PIPA, it is doing absolutely nothing to stop the feds from shutting down websites willy-nilly. What ever happened to DUE PROCESS?
Check out the Drudge Report this morning! And here are some of the links Drudge provides that show government overstepping authority and shredding of our constitution:
1.) US government hits Megaupload with mega piracy indictment
2.) Anonymous Goes on Megaupload Revenge Spree: DoJ, RIAA, MPAA, and Universal Music All Offline
3.) Google Is Already Using SOPA-Like Censorship
4.) Republicans stand together to oppose piracy law And don’t forget it was many of the faux republicans who wrote and supported SOPA/PIPA.
It’s time to wake up and get rid of every one of these bastards who have no regard for our freedoms! Or you can sit by and do and say nothing……Komrades!
Tom Remington
Rome Burns While Congress Struggles To Save Junk Mail
At what point in our history did it become a good thing to compromise everything good away? So many today lament that the United States Congress is so dysfunctional that it can’t compromise on anything and get anything done. I suppose this sort of thought goes hand in hand with comments made a few years ago by Maine’s Senator Olympia Snowe when she stated that her job was to go to Washington and write bills.
Alas, the great divide, that nasty lack of compromise by members of the U.S. Congress. Perhaps if we had never acquired this fabricated “need” for compromise, a far lot less would have been “done” – defined better as destroyed – in Congress and we wouldn’t be finding ourselves in the messes we are currently. For certainly doing nothing is far superior than destroying the lives, liberties and happiness of others for the sake of “getting something done”. Senator Snowe labels herself a Republican, not that labels pertaining to party affiliation mean anything anymore, and yet she believes it’s her job to go to Washington and write bills. Probably a sensible person would have fingers left over uncounted if they named all the necessary laws that have been crafted since the signing of the Declaration and the U.S. Constitution. (Note: Almost nobody in America today would agree with that statement.) It is not taught, nor is it even recognized that for every bill Congress writes, that’s one less freedom you have and that much more power and control you have willingly ceded to a government that is untrustworthy.
Need I remind the people that the vast majority of those legislative measures get their roots from those who find a need to control others, expressing their lack of faith in their fellow man. Thomas Jefferson found considerable faith in his fellow man. Once, he and John Adams were arguing about the role of government’s power over the people. Jefferson said to Adams, “You have a disconcerting lack of faith in your fellow man Mr. Adams, and in yourself, if I may say.” Adams snapped back, “Yes, and you display a dangerous excess of faith in your fellow man, Mr. Jefferson.”
Perhaps Adams was right. Maybe Jefferson placed a bit too much faith in his fellow man but to maintain the sovereign independence of the human being, a person must retain the promise, as from God, the means in which to discover and appreciate such freedoms and inalienable rights without the interference of government. Thomas Jefferson, in a further expression of his certitude of man’s aptitude to do what’s right, wrote: “An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.”
And yet, the people of this day, the victims of Jefferson’s concerns over the tyranny of dishonest men exercising power over others, can seemingly only echo the moans of others who castigate the lack of compromise as reason for not taking more from government.
In America today, debt piles up at immeasurable speed. God told his people, “Owe no man anything.” I suppose one of the reasons for accumulated debt is the result of taking our eyes off God as a country. Very serious issues face the American people. I question how much any of them understand the extent of this seriousness and yet our Congress, every one, fight tooth and nail for themselves and only themselves. Why do we insist on thinking otherwise?
Recall, if you will, several years ago when the people of this country asked Congress if there was something that could be done about receiving unwanted telephone calls from telemarketers, etc. Our self-aggrandizing Congress crafted a law prohibiting such calls. It was even done giving people a choice to enlist in the program or not. However, I cannot fail to mention that Congress exempted themselves from any such law. This way they could, in their intrusive, selfish and disgusting ways, intrude on your privacy anytime they saw fit in order to promote their own lies and propaganda.
And today, while Congress fights and argues like spoiled rotten brats to save the Postal Service, make no mistake about the fact they will do everything in their power to screw you over and protect their own self interests. While Senator Joe Lieberman and Senator Susan Collins regurgitate and swallow again that there needs to be, “some kind of compromise on amendments”, Senator Harry Reid promised that senior citizens wouldn’t be denied their junk mail.
Sen. Reid, hiding behind a chameleonic lie, attempting to convince people he gives two pieces of a rat’s ass about senior citizens, I’m sure was doing as Doug Powers at MichelleMalkin.com said and, “Why am I guessing that the “junk mail” Reid is worried about being delivered to his elderly constituents are the letters from Harry Reid’s office?”
This appears about all our Congress is capable of doing, which may, in and of itself, be a good thing. While it’s too late now, I just wish there were never compromises made on 99.9% of anything. I was trying to explain this to my mother one day and so I put it in terms I thought she would understand. I hope some readers here can as well. I asked her if compromise is such a good thing in order to “get something done”, as she had worded it to me, then I suppose being a believer in God Almighty, a born again Christian and one who stands firmly on the word of God, you would be willing to compromise the promises of God in order that you can better get along with other religions?
For now, it is probably best that the president go on permanent vacation and send Congress home for recess, while suspending all of their pay. For we have reached a point where I certainly find greater solace in this government doing absolutely NOTHING, than to keep forcing onto me the compromises “in order to get something done”.
Tom Remington
Tom Remington