A Senate Republican report examines the influence that woke financial corporations who push left-leaning policies have on their corporate shareholders.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who released legislation in 2021 to hold woke corporations accountable, issued a statement on woke finance’s negative economic effect.
“Woke finance is a cancer on our free-market economy,” said Senator Rubio. “These are often nationless corporations that amass fortunes divorced from the fate of our great country while pushing socially destructive, far left policies like boycotts and cancel crusades at home. We need to empower patriotic Americans who actually love their country to fight back against the growing tyranny of the woke elites running corporate America.”
Rubio’s Mind Your Own Business Act would require corporate directors to prove their “woke” corporate actions were in their shareholders’ best interest in order to avoid liability for breach of fiduciary duty in shareholder litigation over corporate actions relating to certain social policies. It would also incentivize corporate management to stop abusing their positions to advance left-wing social policies by increasing their personal liability to shareholders for breaches of fiduciary duty resulting from those policies.
Senator Rubio’s Mind Your Own Business Act is a private-sector solution to the problem of woke corporations. Specifically the bill:
- Requires large public companies listing on national stock exchanges to provide shareholders with significant holdings with certain privileges with respect to claims for breach of fiduciary duty under covered circumstances.
- Covered circumstances include if a company takes an action on a primarily non-pecuniary basis in response to State law, boycotts a class of persons or industry on a primarily non-pecuniary basis, or uses primarily non-pecuniary public reasoning for an action.
- Corporate defendants would be bound by presumptions that pecuniary interest does not include common defenses used to defend exercises of business judgment, including the media image of the company or employee morale.
- Ensures that for claims of breach of fiduciary duty against management brought by shareholders under these covered circumstances, management would have the burden of proof and, if found in breach of their duties, be liable without indemnification by the company for a minimum amount of damages and attorney’s fees.
