Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio introduced a new bill Thursday that seeks to curb the ability of woke wolves on Wall Street to pursue personal political agendas to the detriment of company shareholders.
The Mind Your Own Business Act shifts the burden of proof in cases where shareholders take legal action against corporate executives over apparent political activism, placing greater accountability on directors to prove decisions were made in the best interests of the company.
“If you own a stock, invest in a mutual fund, have a company-sponsored 401k, then you are a shareholder and are owed legal duties by the corporations you invest in,” Rubio explained in a Fox Business op-ed. “The truth is that corporate executives keep you in the dark about your right to hold them accountable for how they spend your money.”
While laws currently allow shareholders to lodge lawsuits against company executives over a perceived political agenda, whether it be from Major League Baseball’s Georgia boycott or a denial of services to a politically unpopular group, Rubio argues “corporations have stacked the deck to make these lawsuits pointless.”
Under Rubio’s legislation, companies listed on national stock exchanges face a higher court burden to prove decisions such as boycotts or product removal — as happened in Nike’s rejection of a shoe with an American flag — were made in the best interests of the company and not woke boardroom executives.
Scott Shepard, a lawyer who runs the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research, told The Federalist Rubio’s proposal seeks to better empower shareholders who object to decisions made by corporate leaders on a whim without taking the interests of investors into account.
“What hasn’t been tested since woke[ism] has spun up is the question of whether executives have acted in their own self-interest and violated their fiduciary duty if they made decisions based on their political preferences, but they haven’t done extensive, objective testing to see if that’s in the best long-term financial interests of the company,” Shepard said. “I think one of the really important things about this legislation is that it illustrates there’s new thinking on the right that remembers that conservatism in the U.S. means protecting American liberties for everyone, not protecting the entrenched corporations when they try to tear down the republic.”
