You can kvetch about ESG and the other socialism-by-acronyms infecting corporate America. Or, if you’re David Bahnsen, apostle of free and virtuous markets, of prosperity and human flourishing, you can do something about it. Today is the day the financial adviser goes the formal shareholder-resolution route — a tactic so used and abused by the left in recent years — to make good on his effort (first detailed in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed) to get financial giant JPMorgan Chase to realize its harmful and discriminatory woke ways. Whether his resolution (of course, it’s opposed by the corporation) passes will be known soon enough. Should it fall, score that a temporary setback, because Bahnsen’s very public action — logical, detailed, and correct — will no doubt inspire.
You want to hear David offer his rationale? You’ll find an audio file of David’s resolution speech here. Or you can read it:
My name is David Bahnsen, and I am a financial advisor, a JPM shareholder, and an investor — but I am not a shareholder activist. I make investment decisions in accordance with my duty to clients to optimize their financial success.
I do not invest to use my influence to pull companies into various political or social causes as is so often done through shareholder resolutions. My intention in this proposal is the opposite, to shareholder interests by getting politics out of the company, not by pushing more politics onto it. JPMorgan is perhaps the best there is when it comes to running its core business, but it is ill qualified to be a political or cultural arbiter.
This company that I and you, my fellow shareholders, own has shown a concerning pattern of debanking conservatives and religious organizations who have had accounts cancelled without notice or explanation.
The company’s statement of opposition repeatedly claims “it is not our policy to debank people because of their political views or religious affiliation.” I believe them, but that doesn’t really answer the question. Of course there is no explicit policy of political or religious discrimination.
The issue is whether there are vague and subjective criteria for debanking which allow room for bias. I am confident the inquiry my proposal calls for will be valuable for this effort.
The Alliance Defending Freedom gives our company 15% out of a possible 100% in respect for diverse viewpoints. The 1792 Exchange’s Corporate Bias Report classifies the company as “high risk” when it comes to the probability of denial of services based on views and beliefs. The American Conservative Values Fund lists JPMorgan Chase as among the “WORST OF THE WORST COMPANIES MOST HOSTILE TO CONSERVATIVE VALUES.” Elected officials are worried about this too. Recently fourteen state financial officers and nineteen state Attorney Generals sent letters to the company raising exactly the same issues which I raise in my proposal. This issue must be taken more seriously than the company has done thus far.
Surely these matters of public controversy deserve more than a simple denial of the problem based on “explicit policy.” That’s the point of this resolution, to respectfully ask the company to investigate this matter of great importance and report the results to us, the owners of the company. If all is good, the report will demonstrate that, and if it is not, the report is an opportunity to fix it and get the company back to what we investors want it focused on, serving customers without bias at a profit for the benefit of the owners.