Bull Moose Project Releases New Report on ESG
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Bull Moose Project released "The Corporate Voting Cartel: How to Stop Wall Street Weaponization of Americans' Retirement Portfolios," a major new report documenting how three Wall Street giants — BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street — have quietly consolidated unprecedented control over U.S. corporate governance and proposing a market-friendly federal fix known as "mirror voting."
The "Big Three" now own roughly one-quarter of the entire U.S. stock market and are the largest single shareholder in approximately 90% of S&P 500 companies. Although these firms market themselves as "passive" managers that simply mirror the market, the report finds that their small in-house "stewardship" teams have used this concentrated voting power to advance Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) agendas across corporate America, helping drive the broader leftward drift of American business.
The report documents notable case studies of stewardship-team overreach, including the 2021 Engine No. 1 campaign at ExxonMobil, where a hedge fund owning just 0.02% of the company forced three handpicked directors onto its board with Big Three backing, and BlackRock's pattern of voting in favor of Chinese Communist Party-backed resolutions at Chinese firms, breaking with other major investors.
Three Wall Street firms have quietly become the most powerful unelected force in American corporate policy, using ordinary Americans’ retirement savings to advance a political agenda those same Americans never voted for,” Aiden Buzzetti, president of the Bull Moose Project, said. “The Trump administration has rightly begun dismantling the woke capital regime, and Chairman Atkins’s SEC has taken important first steps. But unless Washington confronts the Big Three’s stewardship teams directly, ESG will not disappear. It will simply be put on ice, waiting for the next administration.
The full report is available at here.
About the Bull Moose Project
The Bull Moose Project is a populist-right policy and advocacy organization working to advance an American agenda of reindustrialization, antitrust reform, energy security, and national strength — in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt. Through its affiliated 501(c)(3) research arm, the Bull Moose Institute, the organization develops policy research, public education, and federal advocacy on the issues shaping America's industrial and economic future. Learn more at bullmooseproject.org or follow @bullmooseproj on X.
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