Nice article by that title appeared in Canada’s Financial Post. “Imagine a democracy where those who don’t vote have their ballots automatically cast in favour of the incumbents… Enter an idea whose time has come: websites such as corpgov.net, shareowners.org (corrected), proxydemocracy.org and moxyvote.com. These are just four offerings on the Internet designed to help disgruntled shareholders organize and register their displeasure or lobby for change.” (1/26/2010) Prior article was entitled Shareholder democracy oxymoron (FP, 1/25/2010)
Reporter, Diane Francis, goes on to compare our sites to the Politics 2.0 social movement that elected Obama. She concludes with a quote from former New York governor Eliot Spitzer from an article in the Wall Street Journal. “Virtually every thoughtful discussion of corporate governance concludes that unless shareholders act like the true owners they are, all the proposed corporate reforms will fail. While there are some who claim shareholders are simply too ill-informed to participate meaningfully, this argument should carry no more weight in the corporate context than it does in the traditional political arena.”
I certainly hope the sites mentioned by Ms. Francis, and others such as isuffrage.org, Lemonjuice.biz and theRacetotheBottom.org, can foster the type of movement that changed politics… and I hope we can do it sustainably.
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