The Making of a Democratic Economy: How to Build Prosperity for the Many, Not the Few by Marjorie Kelly, Ted Howard, Naomi Klein (Foreword). Buy the book. As Naomi Klein notes in the Forward, We need to know what we are for as well as what we’re against… It’s not enough to imagine that another world is […]
Innovations in Cooperative Ownership: Converted and Hybrid Listed Cooperatives (Link), by O.F. van Bekkum and J. Bijman, is one of the more interesting research papers I have read since our proposal for Twitter (TWTR) to study cooperatives won 5% of the vote, making it eligible for resubmission for the 2018 annual meeting. Before we redo the […]
Matt Cropp, Associate Director of the Vermont Employee Ownership Center and Marjorie Kelly, Executive Vice President of the Democracy Collaborative, discuss employee and community ownership, with a specific discussion of the Keep BT Local Campaign. (more…)
Exit to Democratic Ownership; here is a preview of my presentation to the annual meeting of Twitter shareholders, to be held on May 22, 2017, at 1355 Market Street, San Francisco, California 94103. The meeting starts at 10 AM. Bring photo ID. I am James McRitchie, speaking in favor of proposal #4, Exit to Democratic Ownership, co-filed […]
Twitter Proxy Voting Guide by CorpGov.net. Twitter, Inc. operates as a global platform for public self-expression and conversation in real-time. The company offers various products and services, including Twitter which allows users to create, distribute, and discover content; and Periscope, a mobile application that enables users to broadcast and watch videos live with others. Twitter […]
Laura Flanders interviews Christopher Mackin, the founder of Ownership Associates, an advisory firm for broad-based employee ownership based in Cambridge, MA. Mackin is also an Adjunct Lecturer at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations and a member of the core faculty of the Harvard Trade Union Program based at Harvard Law School. See a previous guest post by Mackin on […]
CorpGov.net publisher/shareowner activist, James McRitchie in the news. Shareholders push for more say over board members (WSJ’s MarketWatch), on proxy access proposals at Bank of America, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Sued again for daring to file proxy proposals, EMC sues shareholder activists over bid to separate CEO, chairman roles (Boston Business Journal). They lost their ‘no-action’ request […]
Guest post from David P. Ellerman who works in the fields of economics and political economy, social theory and philosophy, mathematical logic, and quantum mechanics. His undergraduate degree was in philosophy at M.I.T. (’65), and he has Masters degrees in Philosophy of Science (’67) and in Economics (’68), and a doctorate in Mathematics (’71) all from Boston […]
Marjorie Kelly is the rarest of authors, discussing some of the most difficult problems we face but doing so through an easily understood narrative of her own search for answers that is bound to draw in readers from a wide variety of backgrounds. Her analysis is insightful and the recommendations contained in Owning Our Future: […]
Important news tidbits you may have missed. The co-operative sector in the UK, which reached £35.6 billion, outperformed the mainstream economy from 2008 to 2011 by over 20 per cent, growing 19.6% while (more…)
Just as corporations are facing demands for increased democracy through proxy access proposals and vague protests from Occupy Wall Street, some cooperatives, with long-held democratic values are in danger of shifting in the opposite direction through internal (more…)
A California bill, SB 201, authored by state senator Mark DeSaulnier, proposes a new corporate form that blends money and mission. The idea is to allow social enterprises, which are often organized as either non-profits or for-profit/non-profit hybrids, to access capital from mainstream investors. As a Flexible Purpose Corporation (Flexible Corp.), a company could make […]
“The worker-owned cooperative, an economic workplace model that has been around for decades is making a comeback. In some parts of the U.S. new coops are sprouting up, cutting unemployment rates and revitalizing economically depressed communities.” via Can Worker-Owned Cooperatives Offer A Solution to Our Economic Woes? | La Prensa San Diego, 2/11/2011. The corporate […]
CalPERS. A report from consultant Wilshire Associates found that activist involvement by CalPERS increased returns at many of the 142 “Focus List” companies. Prior to the pension’s involvement, the companies’ returns averaged 83.3% below their various benchmarks; afterward they yielded returns 12.7% above the benchmarks. Although the cumulative 12.7% is not as high as past results, their corporate governance program […]