Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Grant of 2nd Vote Advisers to the studio to discuss his recent talks with red-state treasurers and the potential to divest in corporations that do not promote American values.
Leahy: In studio with our good friend Mayor of Maury County Andy Ogles and Dan Grant, another good friend with 2ndvoteadvisers.com. I’m so excited about this. I’m so excited. Now you’re talking to some red-state treasurers, right?
Grant: Yes.
Leahy: Tell us why. What is it that the red state treasurers have?
Grant: Well, it’s pretty interesting, actually. So actually, we were just in the Australian Financial Review, which is The Wall Street Journal in Australia. And the reason we resonate with red-state treasurers and Australia is they’re heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
Leahy: Yeah. Fossil fuels have created the energy of America that’s cost-effective energy.
Grant: Right.
Leahy: And they’ve made a lot of improvements on environmental issues. But the Larry Fink’s of the world who want to tell everybody else what to do and what’s virtuous or not have declared fossil fuels are not virtuous.
Grant: Which is a problem if you are a red state treasurer and your state’s economy is dependent on fossil fuels. The main companies in the state are dependent on it. The main industries in your state are dependent on it.
I had lunch with a red state treasure a week and a half ago, and this gentleman controls over $70 billion in assets. And he was telling me exactly what I just said. They are under attack.
That week alone, Exxon lost three board seats to a small hedge fund called Engine No. 1. Engine No. 1 really didn’t know much stock, but they put a slate of directors out there. And then Engine No. 1 went to Vanguard, BlackRock, and some of the other large ones.
Leahy: Vanguard is like the number two.
Grant: Number two. And got enough votes to actually put three activists on the board.
Leahy: Now they like solar, solar, solar. Fossil fuel bad.
Grant: They are not saying, let’s go pump more oil out of the Gulf. (Leahy laughs) I can promise you that.
Leahy: I say bring that all on. Bring it on. Bring it on. (Chuckles)
Grant: Exxon is under attack. That same week, Shell lost a very important case in a Dutch court, which basically is making Shell diversify out of 45 percent of its fossil fuel business.
Leahy: Shell is a Dutch company?
Grant: Shell is a Dutch company.
Leahy: Nothing says free markets like I don’t know, a European quasi-socialist government like the Netherlands.
Grant: Let’s follow that example.
Leahy: Because it’s working so well.
Grant: What could go wrong?
Leahy: (Laughs) You are very good. That was good.
Grant: And then lastly, the same week, Moody’s came out with a report saying 40 percent of companies represent an environmental threat. 40 percent of companies in the United States represent a threat.
Leahy: What are they talking about?
Grant: Well, what they’re talking about is regulations. They’re talking about what Maxine Waters is talking about.
Ogles: A point that we kind of danced around earlier is this idea that these large corporations are putting in these layers and layers of regulations to stifle competition.
Leahy: Exactly.
Ogles: Because they don’t want you and me to start a business. They don’t want the small guy to become a big guy or gal for that matter or a mid-size company that becomes larger.
And so this has nothing to do with the environment. This has nothing to do with carbon footprints or whatever. They are literally trying to put other people out of business.
Grant: You’re right Andy. The government can’t control small businesses so what they want to do is regulate it. They can control large businesses. If large businesses can then make small businesses less competitive by piling on taxes through regulations, that’s what they’re going to do.
And that is exactly what they are doing. You don’t think Maxine Waters really cares about the Investor Protection Act, do you?
Leahy: So in terms of the red states, I think we’re talking. You don’t have to name any, but I will. So red States that have heavily in their portfolio, the fossil fuel companies. Obviously, Texas would be the big dog that would be there.
But Oklahoma would have them. And the Dakotas. North Dakota and South Dakota, New Mexico, and Arizona. All of those. New Mexico is not exactly a red state. Andy?
Ogles: One of the things that when Facebook was censoring the president, I sent a letter to the governor of the Speaker of the House and Lieutenant governor saying that the state of Tennessee should divest itself of any shares of Facebook and Twitter.
Why? Because these are big companies that have become social activists. They don’t represent Tennessee values. By the way, I never got a response to that letter. But that’s something that Florida has done.
Again, what would Ron DeSantis do? Florida has taken the steps to divest itself. And these huge investment funds States control red states and all states. They control a lot of money. If I dump my few shares of Facebook, it has zero impact.
If I cancel my Facebook account, it has zero impact. But if you have a state that has $50 or $60 billion under management and they say, you know what, Twitter? We don’t like what you’re doing to Conservatives on your platform that moves the needle. So I applaud 2nd Vote for what you’re doing.
Leahy: And Dan Grant, last minute of the program, you got 30 seconds. Sum up, 2nd Vote Advisers. Why should you go there?
Grant: Because we believe companies should be inspired by the First Amendment. Companies should not be trying to over-regulate and trying to stifle the First Amendment. Jack Dorsey of Twitter should not be dumping Trump because he can do it.
The First Amendment protects individuals from the government only, not from corporations. But corporations should be inspired because that is what makes our society great.
Listen to the full third hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Grant of 2nd Vote Advisers to the studio to discuss their alternative for Fortune 500 corporations who want stay out of the politically correct ideology promoted by left-wing asset management firms.
Leahy: I’m just so excited about our guest today because you’re going to learn something about how to fix America right now. And one of the problems with America is embodied by a guy you’ve never heard of folks.
Listen to this guy’s name. He’s aptly named. His name is Larry Fink. F-I-N-K. And he’s very aptly named. He’s a very powerful guy, really powerful guy. He’s ahead of a group, the biggest money manager in the country, BlackRock. They manage, what, $9 trillion?
Grant: $9 trillion.
Leahy: $9 trillion. And he’s pushing all this leftist claptrap. There’s a claptrap that he’s pushing. And he wants in his mind, there are good sources of virtuous energy. And then there’s evil. And so in his mind, natural gas, oil, coal, that’s evil.
But solar wind, that’s virtuous. And he’s created all sorts of incentives for CEOs who just want to keep their jobs and get paid $10 million, $20 million a year to kind of be figureheads, moving along with the left.
There are all sorts of pressures with his regular messages to them about what he wants to see. This guy is running the policy of many Fortune 500 companies today, and it is, in my view, Dan Grant, a disgrace. What do you think?
Grant: I think, Larry, he’s a representative of the asset management industry as a whole. BlackRock is the largest. But if you look at all of the leading banks, all of the leading asset managers, investment managers, they’re following this philosophy. And if you went to the BlackRock website, you would find what they call their stewardship team. And that sounds great.
Leahy: Well, there’s a biblical concept, stewardship.
Grant: Sure. They adopted the term. And what they will brag about on the website is last quarter, the stewardship team from BlackRock visited 482 companies and their boards, their management teams, and said, hey, listen, guys, we’re owners were big owners of your company. And if you don’t start making acceptable progress towards hitting these ESG metrics that we have laid out,
Leahy: ESG. Environmental social governance. And some of these metrics are ridiculous, right? They basically, take bad leftist policies, they are the metrics.
Grant: So they’re the largest asset manager in the world. They go to these management teams and say, you need to start doing more to implement our definition of good. You need to start forcing that definition on your suppliers, your vendors, and ultimately, your customers. And if you don’t, we will start voting you out. And they are doing it.
Leahy: They’re voting them out. And basically, you got to accept their version of diversity, equity, and inclusion. You got to embrace Critical Race Theory in the workplace which is perhaps one of the most divisive things that are out there.
Now, people listening to us, you work for a large company, they’ve got diversity, equity, and inclusion. And if you go in, you’re forced to sit through the training. They’re telling you stuff that you know is wrong.
But what are you going to do? Are you going to say you’re violating my rights and lose your job? That’s what’s going on.
Grant: My company from a practical perspective, 2nd Vote Advisers, we’re looking at what they’re doing and we’re saying, what is the cost to these companies at the end of the day?
What is the cost of a diversity and inclusion program? I mean, it sounds great. But JP Morgan, for example, a couple of months ago announced a 30 billion dollar capital commitment to diversity and inclusion and closing the racial gap.
Leahy: (i.e. dividing people). That’s what those programs do.
Grant: You read the press release and you look at it and it’s like, okay, their funding, additional mortgages, small business loans, and that all sounds great. And the top 10 banks all have very similar programs, multi-billion dollar programs.
But nowhere in that press release is the actual cost. They’re not talking about the underwriting criteria for these types of loans and for these types of mortgages? A friend of mine was seriously being considered to be the CEO of Fannie Mae back in the Great Recession.
Leahy: Tell people what Fannie Mae is and why it matters.
Grant: It’s one of the government-sponsored entities that will essentially buy up mortgages.
Leahy: It’s the Federal National Mortgage Associations Administration. It’s a quasi-public organization.
Grant: Back in the Great Recession, both of the GSEs were about to fail. And the reason they were about to fail is they allocated 10 percent of their capital to subprime loans. But that 10 percent represented about well over 50 percent of at-risk.
Leahy: Why did they allocate those 10 percent of subprime loans?
Grant: Because they wanted to do something for the social good.
Leahy: Because it would be good.
Grant: It would be good.
Leahy: Virtue signaling.
Grant: So to bring it back to JP Morgan and this 30 billion and the top 10 banks, what they’re doing, what is the actual cost? Nobody knows. Third Bank just announced a $2.8 billion program, and they’re investing in a bank in Detroit, which doesn’t have the best background.
And yet they’re going to allocate a lot of capital to this bank in Detroit. And that bank in Detroit is going to be putting that money to work. Well, how successful is that going to be?
Leahy: I guess we’ll find out.
Grant: Right.
Leahy: But let me come back and say, okay, so these big money managers like Larry Fink. F-I-N-K. Big Larry Fink, that guy. They’re forcing companies to do all this politically correct stuff that’s costing a lot of money.
Let’s say you have some assets that are currently under management. What can 2nd Vote Advisers do to help out?
Grant: The first thing I would tell you is we are not going to do what BlackRock is doing. We are not going to be visiting companies and their boards and saying, hey, guys, we want you to implement our definition of good.
Leahy: Threatening them basically, you must do our version of lacking good or we’re going to whack you and we’re going to get rid of you.
Grant: That’s right. So what we’re doing is we are actually voting our shares with our beliefs. Companies should not be into social justice engineering. So we are telling CEOs to do that.
And I feel like we’re actually giving CEOs a reason to say no to Larry. Larry, right now, and all the big banks, all the asset managers, as I mentioned, are behind it.
Leahy: He’s kind of a tyrant when it comes to dealing with CEOs who are just quivering when his stewardship team walks in, they start to wonder, what can we do? What can we do? How can we not make them upset? How can I keep my job?
Grant: So what I hope to do is give these CEOs a reason to say no to Larry. I want them to say, Larry, listen, I hear what you want, but I got Dan Grant from 2nd Vote Advisers, and he wants us to do something completely different.
We’ve gone to our board, and we’ve decided to just stay out of the whole thing altogether and focus on our company and profits and let the individual decide where they want to put their philanthropy and charity.
Leahy: This Larry Fink guy at BlackRock manages 9 trillion dollars of money. Where does that money come from, by the way?
Grant: It comes from you and me.
Leahy: Private individuals.
Grant: Private individuals. If you’re in a pension plan if you’re a teacher if you’re a policeman if you’re an individual investor. These guys have hundreds upon hundreds of exchange-traded funds and mutual funds.
Leahy: So they’ve got 9 trillion under management. So 2nd Vote Advisers, what do you have under management?
Grant: Well, we started only a few months ago, and unfortunately, it takes a company like ours, a startup, to do what we’re doing. So I mentioned we started in 2000.
Leahy: You started with zero.
Grant: We started with zero. We now have two publicly traded exchange-traded funds.
Leahy: Tell us what an exchange-traded fund is.
Grant: It’s very much like a mutual fund. So you can go on, you can put the ticker symbol in. And one of our tickers is EGIS and it’s a Second Amendment fund.
Leahy: Which ticker do I go to?
Grant: If you are with a Morgan Stanley or any broker and you want to buy a stock, you put the ticker symbol in and you hit buy. So it is a liquid stock.
Leahy: Can I do it online myself?
Grant: Absolutely.
Leahy: Where would you go?
Grant: I have an E-Trade account.
Leahy: Put in EGIS I could do it right now if I wanted to buy. And what’s the fund do? Investing in gun companies?
Grant: Well, no. So what we’ve done is we have rated the S&P 1500. And we have different issues that Conservatives care about. One of the issues that Conservatives care about is the Second Amendment.
Listen to the third hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Grant of 2nd Vote Advisers to the studio to discuss his background, their mission and the threats of stakeholder capitalism and environmental social governance.
Leahy: Batten down the hatches because we’re about to light it up in studio. With us, Dan Grant with the 2nd Vote Advisers and we’re going to learn all about them. I am very excited about this.
If you are frustrated and you want to do something to stop the wokeness in Fortune 500 companies, you got to talk to Dan Grant. Dan Grant has an option for you. In-studio with us also, our good friend from that bastion of freedom in Maury County, Mayor Andy Ogles. Good morning, Andy.
Ogles: Good morning. Yeah, I’m intrigued as well. When you have Coke, Coca-Cola getting woke and you have all these companies. Look, if you make 10 issues…
Leahy: You mean Woka-Cola?
Ogles: It’s like I don’t give a crap what you think about my politics. Just make good sneakers, right? Just make good running shoes, right? And stay out of my politics.
Leahy: Don’t lecture to me about how bad America is because it’s not bad it is great. Dan Grant, where have you been? Why has it taken so long to get 2nd Vote Advisers up and running?
And Let’s get you going. Tell us about 2nd Advisers on the web at 2ndvoteadvisers.com. What’s the idea, who is behind it, and what are you doing?
Grant: Sure. Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Michael. The research part of the company started in 2012. My partners in the business, Dave and Diane Black. Diane was in Congress for many years.
Leahy: Ran for governor.
Grant: Ran for governor, ran the budget committee. Dave, her husband then started a very successful drug testing company. I met Dave over 10 years ago when I was a banker at JP Morgan. We got to know each other fairly well.
And Dave being a prominent conservative, one day he was checking out at the grocery store and the clerk asked him, do you want to donate to a charity? Which he did. And they walked out and Diane looked at him and said, why did you do that?
That charity you just donates a lot of money to Plan Parenthood. And they’re very strong pro-life supporters. And Dave said, I had no idea. And that got him thinking, what else don’t I know?
And this was back in 2012 before a lot of this corporate activism really came to the public forefront. So he started a research company called 2nd Vote. And they score companies and they’ve been doing it now for nine years. And the scale is one through five.
So one means you’re liberal, two is leaning liberal, three is neutral for conservative, and five conservative. They’ve scored the S&P 1500. And you look at it today, and we now realize he’s really scoring companies on this stakeholder capitalism, Michael, is what they’re doing.
Leahy: It used to be in the olden days when people really understood capitalism, it was all about maximizing shareholder value.
Grant: Right.
Leahy: Now, you got to be politically correct, because if you’re not some left wing Liberal who’s running a big investment bank or a hedge fund like BlackRock, they’ve sent you a note and said, you got to bow the knee to critical race theory and global warming. You got to do all this stuff that’s stupid or else we’re gonna kick out.
Grant: Well, it’s unfortunate, right? I think this country, the economy that’s driven or wealth and success under attack and it’s under attack by what is called stakeholder capitalism.
So you ask, where have we been? I’ve been in the financial services industry my entire career. I have been around, but it really does take a small startup company like ours to do what we’re doing because the big banks I worked for, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan.
Leahy: They’re lefties aren’t they?
Grant: They are.
Leahy: They’re very much far left.
Grant: Well, they’re all fully vested in this theme.
Leahy: I blame the business schools. Because I graduated from the top business school many years ago in 1981 at Stanford Business school.
And they were talking about the concept of corporate governance and stakeholder capitalism there. But it was just their sort of advisory. Now you’ve got these guys at BlackRock sending out these missives on. They call it ESG. Environmental social governance.
Grant: Which is the largest investment theme in the world. There are trillions of dollars behind it. So your listeners know there’s shareholder capitalism, which is a corporation that should be run for the benefit of shareholders.
Leahy: The owners.
Grant: Right. The owners, which I would agree with. But we are not sticks in the mud. If you’re a shareholder capitalist, corporations for many, many years have supported traditional charity. Helping the needy, the sick, and the poor. That is something that corporations have done for a long, long time. But now you have the World Economic Forum, Claus Schwab the stakeholder capitalists.
Leahy: The Davos crowd.
Grant: The Davos. And guess what? Their definition of good, they’re saying corporations should no longer be run solely for the benefit of shareholders, but for the good of all stakeholders.
Leahy: And the good is defined by these elitist leftists who are running these big hedge funds. And they don’t think the same way you and I do.
Grant: What’s a stakeholder?
Leahy: It’s somebody that exists. That’s it.
Listen to the third hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Daniel Grant” by 2nd Vote Advisers.
