Here’s a tip from a long-time Washington DC lawyer: the more folksy or patriotic the name of the group, the more likely that it is funded by people who are promoting exactly the opposite of what it is trying to pretend to be. And thus we have the Main Street Investors Coalition, which bills itself as “bring[ing] together groups and individuals who have an interest in amplifying the voice of America’s retail investor community.”

In reality, it is a corporate-funded group with no real ties to retail investors, and its advocacy is as fake as its name. MSIC uses inflammatory language, unsupported assertions, and out-and-out falsehoods to try to discredit the institutional investors who file and support non-binding shareholder proposals. While these proposals are filed at a very small fraction of publicly traded companies and even a 100 percent vote does not require the company to comply, somehow, this very foundational aspect of free market checks and balances is so overwhelming a prospect to corporate executives that they are unable to provide a substantive response and instead establish what in Washington is referred to as an “astroturf” (fake grassroots) organization, setting up a false dichotomy between the interests of large and small shareholders.

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