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Bugs and Daffy had it all wrong. It’s not duck season. It’s not wabbit season.  It’s proxy season. To demonstrate this point, we spent a few hours beating Excel and Photoshop into submission to come up with this chart.

Proxy season is Marchish through Junish.

Today marks an exciting end to a busy week!  Since Monday, we have added five new Advocates on our site - Green America, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays, ProxyAnalyst, Trillium Asset Management and Walden Asset Management. We hope this diverse group will contribute plenty of guidance and opinions in the coming weeks and months.

Also this week, several advocates provided opinions on multiple ballots displayed on our site. The highlights include:

• Change to Win supported the resolution at Toll Brothers which calls for the Board’s Chairman to be an independent director who has not previously served as an executive officer in the company.
• Change to Win also supported the resolution at Whole Foods for the Board to develop a succession plan for the position of CEO.
• Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays supported the resolution on the Disney ballot to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on ex-gay status in its sexual orientation employment policy and diversity training for employees.  In doing so, they sided with the Corporate Morality Action Center on this ballot item.

With the momentum from our advocates picking up, this should be an exciting spring proxy season at Moxy Vote.

Moxy Vote has been working on our exciting business for almost three years.  Although it seems like a long time, we realize it is nothing compared to the long journey the many pioneers of the corporate governance and shareholder advocacy community have traveled.  These individuals and organizations have been trailblazing long before we came on the scene.  They made it easier for Moxy Vote to help push the industry to new heights.

With that in mind, we thought it would be a perfect time to shout out to those who brought shareholder rights to the forefront of the investment scene.  These folks continue to lead this charge even today.  We have worked closely with some, and others we have just admired from afar.

Due to the number of individuals and groups Moxy Vote would like to profile, we will make three separate posts.  We just don’t want to overwhelm you with too much good stuff all at once!  So here we go, our first edition of our very own “wall of fame.”

Jim McRitchie

Jim McRitchie at CorpGov.net – Jim has been a true independent voice in the industry for years and has run his corporate governance site since 1995.  He brings to light important issues and information on the industry and leads many discussions about pushing reform and best practices forward.  Many shareholder advocates have his site bookmarked as a “must see” to get their regular dose of corporate governance information.  Jim tirelessly keeps individual and institutional shareholders more informed and more engaged in the corporate governance process.

Mark Latham

Mark Latham and Andy Eggers at ProxyDemocracy – ProxyDemocracy began as a collaborative project between Andy and Mark, and it has grown into a useful resource for investors. Focusing on the mutual fund industry which owns about 25% of corporate equities,  the site encourages funds to disclose their proxy votes ahead of meetings and analyzes how those funds voted.  With a proprietary method for scoring these funds according to ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) criteria, it allows investors to see which mutual funds share their views and values.

Andy Eggers

Now the torch has been passed to the new Executive Director Matt Keenan who is leading ProxyDemocracy into the next phase of its evolution, which will no doubt be impressive.   As Matt leads the charge, Mark is focusing his efforts on VoterMedia.org, which has some cutting edge ideas on how to promote good governance in both companies and governments.  Mark was named to the SEC Investor Advisory Committee, where he continues to make sure that individual investors have a voice with the SEC.  Andy serves on the board of ProxyDemocracy.

That is it for this week.  Next time, I will highlight Glyn Holton, Nell Minow, and the Social Investment Forum.

If you are still not sure how Moxy Vote can help you, check out this article at BusinessWeek.  Our very own Doug Gates eloquently describes who we are and how we help shareholders have a voice.  In addition to Doug, the article quotes three important folks:

• An advocate on our site - Eric Cohen from Investors Against Genocide
• A retail shareholder who wants to be heard  - John Marcoux
• A pioneer in shareholder advocacy - Nell Minow from The Corporate Library

You could be an expert in the industry, a shareholder advocate, or just an average investor – Moxy Vote can help you be heard.

You may not follow Supreme Court rulings, but you may have seen the video clip of Justice Alito shaking his head during President Obama’s State of the Union address a few weeks ago. Or you may know that the controversial ruling to lift spending limits on corporate campaign donations has caused a political firestorm. It has dramatically changed the landscape on donations.

But why should you, as a shareholder, care? Transparency, or lack thereof, just became more important.

Now that corporations have no ceiling on political donations, shareholders’ ability to have transparency on those donations becomes critical. However, most corporations do not offer any transparency to their owners on this issue. One of the Advocates participating on Moxy Vote, the Center for Political Accountability, fights to change this. They ask corporations to simply disclose all of their political spending. Not stop – just disclose.

As a result of this ruling, my guess is that Bruce Freed and Maureen O’Brien at the CPA are going to be very busy this year!