Conservative investors were given a win by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) after the federal agency green-lit a proposal by the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) that will investigate religious and political discrimination in PayPal, according to The Epoch Times.
The proposal allows shareholders to vote at the company’s next annual meeting whether they want PayPal to “conduct an evaluation and issue a report” on how they deal with overseeing discrimination and how that might affect Constitutionally protected rights.
PayPal tried to block this proposal from going through, arguing that shareholders are not part of the company’s normal operations and do not have the judgment to make informed judgments into “matters of a complex nature.” But the SEC denied their request and said that they cannot agree with their statement. The agency argued that the NCPPR’s proposal “transcends ordinary business matters.”
Scott Shepard, director at NCPPR, claimed that PayPal discriminates based on politics and shuts down accounts that are not “woke,” adding that the proposal is a way for the company to deliberate how to fix their behavior. PayPal has a rank of 49 out of 100 on the Standard and Poor’s ESG score. The number is reportedly more than twice as much as the industry average of 22.
In five years, PayPal has gone from a score as low as 13 to 58 today. Other organizations such as the Corporate Equality Index (CEI), which is published by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), give the company a score of 100. George Soros, the notorious left-wing megadonor, has funded HRC leaving some to scrutinize how companies are turning to left-wing politics to improve their ESG scores.
Some analysts are reportedly suggesting that Bud Light’s campaign featuring popular transgender Dylan Mulvaney was an attempt to score higher than progressive organizations like the HRC.
