OKPOLICY.ORG
Oklahoma Watch reported recently that State Treasurer Todd Russ is driving an effort to get the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust (TSET) Board of Investors to make proposals to corporations in which the board invests the $2 billion trust fund. The proposals are intended to sway the companies’ behavior regarding ideological issues.
The Oklahoma constitutional amendment creating TSET, passed by voters in 2000, established a Board of Investors to invest the monies in the trust fund. The Constitution provides that the State Treasurer shall serve as chair of the Board of Investors.
The board agenda for August 20 included a presentation, discussion, and potential action regarding 2026 shareholder proposals, including: (a) anti-trafficking policies, (b) politicized and anti-religious discrimination in charitable gift matching, (c) gender ideology activism in health care coverage, (d) dispensing of the abortion drug Mifepristone, (e) risks of executive compensation plans that include diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG), and (f) risks of China exposure on shareholder return.
Jerry Bowyer of Bowyer Research recommended the issues and the target companies for the board’s 2026 round of shareholder proposals. According to its website, Bowyer Research seems to be primarily a family operation. Its seven employees are CEO Jerry Bowyer, COO Susan Bowyer, Christopher Bowyer, Jeremy Bowyer, Hope Crock, Mercy Bowyer, and Isaac Willour.
Some of Jerry Bowyer’s listed credentials include: “He is Resident Economist with Kingdom Advisors, he serves on the Editorial Board of Salem Communications, he is Senior Fellow in Financial Economics at the Center for Cultural Leadership, a member of the State Financial Officers Foundation’s (SFOF) national advisory committee, and a fellow at the Center on Wealth & Poverty at the Discovery Institute. He also helped in the creation of Morgan Stanley’s Christian values toolkit.”
Kingdom Advisors is an organization that trains and certifies financial professionals to integrate biblical wisdom into their practice for clients seeking values-based advice. Salem Communications, now Salem Media Group, describes itself as America’s leading multimedia company specializing in Christian and conservative content, with media properties spanning radio, digital media, and book and newsletter publishing.
The Center for Cultural Leadership is an organization whose mission statement says it believes culture should be Christian — not by political coercion, but by spiritual conversion. The State Financial Officers Foundation is an organization of current and former Republican State Treasurers and Auditors whose mission is to drive fiscally sound public policy by partnering with key stakeholders and educating Americans on the role of responsible financial management in a free-market economy.
The mission of the Center on Wealth & Poverty at the Discovery Institute is “to apply the perennial truths of economics and ethics to the urgent challenges of today” and to “build a sustained argument against the progressive ideological regime that increasingly dominates America’s institutions.”
After Bowyer’s presentation and recommendations, the board voted 3-1 to select 10 publicly traded companies it intends to target with shareholder proposals in 2026. The companies are Boeing, Starbucks, Chipotle, computer chip giant NVIDIA, Visa, Mastercard, communications equipment maker Qualcomm Inc., cosmetics company Estée Lauder, Amazon, and drug distributor McKesson. The proposals ask the companies to compile reports on possible risks tied to DEI, ESG, and other ideological issues.
The rationale for the proposals seems to be that, left to their own devices, the companies would be led by “activist investors” to base their corporate policy decisions on more progressive principles, thus putting themselves at “reputational and legal risk.” Such risks could be in violation of their fiduciary duty to shareholders like TSET to maximize profits.
According to Oklahoma Watch, the 2025 proposals to targeted companies received less than 1 percent of the vote at the annual meetings of the companies earlier this year.
