Most Americans will never read a proxy statement. They work, they raise families, they pay into a 401(k) or a pension fund, and they trust that the people managing those dollars are doing the one thing they are legally obligated to do, which is to make the money grow.

That trust has a name. It is called fiduciary duty, and it is supposed to be sacred. Yet two firms most workers have never heard of have spent years bending that duty toward a political agenda those same workers would reject in an instant if anyone bothered to ask them.

The firms are Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, and together they dominate the proxy advisory business. These are the outfits that tell the giant institutional investors managing your retirement how to vote on the thousands of corporate questions that come up every year, from who sits on a board to how executives get paid to whether a company should adopt some fashionable environmental or social mandate.

One study of 175 institutional investors managing more than $5 trillion found they followed proxy advisor recommendations more than 95 percent of the time. When two companies control roughly 90 percent of that advice, they do not merely influence corporate America. They quietly run a large part of it.

A Racket With a Polite Name

Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee put it plainly during a recent appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” Proxy advisors, he said, are the companies that tell shareholders exactly how to vote on management’s proposals, and many of them are not even American. They are owned in Canada and Switzerland.

In Hagerty’s words, they are “using, misusing and abusing their power to achieve political objectives.” He did not soften the verdict. “It’s a total shakedown. It’s corrupt.”

That language is strong, but the structure he is describing earns it. A proxy advisor sells two things at once. It sells investors ratings and voting recommendations on a given company, and it sells that same company consulting services to improve its scores.

Read that sentence again. The referee is also selling cleats to one of the teams. When the firm grading your governance “suggests” you adopt its preferred policy, the board has every incentive to nod along rather than risk a downgrade that could cost directors their seats. The suggestion is not really a suggestion. It is a toll, and the politics ride along for free.

How the Money Got Weaponized

The clearest evidence of what these firms actually do shows up in the campaign against politically motivated de-banking. When shareholders at JPMorgan Chase and PayPal tried to force transparency about why accounts were being canceled, proxy advisor recommendations helped sink those resolutions.

The accounts in question were not closed for sloppy bookkeeping. Chase shut down the account of Ambassador Sam Brownback’s National Committee for Religious Freedom without a meaningful explanation. PayPal disabled the account of the Free Speech Union, restoring it only after a public backlash made the cost of the censorship higher than the cost of the principle.

This is the part that should alarm anyone who still believes a corporation’s job is to serve its owners. A retiree in Tennessee or Michigan never voted to punish a religious freedom group. Her money did, because a foreign-owned firm told the fund manager how to vote, and the manager, drowning in proxy ballots, simply obeyed.

Her lifetime of labor was conscripted into a political project she would have opposed if she had been allowed anywhere near the decision. That is not stewardship. It is theft dressed up as governance.

The Reckoning Has Started

The good news is that the wall of silence is finally cracking. On December 11, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing the SEC, the FTC, and the Department of Labor to scrutinize whether ISS and Glass Lewis have used their market dominance to push ideological agendas at shareholders’ expense while enriching themselves.

State attorneys general have not been idle either. Twenty-three of them signed a letter demanding viewpoint-neutral advice, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has gone further, opening an investigation into both firms. Florida has sued. The advisors themselves are already scrambling to revise their guidelines, which tells you everything about who was winning the argument before the lights came on.

None of this is finished, and that is precisely why it cannot be allowed to stall. Regulatory attention has a way of fading once the headlines move on, and the firms know it. The Senate Banking Committee, chaired by Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, has the standing and the membership to write legislation that restores transparency, real competition, and genuine accountability to an industry that has operated for too long as an unaccountable duopoly.

Fiduciary duty has to mean what it says. It means serving the shareholder, including the retiree, and it does not mean serving a movement.

Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.

There is something almost biblical about the offense here, because the offense is ancient. Skimming from the wages of the worker, quietly and from a comfortable distance, has always provoked a particular kind of judgment.

Americans did not endure decades of early mornings and long shifts so that an unaccountable racket could shortchange them in their final years and call it good governance. Expose the arrangement, end the conflict of interest, and let the money do the only job it was ever entrusted to do.

Buy physical precious metals before the next gold and silver surge. Don’t buy numismatics! Buy pure bullion instead. Whether with cash or retirement funds, learn how we can help you prepare for financial turbulence ahead.