The state visit by Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping in combination with USTR Jamieson Greer’s responsibilities within the U.S-China trade program, meant that Greer had to defer a visit to Mexico to work on the USMCA replacement.  However, bilateral trade agreement discussions at a technical level remained on track and progressing during Xi’s visit. The U.S. […]

The post U.S. and Mexico Trade Teams Expand Technical Topics from 54 to 90 Sections appeared first on The Last Refuge.

Promethean Action’s Susan Kokinda gives a good recap of Chinese Chairman Xi’s state visit, including the nuanced respect and policy alignment visible between President Trump and Chairman Xi. In essence, the comments by Marco Rubio about putting USA sovereign policy ahead of prior USA multilateral global policy, are a baseline for Chairman Xi to pivot […]

The post Susan Kokinda Recaps Chairman Xi State Visit and Current Geopolitical Events appeared first on The Last Refuge.

The Heritage Foundation’s Free Enterprise Initiative is now the American Investor Initiative, a name that says plainly what its predecessor implied: that the American economy runs to no small degree on the decisions of ordinary people who own shares—in their 401(k)s, their pension funds, their modest brokerage accounts—and who have a personal stake in how the companies they own are governed.

It says, too, that the health of American capital markets is not a niche concern for men in Brioni suits but a pillar of national strength, on par with the size of the Navy. China’s capital markets, for all Beijing’s ambitions, remain hobbled by capital controls, a state-directed banking system given to intervening in market downturns through its so-called national team, and corporate structures built to obscure rather than clarify who actually owns what.

A country whose markets are transparent, adjudicated by independent courts, and governed by the rule of contract rather than the whim of the party enjoys an advantage that compounds, like interest, over decades. That advantage is worth guarding jealously, and guarding it from ideological capture at home is no less urgent than guarding it from Beijing abroad.

Heritage’s own portfolio (shares in more than a thousand companies) is the vehicle for this work, and the results, quietly achieved, have been substantial: Half of last season’s shareholder proposals were withdrawn, not because Heritage lost interest but because the companies in question agreed, in private conversation, to change course.

Some of our proposals went to a shareholder vote and received modest support, including at Starbucks and Amazon. But those public tallies capture only a fraction of what happens in shareholder engagement. The real measure of success is more often what happens before a proposal ever reaches the ballot.

Low vote counts should not be misrepresented as a proxy for overwhelming shareholder consensus. On highly divisive issues, a 1% vote for an anti-DEI or anti-ESG proposal does not establish that 99% of shareholders affirmatively support DEI or ESG—particularly when a corresponding proposal advancing the opposite position receives similarly low support, sometimes on the same ballot.

Treating such results as evidence of near-universal shareholder support is analytically unsound and risks conflating non-support for one proposal with affirmative support for its opposing position (see here and here). More broadly, these outcomes raise legitimate questions about whether proxy voting results accurately capture the views of beneficial owners or instead reflect structural features of the proxy voting system.

For a generation, the Left treated the shareholder proposal as its preferred instrument of moral suasion, using it to embed progressive commitments into the machinery of the corporation itself (its hiring practices, marketing, compensation formulas, charitable giving, and health care plans) until institutions that owed their existence to serving shareholders found themselves administering a kind of parallel social policy.

Our engagement targets last season were representative rather than exhaustive: DEI mandates folded into executive pay, ESG substituted for the ordinary discipline of return on investment, corporate charitable giving keyed to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s contested “hate map,” health plans extending gender transition treatment to minors.

Each was a symptom of a broader condition: the decades-long repurposing of shareholder capitalism.

The Right’s recent response—which was long past due—has been to do the same work in reverse, not by picketing shareholder meetings but by talking, company by company, to the men and women who run them.

We approach our engagements in hopes of improving firms, not of remaking them as political agents for our own side. Shareholders, after all, profit when their companies succeed, and the scorched-earth activist investor is usually a poor steward of his own portfolio.

All of this occurs against a backdrop that may soon shift beneath everyone’s feet. On Sept. 16, the Securities and Exchange Commission formally proposed rescinding Rule 14a-8, the 1942-vintage regulation that obliges public companies to include qualifying shareholder proposals in their proxy statements. Chairman Paul Atkins suggested that the commission has been legislating without a permission slip from Congress, and that nothing in the Securities Exchange Act authorizes the SEC to decide which resolutions are a “proper subject” for a shareholder vote.

Kudos to Atkins for recognizing federal overreach and its net deleterious impact on public firms. Had the rule been rescinded decades ago, a great deal of institutionalized progressivism might never have taken root in corporate America in the first place. But regret is a poor substitute for strategy, and the sounder response to belated vindication might be to get on with the work the vindication makes possible, at least for a little longer.

The proposal, it bears repeating, is not yet law; it sits in a 60-day comment window, and formal adoption remains ahead. This is not obviously positive, in the near term, for the conservatives now enjoying real momentum with their shareholder engagement.

Once finalized, the rule’s rescission would relocate the whole enterprise of shareholder engagement from a single federal rulebook to 50 state corporate codes and thousands of individual sets of bylaws (a jurisdiction, in practice, concentrated overwhelmingly in Delaware, with Nevada and Texas gaining ground as companies conduct what has been dubbed “DExit,” and Wyoming a less assuming beneficiary further behind).

A brief transition period (two years, say) would let these states write the statutory machinery this shift requires. The absence of such preparation invites exactly the kind of procedural chaos that gives reform a bad name.

The next front, meanwhile, is perhaps even more consequential: state pension funds. An audit of how red-state pension systems have actually voted their proxies would likely turn up a good deal of daylight between the professed values of the states holding those funds and the votes their money managers have been casting on their behalf.

Fixing that gap, aligning the fiduciary conduct of red-state pension funds with the values of the citizens whose retirements they administer, is unglamorous work that generates no headlines and considerable friction. But it’s necessary.

The American investor isn’t an abstraction, although abstractions have been making decisions for him for years. He is, rather, the worker whose 401(k) owns a sliver of General Motors, the teacher whose pension owns a sliver of Microsoft, the retiree whose savings depend upon the prudence of people she will never meet.

Their ownership should mean more than a quarterly statement and a line on a balance sheet. Those who manage Americans’ investments must remember whose money they are managing, and whose interests they are obliged to serve.

That’s the modest proposition behind the American Investor Initiative: Capitalism becomes an odd thing when the people who own the capital have the least to say about how it is used.

Hundreds of thousands of Catholics poured into Paris on Saturday as Pope Leo XIV held Mass in the city centre, spreading a message of religious revival amid modern secularism stemming from the French Revolution and calling on the faithful to "bring hope wherever discouragement and spiritual dryness prevail."

The post Pope Leo Holds Mass with 800,000 People in Paris at Site of French Revolution Guillotine Terror Beheadings appeared first on Breitbart.

As the battle for control of the House of Representatives intensifies ahead of the 2026 midterms, a lame-duck House Democrat dropped a comprehensive blueprint for how a potential Democratic majority could target the White House come January.

The post PREVIEW OF A MIDTERM RECKONING: House Democrat Drops Massive 26-Article Impeachment Resolution Against Trump appeared first on Breitbart.

More than a year after a newborn baby was found abandoned next to a dumpster on a rainy day in Riverside, California, police say they have arrested the infant's mother. 

The post Police: California Mother Arrested More Than a Year After Newborn Was Found Next to Dumpster on a Rainy Day appeared first on Breitbart.

Do you really know what’s in your food? The Make America Healthy Again movement is top of mind for swathes of Americans concerned about what they’re putting into their bodies. To understand more about these Americans, I sat down with Turning Point USA’s Alex Clark, host of the “Culture Apothecary” podcast, and discussed the fight to make America healthy again.

From eliminating harmful chemicals and additives in the food supply to the broader goals of the MAHA movement, we explored how America can rebuild itself physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

The rapid intensification of Hurricane Polo in the Pacific Ocean has prompted some weather analysts to call the storm a "Category 6" as it threatens the Mexican coastline this weekend.

The post Pacific’s Hurricane Polo Prompts ‘Category 6’ Discussion appeared first on Breitbart.