The Main Street Investors Coalition can no longer argue that they have any connection to Main Street or investors as we have repeatedly made clear in articles, news stories, blog posts, and responses to their tweets, that they are a fake dark money front group funded by corporations, including the National Association of Manufacturers, and led by an energy lobbyist. We have pointed out the continual misrepresentations, distortions, omissions, misdirections, and outright fabrications of every argument they have made so far, all purporting to be on behalf of promoting more active involvement of retail investors even their own numbers show vote proxies only 29 percent of the time. We have repeatedly asked them to give us an example of a single proxy issue that was wrongly decided or even wrongly recommended by the proxy advisors they claim are “political.” No answer. That’s because there isn’t one. They did try to claim that the failure of the Rite Aid/Albertson’s merger was the result of bad advice from proxy advisors, and we explained why that was, well, a lie.

Now, they claim that it is activist investors who are responsible for a decline in IPOs. That is, again, simply not true. First, who says that the decline in IPOs is a bad thing? There were too many premature IPOs. Private equity is still an option for pre-IPO investing, and often a better one.

The rationalization of IPOs is the result of market forces, which, again we must remind MSIC, is how capitalism works. There are a number of factors, including geopolitical elements like trade wars and Brexit. So even if there should be more IPOs, the level of activism is not the obstacle MSIC claims.

Once again, the Main Street Investors Coalition is a wolf of Wall Street in the sheep’s clothing of the retail investor, promoting the interests of entrenched, overpaid CEOs and climate change denial by trying to prevent oversight by large, sophisticated investors with access to independent research. This last claim shows just how desperate they have become.