Midwest energy reporter at @POLITICO
St Louis, MO
Joined November 2008
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15 years ago today — carried my 2 y/o daughter to the Cards World Series parade — not because I was a fan of the team, but because I’d never lived in a city whose team won it all. Savor this Brewers fans!
Now do RTO governance
America’s corporate governance system is broken, and it’s killing public companies. Look no further than Cracker Barrel: Decades of brutal mismanagement have seen one incompetent CEO after another walk away with a massive paycheck while customers and actual shareholders take a beating.
Why does this keep happening? Because proxy advisory firms like ISS are corrupt. They blindly rubber-stamp failing boards year after year, protecting the corporate elite while burning shareholder value to the ground.
The root of the rot is index funds. There's no question that indexing one's money is a smart financial move for most people. But just because you passively index your investments doesn't mean your corporate votes should be handed over to the managers of your fund so they can play politics. Right now, passive funds hold massive, unchecked voting blocks while having zero skin in the game themselves.
It is time for a simple rewrite of the rules: We need to index the votes of index fund investors.
Passive index funds should be forced to automatically split their votes to proportionately mirror those of retail and active institutional shareholders — the people actually doing the research, risking their capital, and fighting for performance in the companies they hold shares in. No more rubber-stamping. A change like this will immediately strip corrupt gatekeepers like ISS of their toxic influence.
True accountability happens when lazy, overpaid boards actually answer to the stakeholders they represent, rather than screwing them over.
Actual, logic-driven governance when your money is passive happens when your vote passively follows the voting decisions of the actual market.
We need to stop letting passive capital protect active incompetence. By stripping index funds of their arbitrary voting power and empowering engaged investors, we will finally torch corporate cronyism and usher American capital markets into a golden age of capitalism.
The viral ARod swing down video and debate on social media is beyond silly but it raises the point:
Just because you can do something at an elite level doesn't make you qualified to teach it and just because you can't hit at an elite level doesn't mean you can't teach something.
One issue the Entergy-Google kerfuffle in Arkansas exposes: there's way too much being redacted in all sorts of utility filings. Not a new issue, but the problem is no one is really motivated to spend the time and money to challenge it. So it's just become BAU.
😲
A Republican legislative candidate in Missouri plotted to plant cocaine and Adderall on his primary opponent in an effort to derail her campaign, federal prosecutors allege.
@MO_Independent reports:
stlpr.org/government-politic…
Did I really just get an email about a conference on clean energy and rural America that's being held in...New York City?
Interesting to see so governors paying closer attention to utility rates and reliability, but how many are taking steps to better equip the state offices and advocates who do the daily dirty work of litigating cases at PUCs?
Star = born. And at Wrigley, no less.
JOSHUA BÁEZ OH MY GOODNESS 🤯
THREE HOMERS IN HIS FIRST THREE MAJOR LEAGUE AT-BATS ‼️
(🎥@MLB)
jeffreytomich retweeted
🚨 David Crowley beat democratic socialist Francesca Hong overnight in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor — a major blow for progressives and a relief for establishment Dems in a key swing state.
🔗 politi.co/45ishsR
🚨 The Wisconsin PSC just revoked the "completeness determination" issued in Dec. '25 for a $1.4B transmission line needed for the Stargate data center in Port Washington, Wis. This closes the docket. Project developer ATC will have to file a new application.
How much capacity could we free up on the grid by, say, not over-air conditioning every building in America 🥶
Ohio estimated data center tax breaks would cost $136 million in 2025. The state Department of Taxation revealed the actual number was $1.6 billion. Ohio's Legislature had voted to end data center tax breaks last year but Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed it. signalohio.org/ohio-data-cen…
Imagine the world’s tiniest utility. It has one small power plant ⚡️ and a power line strung on 2 poles connected to 2 homes 🏠 spaced a mile apart along a country road. Cont.’
The data center agrees to pay for the power plant and line for the next 15 years. But what happens in 15 years if the data center closes or doesn’t need all the power and the plant and power line, financed over 30-year lives, aren’t fully paid off. Cont.’