At&t Proxy Drive by Neo-nazi Group Poses Dilemma for Groups Fighting It

Though a National Alliance proposal to end the American Telephone and Telegraph Co.’s business relationships with Israel was expected to be voted down by the vast majority of AT&T stockholders at Wednesday’s annual meeting, the neo-Nazi group will have succeeded in achieving its real goal: to garner increased credibility for its racist views through mainstream exposure.

For the Jewish and other groups fighting the National Alliance’s campaign, efforts to combat groups of this ilk are a double-edged sword.

A balance must be carefully struck between exposing the National Alliance’s real goals to public scrutiny and not ceding it too much of the publicity it so hungrily seeks.

“We never want to give these groups the visibility that they don’t deserve,” explained Jerome Chanes, co-director for domestic concerns at NJCRAC, the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council.

“At the same time, our long experience has taught us that the best counteraction against groups such as National Alliance is public exposure. When groups such as this are exposed as the racists that they are, the American body politic and individual Americans repudiate them.”

The Arlington, Va.-based National Alliance, an outgrowth of the Liberty Lobby and the American Nazi Party, was able to get a proposal urging the telecommunications company to “phase out all sales of AT&T products and services to the State of Israel and to Israeli businesses” included in AT&T’s proxy statement.

The group, headed by William Pierce, owns 100 shares of the blue-chip stock, just enough to allow it to use the proxy as a vehicle for its views, according to Securities and Exchange Commission regulations.

Each year since National Alliance bought its stock late in 1987 it has included a proposal in the AT&T proxy statement.

‘ANTI-SEMITIC GOALS’

In 1988, 1989 and 1990, the proposals urged shareholders to vote to force AT&T to end its affirmative action program. Each year the proposal was rejected by the owners of at least 91.2 percent of AT&T’s 1.09 billion outstanding shares.

At the end of the National Alliance proposal in this year’s proxy, AT&T urges shareholders to vote against it. The company’s directors noted that “clearly, the (National Alliance) is using the proxy process not to attempt to advance human rights, but to achieve anti-Semitic goals.”

One way to make sure that investors know what the National Alliance is really about is to work with AT&T’s shareholders. NJCRAC distributed background information about the proposal and the National Alliance to community relations professionals around the country.

Another way to get the message across is through the largest shareholders, some of which are state pension funds, which invest huge sums.

Illinois state pension systems, for instance, own 1,472,330 shares of stock, worth more than $49.5 million, according to figures from last April.

The Illinois state legislature is considering a bill urging representatives of the state pension systems that hold AT&T stock “to participate in the proxy referendum and vote the full extent of their portfolio holdings against the National Alliance stockholder proposal.”

The resolution has strong leadership support, with the co-sponsorship of both the majority and minority leaders, and was expected to pass when it came to a vote Tuesday, on the eve of the shareholders meeting, being held in Chicago.

The Jewish Community Relations Council of Metropolitan Chicago worked closely with legislators to draft the resolution, which was commended by the American Jewish Congress.

Though this is the first group to try to use an AT&T proxy “to espouse a social philosophy,” AT&T spokesman Burke Stinson said he suspects “there will be more of this.”

AT&T has tried to get the National Alliance proposals off the proxy, Stinson said, but they are permitted by the SEC to remain.

“Corporations know that they’re being had in that their ballots are being used for publicity purposes, yet someone with a broader perspective on life would say that’s what America is all about,” he said.

NJCRAC’s Chanes agrees. “These organizations have every constitutional right to express what they want to express,” he said. “The best place to counteract these people is in the marketplace of ideas.”