Oh, brother. Am I glad I don't have money invested in any
corporations run by cowardly CEOs.
Okay, I don't have any money invested anywhere, but if I did, I'd
be worried. Ditto anyone whose pension is managed by those
spineless, politically correct lemmings.
It's one thing for a company to be concerned about how it impacts
the environment, but now environmental militants are extorting
businesses into basing their investments on public relations.
Advocates hyping the global warming scenario are persuading - or
intimidating - once wise business leaders into tailoring company
investments to meet those advocates' standards, rather than
providing the best revenues for their stockholders.
Ford just posted the biggest loss in its history, but
environmentalists should be pleased to learn that the company has
donated $25 million to Conservation International for an
environmental center. According to BusinessWeek, a former Ford
CEO, William Ford Jr., has championed green causes for years,
spending $2 billion to overhaul the sprawling River Rouge, Mich.,
Ford complex and put in a 10-acre grass roof to capture
rainwater. The stockholders are not amused.
Marxists have always demonized the corporate world, and Hollywood
has done its best to inculcate this negative image of venal
capitalists into the minds of the public. That corporations are
made up of individual stockholders, big and little, and that
workers' pensions, IRAs, and 401(k) accounts are tied up in
public companies doesn't filter through the bad press.
Now that Vice President Gore has managed to spread his climactic
horror plot through the cinema, intellectually lazy business
titans have folded and joined the climate-change cabal to
undermine their business decisions. What a joke.
I'm no business expert. I have no assets besides my 116-year-old
house, which so far has survived big climatic assaults.
Fortunately, astute individuals have been sounding the alarm
against the attacks on our capitalist system.
Thomas Borelli is a partner in an investment company, the Free
Enterprise Action Fund, which seeks to increase shareholder value
by advancing free-market policies in the companies it owns. Its
mission statement advises investors to consider the fund's
investment objectives, risks, and charges carefully before
investing or sending money.
This sounds like common sense, but it's not common in the
corporate world today. Citigroup is "denying loans because
of green pressure not to give loans to the developing world.
That's a decrease in revenue. Look at their citizenship report;
they're not lending 75% of their loans to the developing world
because of non-financial criteria," Mr. Borelli said on CNBC
recently.
But when have human beings ever mattered to radical
environmentalists? They're always spouting about quality of life,
but only for non-human species. It's criminal that developing
countries are denied opportunities to rise out of poverty because
junk science advocates are intimidating investors.
But the mainstream press aids and abets the global warming
propaganda. The Times of London reported last month that the
disappearance of Lohachara Island in India's part of the
Sundarban delta shows that "one of the most apocalyptic
predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has
started coming true." But the article failed to note that
the island disappeared 22 years ago and was eroded by oceanic
currents, not by rising sea levels, the director of the Sundarban
Biosphere Reserve, Atanu Raha, said.
Maybe my perspective differs from that of journalists the
anti-corporate crowd is wooing because I have always been at the
bottom of the economic ladder. Having lived in some of this
city's harshest neighborhoods, I've learned that a thriving
business community and jobs best help the poor. New York may lose
its status as a financial center because of politically correct
decisions.
In developing countries, militant environmentalists have impeded
the innovative bioengineering advances that would end famine. I
am sick to death of listening to Earth lovers who are more
concerned about the planet than about the human beings who
inhabit it.
If I ever get enough money to invest in a company, I'll first
make sure its CEO not only has a heart, but a spine.