naked capitalism

attempter says:

I read this earlier and bookmarked it for further consideration because if it’s for real it seems odd. It seems to contradict all other indicators.

For example, it wasn’t that long ago that the facts of climate change seemed to have triumphed even in the MSM. But over the last few years we’ve seen a severe retrogression.

In general it seems that the economic crisis is being used as a disaster capitalist pretext to roll back environmental advances. It’s part of the general neo-feudalist campaign.

I’ve also taken it for granted that as Peak Oil sets in we will not rationally transform the fossil fuel economy to a post-oil economy but will hunker in the bunker and try to extract every drop and lump we can, environmental and human well-being be damned.

Certainly even the BP cataclysm doesn’t seem to have engendered any broad-based soul-searching. Instead the most fierce debate has been over a picayune “moratorium” and a paltry escrow fund (which is clearly intended to set an extremely low ceiling on what these criminals will have to pay out).

It’s true that Wall Street likes climate change legislation because the cap and trade scam is another disaster capitalist gambit. It’s really intended to set up another rent extraction point and blow up another bubble while just pretending to mitigate GHGs. (Offsets, free allocations of permits, off-ramps, safety valves, grandfathering in Big Ag and its destructive indirect carbon effects, gutting EPA command and control authority; all this proves these bills are frauds.)

As for mountaintop removal, of course it’s a hideous environmental and socioeconomic atrocity, and brazenly illegal according to the Clean Water Act (but the rogue administrations and courts have simply refused to enforce the law), but since when do big banks care about that? I wondered if their gradual shunning of Massey was over its latest murder. One of the things I was going to try to look up if I decided to write about this was to see if they were shunning only Massey, or all the MTR rackets.

But again, even after yet another in the long line of Massey safety floutings leading to multiple homicides, society hardly seems to care much. Is there really that much pressure on the banks to “do better” in the sense of doing good?

So to sum up I wasn’t sure what to make of this. By now I always assume the worst, in this case that it’s just greenwashing. I wouldn’t be surprised if these banks are still extracting rents from MTR, just having the money laundered through other entities.

BP itself had until recently been putting across one of the most successful greenwashing scams, even as it had one of the worst records in the industry.

craazyman says:

The banks have been pressured for over a decade by shareholder activists from the so-called “socially responsible investment” community to develop and implement policies that recognize and reduce the environmental impact of financed projects, particularly in developing nations.

I work on a consulting basis (but not directly in this area) with one such firm. Some of these firms manage money for religious institutions, others channel the American transcendentalist zeitgeist and offer money management that incorporates that vision, and some are state pension plans.

They often form groups that represent non-trivial amounts of stock, get management’s attention, and work together on initatives with companies. All see themselves as stewards of the assets they manage, and see their stewardship as requiring an ethically engaged ownership of shares, not a passive and disengaged implicit cooperation with whatever management wants to do.

Because the banks are large bureacracies, they inevitably have some staff who take this quite seriously and are very gung ho about having a job that lets them steer the company to “do the right thing” ethically, others see it as a fig leaf, while some see it as a distraction to be surmounted in the chase for profit. As in any bureacracy, there are factions that compete for influence.

Ironically, if my memory serves, I believe a contact at my client related to me that BP in a cost-cutting effort fired its staff in this area several years ago (I’m not 100% sure of my facts but I think there was something along these lines that happened there). We can see how wise a move that was, or at least what it represents about the franchise value inherent in preserving good citizenship.

One can smile sardonically about whether any of this will ever make a difference. But changing the way big organizations work can take time, a lot of time. I’ve actually be quite impressed by the successes these shareholders have had over the past two decades or so on a lot of fronts.

I don’t believe the developments described in the NY Times article would have happened without the multi-year campaigns by these activist “socially responsible” shareholders.

Ed says:

I think people might be reading too much into this. The example of BP shows that a company can rack up sufficient environmental liability to hurt itself financially, or even jeopardize its existence. From a purely financial point of view, this risk should be priced into the prices of the debt and equities that it issues, but its difficult to price this sort of risk and environmental risk may have been underpriced until we started getting prominently reported environmental disasters.

Mozzie says:

Um … “Hesitance”? What’s wrong with “hesitation” – or am I missing something?