Today's Marketplace features a story about the annual stockholder's meeting at Exxon Mobil. Apparently, the descendents of founder John D. Rockefeller, are pushing the firm to admit the reality of global warming and begin being more aggressive in pursuing alternate energy sources (btw-I recommend this biography of JDR). Other shareholders, in contrast, argue that the "job of Exxon Mobil is to create wealth for society". They argue that high stock prices are the best way of doing so...and that stock prices benefit from the current resource scarcity and related record profits.One quote from the story stuck wtih me especially. Steve Maloy with the Free Enterprise Action Fund argues that addressing global warming is not a responsibility of Exxon Mobil. Instead he argues
Investing has become politicized as various environmental action groups have had a hard time getting their agendas through congress. So, they decided to hi-jack American corporations.
This is a terrible argument in so many ways... First, it is based on the assumption that the reckless pursuit of profit at all costs is apolitical. This is ludicrous. Maintaining the status quo--however well accepted it may be--is never apolitical. The status quo embeds a certain power structure with some set of individuals holding power, and others denied access to power. Maintaining that power structure is inevitably a political process. The notion that speaking truth to power is political while maintaining the current system is not is nonsense. Second, Mr. Maloy assumes that the "correct" path for this concern is through congress, rather than through shareholder activism. In other words, he seems to believe that large global corporations like Exxon Mobil are completely incapable of responsible behavior in regards to the impact of their products without government regulation enforcing some constraints. While that may be true for Mr. Maloy, it is clearly not univerally true. Many business leaders take responsibility for their product's impact seriously...regardless of costs. Finally, it's hard to understand how the current debate can be considered a "hi-jacking" when it is a) initiated by the founding family of the firm, and b) follows a democratic process of voting by shareholders. Mr. Maloy seems to have confused debating ideas and strategies with terrorism (ala hi-jacking). That's the kind of argument that leads to the most toxic forms of groupthink.
I've never been a big fan of Ted Kennedy. However, I truly enjoyed this week's "
