THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VII, Issue # 90, April 20, 2005
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
WANTED: CORPORATE CHIEF EXECTUTIVE OFFICERS
WITH TRUE ETHICS & THE COURAGE TO CHALLENGE
THE RADICAL ECO-ACTIVISTS
By Niger Innis & Paul K. Driessen
THE NEED FOR DECENT, ETHICAL CORPORATE CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICERS WITH THE WILL, DETERMINATION, & COURAGE TO
STAND UP TO THE RAINFOREST ACTION NETWORK & ITS ALLIES & THEREBY PREVENT THE ECO-ACTIVIST, RADICAL
ENVIRONMENTALISTS FROM KEEPING THE WORLD'S POOR IMPOVERISHED, HUNGRY, & DISEASE-RIDDEN
FULL STORY:
Last week, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) launched another wave of protests against JP Morgan Chase Bank. RAN's goal is
to intimidate the bank into rewriting its lending and environmental standards in accord with RAN’s demands and ideologies.
Such a capitulation on the part JP Morgan Chase Bank would have significant consequences for the bank, its customers and
shareholders, and businesses everywhere. But it would have far more tragic – and lethal – consequences for many of our Earth’s
poorest citizens.
The propaganda of RAN's eco-activists is quite familiar. The litany of alleged offenses follows a script: fragile ecosystems,
environmental devastation, irresponsible investment, huge profits, human rights violations, indigenous people imperiled. So do the
demands: transparency, accountability, ethics, social responsibility.
RAN tactics are equally familiar. Launch websites and issue denunciations. Enlist grade school teachers whose students can write
letters to the CEO. Harass the CEO at home. Stage protests at corporate offices. Claim to be stakeholders who must be given a role in
all decisions, so that company policies henceforth reflect activist demands.
Confrontational? Disingenuous? Of course. Effective? Absolutely.
The World Bank caved in several years ago, followed by Citigroup, Bank of America, and a few oil and mining companies. Now JP
Morgan Chase and other companies are in the crosshairs of eco-activist, radical environmentalist groups like Rainforest Action
Network.
RAN’s focus is on rainforests and fossil fuels. But its websites and rhetoric show that is just the tip of the iceberg. The group’s
Global Finance Project Director told Wall Street Journal business analyst Alan Murray, “I personally do not want them to
lend to oil companies.” Mining and timber companies are also high on her list.
Moreover, RAN is just one element in what Professor Jarol Manheim (author of Biz Wars and Death of a Thousand
Cuts) calls an elaborate network of foundations, advocacy groups, labor unions, and other institutions. All are determined to
advance their anti-corporate, anti-development agenda, which includes strident opposition to pesticides, biotechnology, electricity,
and other modern technologies.
All employ economic, legal, political, media, and psychological warfare to convince companies that surrender is preferable to
continued resistance. And all launch their attacks under the banner of sustainable development and corporate social responsibility
– as defined and interpreted by the eco-activists.
The attacks sully reputations and impact bottom lines. Less obvious, but more insidious, is their effect on investment, innovation,
employment, and our economic future and standard of living. Worst of all, the campaigns trample on the human rights of the world’s
most destitute people, keep them impoverished, and send many to early graves.
Worldwide, two billion people still don’t have electricity, water purification, sewage treatment, or refrigeration. Indoor pollution from
their wood and dung fires causes four million deaths a year from lung infections and tuberculosis, while unsafe water and spoiled
food cause intestinal diseases that kill another six million.
Over 800 million people are chronically undernourished, and 200 million children suffer from Vitamin A Deficiency. A half-million
children go blind annually, and two million die from diseases they would likely survive with better nutrition.
Malaria, sleeping sickness, and other insect-borne diseases infect half a billion people every year in sub-Saharan Africa – killing
four million and contributing massively to the region’s economic devastation.
Abundant, reliable, affordable electricity would generate jobs and prosperity, dramatically reduce lung and intestinal diseases, and
help preserve woodland habitats and wildlife. Biotechnology would reduce crop losses from insects and plant disease, help alleviate
hunger and malnutrition, and decrease the amount of land that must be cultivated to feed growing populations. Pesticides would
control mosquitoes and flies that spread killer diseases.
But environmental extremist groups – and the foundations, companies and governments that support them – viscerally oppose
fossil fuel, nuclear and hydroelectric power projects, biotechnology, pesticides, and bank financing of projects that would generate
jobs and hope for the future.
To deflect criticism over their callous policies, they promote solar panels that power a light bulb and radio in mud huts; wind
turbines that spoil scenic vistas and kill birds; subsistence farming that is land and labor intensive and subject to massive crop
loss; and bed nets that are at best 40% effective in reducing malaria.
“What right does RAN have to dictate choices for poor people, who never enjoy the safe water, plentiful food, nice homes and
modern technologies these protesters take for granted?” Uganda-native Diana Koymuhendo demands.
On April 12, the Congress of Racial Equality went head-to-head with RAN demonstrators in front of JP Morgan’s Manhattan
headquarters, doing so in order to spotlight the truth behind these eco-activist campaigns. Up to now, the bank has had the
courage and ethics to resist the radical environmentalists' pressure tactics, and recognize that the real stakeholders are poor
people whose needs, wishes, and rights are ignored and violated by the radical environmentalist groups. We hope, and the
Third World prays, that the bank will not lose its resolve.
Rainforest Action wants JP Morgan to change its business practices and standards, and give the eco-activists a principle
advisory role – even effective veto power over lending decisions. This is the shameful arrangement the World Bank agreed to
and, as Washington Post journalist Sebastian Mallaby has shown, the decision has seriously compromised its functions.
With Citigroup and Bank of America having done likewise, the cumulative effect of these capitulations could be disastrous for
poor developing countries. They need serious investment, not a few eco-tourism or eco-activist jobs. Their principle resources are
oil, timber, minerals, and hardworking people – and RAN and its colleagues are strangling their financial options, and prolonging
the Third World’s misery, malnutrition, disease, and death.
JP Morgan’s standards already meet or exceed modern social norms. That they don’t reflect RAN’s eco-centric agenda, is irrelevant.
Indeed, it is the protesters’ – and their financial backers’ – morals, practices, and standards of honesty, transparency and
accountability that merit scrutiny and reform.
RAN hectoring corporate America about ethics and human rights is like Jeffrey Dahmer lecturing ministers about the sanctity of
human life. Putting RAN on a company’s CSR advisory panel is akin to having Cuba, Sudan, and Zimbabwe on the UN Human
Rights Commission – and granting it favored tax treatment as a 501(c)(3) educational charity is equally absurd.
Why, then, have these pressure campaigns been so successful?
First, even the corporate targets don’t grasp the true nature and scope of this global war on business and development. Neither they,
the general public, nor rank-and-file environmentalists realize how harmful these eco-imperialist policies are to the world’s poorest
people.
Second, incessant attacks over many years – coupled with the minimal respect that people now have for corporations and their
leaders in the wake of recent scandals – have left too many CEOs without the courage, credibility, or Churchillian spirit to fight on.
Instead, they seek a Neville Chamberlain solution: peace for their time, feeding the crocodile and hoping it will eat them last.
Third, the public, regulators, and environmentalists often employ a monstrous double standard. Where American or European lives
are at risk – even from speculative or specious threats like arsenic in drinking water, pesticide residues on grapes or a droplet of
mercury from a broken thermometer – no law is too tough, no cost too high, to safeguard the populace. But when Third World lives
are threatened by real, immediate, life-or-death dangers that kill literally millions year after year, inaction prevails.
Fourth, few of today’s urbanites understand how our economy works, or where their consumer products, health, and prosperity
really come from: land and holes in the ground, through an often messy business that extracts and transforms basic resources into
valuable, life-giving technologies. That ignorance makes them easy prey for eco-charlatans who need recruits to harass and
intimidate companies.
Last, few are willing to challenge the envirnomentalist radicals to put their money, their lives – and their children’s lives – where
their mouths are. To go native – all the way. To live in Africa or the Amazon rainforest, among millions of mosquitoes and tsetse
flies, without benefit of electricity, refrigeration, clean water, pesticides, insect repellants, screens, medical care, or automobiles.
It’s easy to idealize and idolize Nature and indigenous lifestyles. Until one has to live that life. Only then does one realize, in the
words of Kenyan Akinye Arunga, that it means “indigenous poverty, indigenous malnutrition, indigenous disease and childhood
death.”
So CORE salutes JP Morgan Chase and CEO William Harrison for having had the courage and morality to stand up to radical
environmental activists and their lies and pressure tactics. We only hope you won’t go wobbly on us.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Policy Issues Relating to Energy, Environment,
& Natural Resources
Niger Innis is National Spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
Paul K. Driessen is Senior Policy Advisor for CORE, for the Committee for A Constructive Tomorrow, and for the Center for the
Defense of Free Enterprise. Driessen is author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, which can be obtained at
www.Eco-Imperialism.com. Email: pdriessen@cox.net --- Telephone: (703) 698-6171
Readers of Paul Driessen's book and the foregoing article by Innis and Driessen can voice their concerns by writing to: Mr. William
B. Harrison, Jr., CEO, JP Morgan Chase World Headquarters, 270 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
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