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12.12.12
There was an oil-and-gas-investing section of the newspaper. Not a page or two; a whole, independent, pull-it-out and carry-it-around section. As you may have guessed, I rarely read this paper. But here, in this resort municipality, where personal wealth is expected, it’s the one they have for free in the lobby.
I flipped through. The pictures fell into four categories: 1. Distant photo of equipment, many pipes, derricks, nodding donkeys, large-scale installations photographed from the air or reduced to silhouettes. 2. Symbolic corporation photo, major trade centres, headquarter architecture. 3. Photo of workers, always in appropriate safety equipment, always from a semi-anonymous middle distance, and if there’s a staircase, always walking up. 4. Middle-aged white guy in a suit standing in an office/boardroom, facing the camera, except for one, taken by the newspaper (instead of issued by someone’s PR department) in which the middle-aged white guy has boldly removed his coat (or been instructed to remove his coat) and is leaning on the office windowsill, giving his side to the camera.
There was one other exception; a photo from Ecuador of a brown river winding through a tropical jungle, its banks coated in crude oil. The top of an open barrel is in the foreground and a dark-skinned man stands in the curve of the river, high boots and gloves past his elbows, streaked in oil. The caption reads that this is the continuing cleanup of a Chevron spill from 30 years ago. The article says that Ecuador, with it’s courts seeking damages from Chevron, which has since pulled out of the country, is going after assets held in Canada.
The discussion, instead of debating what should be done in this all-too-familiar situation to make the company liable in a reasonable way, described the planned Canadian legal acrobatics to safeguard the company’s assets in this country. The issue of who should be financially, morally, or environmentally responsible never came up.
Similarly, in an interview with one of the middle-aged white guys, when asked to speculate on the completion of a certain pipeline, he comments that it would happen “if logic prevails (laughs)”.
Doesn’t it seem that the manifest-destiny, march-of-progress, man’s-dominion mentality is just taken as a self-evident truth? (I say “man’s dominion” in particular, not “people’s”, and seemingly, “middle-aged white man’s”.) And if it is, so what? Is this paper only targeted at people who can call up their stock brokers and put more money into specific companies and is therefore set up only to advise them?
Helpfully, they also publish a bar graph of the industry’s biggest investors. My bank is #2. I doubt this chart was intended to produce shame, but there you go. Some infinitesimally small part of my infinitesimally small investments has funded this.
I just looked up “ethical investing” at my bank’s website and was advised, among other things, that “if you are a shareholder, remember that you have a say in the company in which you are investing. By participating in annual meetings and proxy votes, you have the power to effect change.”
Do I?
Partly the problem is that I don’t know in which companies I’m actually investing. I have “investment reports” that tell me I’m in a certain kind of generically-named fund made up of other generically-named components. And no one’s invited me to any AGMs.
I’m also advised to “speak with a financial professional”, so the next time I’m in, I just may do that, though I expect to hit the same corporate-mentality wall. Still, enough people clawing at it may make a scratch, and I can always choose to take my infinitesimally small brick out of that wall.
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