Financial Post -- Peter Foster: Milton’s loophole
Green groups are not guardians of the planet, they are shakedown artists.,
June 21st, 2011
Excerpted from The Financial Post:
In fact, a new “iron fist” has emerged in the intervening period to “curb the market.” It belongs not to bureaucrats but to radical environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs), who have achieved a stunning amount of boardroom influence. They have done this, paradoxically, by learning from Prof. Friedman, and in particular by exploiting what might be called “Milton’s loophole.”
Prof. Friedman said that part of an executive’s role, beyond his primary task of serving shareholders, was to conform to “the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical customs.”
What ENGOs learned was this: If you want to bring corporations to heel, work on those “ethical customs,” which is precisely what they have done by helping make the environment a “moral issue.”
There is not a company on Earth that now fails to pay obeisance to the essentially socialist notion of “sustainable development” (SD), which implies that markets need to be “curbed” if we are not to run out of resources and/or destroy the planet. Corporations keen to achieve their CSR and SD badges have, meanwhile, found themselves cast as mouthpieces for radical environmentalism.
A classic example appeared in a recent ad in USA Today. The ad features the names of both California-based grocery chain Trader Joe’s and ENGO ForestEthics, whose most notorious scalp was Victoria’s Secret, which it bullied into stopping using “virgin fiber” for its lingerie catalogues.” The ad features a shot of a caribou in a sylvan setting and declares:
- Some of Trader Joe’s best values aren’t found on its shelves. For example, the commitment to avoid shipping products with extremely toxic and dirty fuels from places like Canada’s Tar Sands. Transporting all of the food and products that we buy to the shelves of our local stores consumes an enormous amount of energy. And all shipping fuels, i.e., gasoline and diesel, are not equal. In fact, the Tar Sands are a source of extreme energy that is used to make shipping fuels — giant strip mines visible from space are used to produce a synthetic form of oil that destroys forests, endangers wildlife, including endangered caribou, and has a higher toxic and global warming footprint than traditional oil. Worse still, U.S. and Canadian communities are facing health threats because of toxic pollution from Tar Sands operations, including pipelines and refineries. All of which are great reasons to avoid the Tar Sands if you are a values driven company. Trader Joe’s joins nearly 20 other major companies who similarly have distanced themselves from Canada’s Tar Sands. That’s a good market trend for the planet.
Download the Trader Joe's ad we placed in USA Today >>
