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Comment by PakG1 | Hacker News Reader

https://www.chevron.com/corporate-responsibility

Is it any wonder that I'm extremely jaded with any corporation's public speech about how they care or how they're a responsible citizen? At the end of the day, corporate incentives are driven by shareholders and most shareholders are short-term driven, and only cry out after disasters happen, never before.

Most corporations these days feel no different from tobacco companies talking about caring about consumer health.

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one solution is to use your rights as a shareholder to hold companies accountable to your long term interest.

vote your proxies.

or support year-round initiatives such as https://www.yourstake.org/petition/disclose-corporate-politi...

Norway actually does this and it's fairly effective.

The ever so slight downside to this is that, while Norway's state investment fund is vastly wealthy shareholder of many companies that can throw its weight around, I am, regrettably, not.

One solution for this is for you to give me money.

If I had shares, sure. But if I have disdain for the company, why would I want to own their shares? Hence, you have self-selecting shareholders who don't care.

So you're proposing the Ecuadorian government should've given a whole lot of money to Chevron to be able to have a say in the matter?

At this point I would be fine with them sending in their army and raiding the place. If some of the higher-ups get collateral-damaged during the raid that wouldn't be a huge loss to the world.

Amen.

> So you're proposing the Ecuadorian government should've given a whole lot of money to Chevron to be able to have a say in the matter?

Why would buying Chevron shares necessitate giving Chevron money?

Because that's literally what buying shares is?[0]: Giving money to the corporation so they can finance future endeavours. Yes, you may not buy shares from them directly but from some other gambler. Still, to be able to sell you shares they need to have given it to Chevron first.

[0] Please correct me if I'm unknowingly bullshitting here!

As you say, someone else has already given Chevron that money. Buying Chevron shares from “some other gambler” does not give Chevron money.

You'd be giving money to the company if the shares actually came from them. If you're buying on an exchange ... you're exchanging cash for shares with the counterparty almost never ever the company itself. The company is not acting as a market maker on its own stock, for example. The only way the company would benefit is if the purchase increased the ask price so that at the end of the day the price per share was higher.

I'm suggesting that if you already have ownership rights in Chevron, you should tell them to stop polluting the Amazon. Which you probably do if you're invested in any S&P500 index fund, for example, even if you're not invested directly.

Incidentally, the Government of Ecuador did buy a 25% share in the Texaco Lake Agrio oil field, via Petroecuador. And they also did raid offices at various points of the longstanding lawsuit iirc.

It's telling that nobody even mentions using your vote in the public elections.

Maybe it's mostly Iowans on HN at this time of day?

Telling of a good thing, surely? It's not ideal if the first instinct for solving every problem in society is "oh we'd better send the government in".

Help us out here... we were thinking this was about a series of court cases? Who owns the courthouse?

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