BIG BANKS' GREEN GOOF
By FRASER P.
SEITEL
CORPORATE concern about the environment is a fine thing. But there's
a growing, and dangerous, trend among corporations to jump into bed with
radical environmentalists — people who are intent on destroying the very
free-enterprise system that their new-found bedmate represents.
The latest industry group guilty of "sleeping with the enemy" is the
nation's big banks. Specifically, Citigroup, Bank of America, and, most
recently, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., have all adopted new environmental
policies, at the behest of the ardently anti-capitalist Rainforest Action
Network (RAN).
RAN claims to promote "peaceable solutions," but its tactics include
ugly protests at CEO's homes. And it was reportedly was among the prime
organizers of the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests and the
resulting riots.
Another RAN initiative stopped Burger King from buying $35 million
worth of beef from Costa Rica and Guatemala — because ranches in those
countries had once been forested. The result of that boycott, of course, was to
deprive Third World workers and countries of export income.
Adam Smith, in short, isn't exactly the Rainforest Action Network's
patron saint.
The troubling J.P. Morgan Chase-RAN alliance hits particularly close
to home for me. In the '70s and '80s, when it was known simply as The Chase
Manhattan Bank, I served as Chase's senior vice president and director of
public affairs, responsible for the bank's philanthropic giving program, which
awarded $12 million a year to a wide range of charities — from educational
institutions and hospitals, to inner-city arts groups and international
public-policy foundations.
Chase's wide philanthropic reach in those days largely reflected the
eclectic interests of our CEO, David Rockefeller. Not only did we give to
groups with vastly diverse purposes, we also donated to institutions of
different political persuasions.
We gave grants to conservative organizations, like the American
Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, as well as to more liberal
organizations, like the Brookings Institution and Planned Parenthood.
We had one overriding philanthropic intent — to award grants to
worthy groups, regardless of political philosophy. All we required was that our
grantees basically supported the private-enterprise system that allowed us the
resources to grant such meaningful philanthropic gifts.
Conversely, we refused to support any nonprofit group that rejected
what our company stood for and fundamentally opposed capitalism. Subsidizing
such groups would be akin, we felt, to "feeding the hand that bites us,"
and that's where we drew the line.
Boy, how times have changed at poor old Mother Chase.
Last month, JPMorgan Chase announced the adoption of a sweeping new
environmental policy, created in cooperation with RAN.
For months, the militant group had harangued the bank with public
demonstrations, posters and protests that extended from the company's Park
Avenue headquarters all the way to the palatial Greenwich home of CEO William
Harrison.
A year earlier, RAN had completed a similarly successful sniping of
Chase's arch rival, Citigroup, and its own Greenwich-domiciled CEO at the time,
Sandy Weill.
That earlier triumph, which took RAN four years of guerrilla warfare
to complete, included such niceties as blockading branches, "crashing"
Citigroup community parades, and distributing "Wanted" posters with Weill's
picture to Greenwich grocery stores.
Apparently, Harrison wasn't interested in seeing his likeness
overlooking the frozen vegetables. So Chase folded meekly — after
demonstrations at Chase branches and at its annual meeting — to RAN's
demands.
Among the concessions to which JPMorgan Chase capitulated are new
standards tying carbon-dioxide emissions to loans for power plants, new
strictures on loans for energy development and logging, and new "no go"
criteria to protect biodiversity and critical habitats.
What Chase's new environmental policy failed to address was what the
bank would do if its interpretation of such concepts as "endangered
conservation values" or "adversely impacting a critical natural habitat"
differs materially from the viewpoint of its friends at RAN.
Nor did the company speculate on what might happen when other
similarly "well-meaning" advocacy groups approach JPMorgan Chase to ensure that
their own chosen policies of societal improvement are applied to the way the
bank does business.
Fraser P. Seitel, managing partner of Emerald Partners
communications consultancy, is author of "The Practice of Public
Relations," now in its ninth edition.