Overview

Our only chance to save the planet and take back control of our economy and political system lies in our ability to control our dollars. In a brilliant synthesis of thirty years of experience, John C. Harrington gives investors the strategies to thwart corporate domination of the earth's resources, decentralize our economy, restore democracy, tame corruption, and regain community control of our financial resources.A strong advocate of using shareholder power to push for responsible corporate practices that benefit society, Harrington warns that we are running out of time; corporate abuse of shareholders and other stakeholders runs rampant. Concerted, coordinated shareholder action is needed to challenge corporations to adopt human, labor, and environmental codes of conduct to eliminate years of egregious and abusive practices.For corporate America to change in time, a revolution--fueled by investor dollars--must come from within.

Full Product Details

9781931498968

Table of Contents

Reviews

Speaking Cash to PowerAuthor John Harrington offers tips for taking on the leviathanFrom Metro Santa CruzBy Tessa BruntonJanuary 18, 2005Self-defense manuals do not often recommend hitting an aggressor in the wallet. But in a world where megacorporations have carte blanche and suspect business practices can lead to environmental disasters, human rights abuses and corruption, concerned citizens have to hit corporations where it counts. And that means hitting below the belt at the bottom line.In John Harrington's new book The Challenge to Power: Money, Investing and Democracy (Chelsea Green Publishing; 392 pages; $40 cloth), the author provides a helpful strategy for doing just that. The strategy is called Socially Responsible Investing (SRI), a process that enables investors to make a profit while keeping their funds away from ethically dubious businesses.Harrington has plenty of experience using SRI to change the world. After founding one of the first socially responsible investment

Book Review-- The Challenge to Power: Money, Investing, and Democracy From SocialFunds.comby William BaueNovember 7, 2005John Harrington compiles voluminous evidence to diagnose what ails modern corporatocracy, and prescribes a comprehensive cure with socially responsible investing playing a key role.SocialFunds.com -- John Harrington's writing, which springs from his long career in socially responsible investing (SRI) advocating social and environmental justice, walks a fine line between the kissing cousins of deep cynicism and deep hope. His cynicism stems from his encyclopedic identification (when does he find time to read all the sources he cites?) of how corporate actions systemically and systematically advance social and environmental injustice. His hope derives from his faith that SRI, working in coalition with other instruments, can effect change by holding corporations accountable for past actions while simultaneously creating a system that more actively requires companies to benefit society and the environment in the first place. SRI can be a progressive force of change, writes Mr. Harrington in The Challenge to Power: Money, Investing, and Democracy (Chelsea Green). The goal is not simply to maximize financial return and feel good about it, or to have less guilt, but to understand that capital is a major source of power and authority in American culture. A pattern develops throughout the text where Mr. Harrington introduces a problem, illustrates it by citing and quoting primary and secondary sources, then ends the paragraph with cutting sarcasm, isolating and exposing ethical failings like a surgeon's scalpel slicing out a cancer. Halliburton disclosed in 2002 that oneof its units made 'improper' payments of $2.4 million for favorable tax treatment to a Nigerian tax consultant who turned out to be an employee of a local tax authority, Mr. Harrington writes. Gosh, Halliburton reported making a bribe! It's unclear if Halliburton received a tax deduction for this, he adds, extending the irony.Later, Mr. Harrington explains how Coca-Cola did an end-run around its own July 2003 pledge to stop marketing soda to children under 12 by replacing Coke with Swerve, a skim milk-based drink made with the same amount of sugar as Coke and double the sodium. [School] districts must wean the kids off Coke and onto Swerve--sort of like going from heroin to methadone, he states dryly.There are no sacred cows for Mr. Harrington, who founded the SRI firm Harrington Investments Inc in 1982, and co-founded Working Assets Money Market Fund (now managed by Citizens Funds) in 1983 and Progressive Asset Management in 1987. He is an equal opportunity critic of corporations, politicians, regulators, nonprofits, SRI, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and sustainability, among many other things. He calls the latter two terms captives of 'corporate-speak, ' now completely devoid of meaning, used primarily by marketers and public relations firms working for large corporations. In the next chapter he takes voluntary corporate codes of conduct to task, finding them just that: voluntary. Without a comprehensive code enacted into law and enforced by national and international laws, and an international judicial system with the authority to levy penalties and mandatory sanctions, voluntary codes are a great waste of everyone's time, including the SRI community, he says.Mr.Harrington also skewers nonprofits with progressive social and/or environmental missions that fail to put their money where their mouth is in that they lack SRI investment policies. He conducts an informal survey, asking the progressive organizations he belongs to (such as Citizen Works, Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace, Amnesty International) for copies of their goals and objectives, investment policies, and schedules of investments. Most of the groups that responded had no social or environmental investment mission statement, and when they did, it could not be determined whether it was being implemented, he states in frustration.Perhaps most importantly, Mr. Harrington exposes how free market capitalism as exercised in corporate America is essentially devoid of democracy. [O]ne of the major obstacles to shareholders improving corporate conduct [is that] shareholders have almost no power, he writes. Even if large institutional shareholders and other owners could effectively coordinate massive serious shareholder vote challenges to management, resolutions are 'advisory, ' amounting to begging; non-management nominations of board members are prohibitively expensive; and 'withhold' votes are worthless. Mr. Harrington's sarcasm and cynicism would depress readers if it seemed intended to destroy the people, institutions, and practices he criticizes; however, his goal is to redeem them from the shortcomings he identifies with such acuity. In the final chapter, he lays out a vision of SRI working in collaboration to advance corporate campaigns or coordinated, comprehensive, long-term and wide-ranging efforts to promote positive progress in corporations. What is now needed is astrategy that is a 'systems' approach that coordinates all the stakeholder strategies at one time to overload the corporate system, Mr. Harrington. Shareholder advocates will play a role, as will activists in the streets, NGOs in the community, labor in the workplace, and peasants, farmers, and workers in the fields of developing countries. Corporations will not be able to deal with campaigns coordinated at the local, state, national, and international levels, he adds. We need to act now as investors, as voters, as philanthropists, as executives, as consumers, as activists, and most important of all, as human beings concerned about the survival of our planet, our economy, and our struggling democracy.

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available