Notes
World-Watch reports in its January/February 2002 issue that Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and the Journal of the American Medical Association have passed rules requiring researchers publishing in their pages to make full disclosure of their direct and indirect financial relationships with corporations. This is particularly good news to those of us who try to follow the energy and pharmaceutical industries, for example, and have always had to wonder what information was real and what was just bought and paid for. May this practice spread.
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Speaking of energy companies, the campaign to get ExxonMobil to recognize and deal with global warming, which many of our members have been involved in for years, has picked up an important new ally. Robert A. G. Monks, founder of Institutional Shareholder Services, the country’s leading corporate governance consulting firm, has filed a resolution of his own asking that the company separate the board chair and CEO roles as a way of reining in Lee Raymond who presently fills both slots. In his announcement Monks said that Raymond’s extreme positions on global warming and other issues were hurting the company’s reputation and share values. In a related matter, Amnesty International USA has filed the first shareholder resolution in its illustrious forty-year history. The target? Yeah, you guessed it. It asks ExxonMobil to adopt a "human rights policy which shall include an explicit commitment to support and uphold the principles and values contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Looks like another late lunch for Mr. Raymond on meeting day this spring.
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The annual Empowering Democracy Conference that several of our members participated in last spring in Dallas will be held in New York this year on April 13-15. All arrangements have not yet been made. Contact the SRIC office for further details.
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Jim will present a one-night course on socially responsible investing in June through the North East Independent School District Community Education Program.
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