Student activism is challenging university endowments : The Indicator from Planet Money : NPR
MA: So those are some of the practical obstacles standing in the way of divestment. But let’s just put that aside for a second and assume that some protesters successfully convince their schools to divest from certain companies. How effective might that be in accomplishing the larger goal of these protests? For instance, a permanent cease-fire.
We put that question to Witold Henisz. He’s a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studied how social movements and shareholder activism affect companies. And he says if a divestment campaign is simply about taking a moral stance or raising awareness around an issue, it can be effective.
WITOLD HENISZ: Divestment can be part of constructing a broader social and political movement. Maybe the protests build pressure against politicians, for voters, for a wide range of companies, not just those targeted by divestment, and they change the way we think about an issue.
WOODS: But if the goal is to directly pressure companies and sometimes then governments into changing their behavior, Witold says research on divestment campaigns from the past few decades suggests they can actually be counterproductive.
HENISZ: Imagine you care really deeply about something a company is doing and you want the company to change. If you sell your shares or if you force someone to sell their shares who cares about the issue, by definition, the person who buys the shares, the person who’s on the other end of the transaction cares less.
WOODS: Witold says this applies even to those fossil fuel divestment campaigns we mentioned earlier.
HENISZ: If the university and many other institutions who cared about the climate transition sold their shares, who would buy it? Who would buy the shares? Maybe the Saudi government or maybe the Russian government or maybe the Koch Brothers. Should we feel better about that?
If you sell your shares or if you force someone to sell their shares who cares about the issue, by definition, the person who buys the shares, the person who’s on the other end of the transaction cares less.
Which is why the goal is also to make the pool of buyers dry up. Dipshit.
Not to mention that the market getting flooded with shares tanks the value which turns off investors.
Aquaman will buy the shares!
NPR is a joke. BDS worked on South African Apartheid, and if it wasn’t a massive threat to the US-Israel money laundering/Imperial-Client relationship, so many states wouldn’t have banned even advocating for it in the US.
If it was actually useless, outlets like NPR would be pumping out articles in support of it
This is the correct answer
The punchline is still is making me laugh even though it’s been 30+ minutes since I posted.
Who would buy the shares? Maybe the Saudi government or maybe the Russian government or maybe the Koch Brothers. Should we feel better about that?
I can’t believe that’s a real thing somebody said on NPR. I can’t stomach listening to NPR but maybe I need to start hate-reading transcripts.
It’s very cute when Americans act like Saudi Arabia is their enemy lol
Or maybe the Walton family?
https://www.npr.org/about-npr/1226359603/npr-receives-grant-from-the-walton-family-foundation
“Walmart and unionization has been in the news recently and we here on Planet Walmart… My goodness.”
“Was that a Freudian slip?!”
Annoyed but pretending hard to be enjoying the situation "We here on Planet Money…
Damn, it’s like talking to my mom
“Divesting doesn’t work”
Okay you all heard the liberals, guess the students have to do terrorism.
That’s why I have all my money in HAMAS bonds.
This is just placid lib speak for “If we don’t do it someone else will”, bloodlessly evil as usual
Real energy.
I’m going to do entryism into Raytheon
This is a good tactic iam a genius
State-affiliated media
“Counterproductive” is the liberal’s second favourite word, after “complicated”
Counterproductive
I can’t believe I’ve entirely neglected that word in my parodies.
“Look, the situation in Israel is complicated and it goes back thousands of years. And protesting against Gaza is counterproductive. Do you really want the republicans and TFG to win big in the elections?”
As a climate change activist I have no choice but to plow every dollar I have into exxon mobil shares. I wake up every day at 5 am and work myself to the bone for this
If divestment were counterproductive then Israel would be pursuing it as “counterproductive” for leftists benefits Israel.
absolute fucking nerd shit
this is a great example of the adage that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail
Distinguished researcher has no idea how stocks work, pretends to be expert to tut-tut genocide opponents anyways.
“Push your own communities to adopt smarter practices. Invest. Divest.”