top of page
    • Jan 6
    • 2 min read

Investment - The Real Voting System



Investing is a great way to make passive income, to make your money work for you. Most of us are investing, whether we know it or not. It isn’t just those who buy and sell stocks, or crypto, or other financial tools. If you have super, you are investing. 


Investing is also a great way to change the landscape of the economy and influence society’s future. By providing capital to businesses you are providing power and promoting their growth. This can, in some cases, be a good thing. For example, investment into businesses working on renewable energy technologies can lead to more research and development, and more rapid advancement. 


When you invest, you send a message. You tell the company that you have given your hard earned money to that they are doing a great job and that they should keep going - full steam ahead. You also implicitly suggest that other companies should be more like the one you gave money to, that they are doing something right which deserves attention and imitation. 





So when you invest in companies like National Australia Bank for example, you tell them that it is okay to harass, forcibly remove, prosecute, and wage war against villagers in Canada in order to build a non-essential gas pipeline. Or when you invest in Shell, you tell them that it’s totally fine to pay off local militias to murder, rape, and torture local civilians for decades in order to procure oil for profit. Or when you invest in JP Morgan Chase, you tell them that fraud in the sale of mortgage backed securities, years of manipulation and fraud in the precious metals market, and that more than 80 major legal actions, which continue to increase in frequency, are business as usual.  


Investing is like voting, and with increasing privatisation and deregulation our society looks less like a democracy and more like a ‘corporatocracy.’ As a result, choosing where to invest, and who to invest with, could soon mean much more for society’s future than writing a name or number on a piece of paper every couple of years.


You have the power to make change. So vote wisely with your money.




References


Amnesty International on Shell’s Human Rights Abuses in the 1990s 


Platform’s Report on Human Rights Abuses by Shell in the Niger Delta


Better Markets Report on JP Morgan Chase’s Legal Actions


Backers for the Canadian Coastal Gaslink Pipeline 

Comments
Share Your ThoughtsBe the first to write a comment.
bottom of page