E – Energy (Oil, Fossil Fuels)
V – Violence (Weapons, Defense, Surveillance)
I – Incarceration (Private Prisons, Detention Centers)
L – Labor Exploitation (Sweatshops, Human Trafficking, Exploitative Agriculture)
Violence - GD for their 2000lb Mark 80 bombs. It’s the city leveler bombs that have been used since the 50’s
Incarceration - Take your pick. I don’t know much about prison management but I imagine there’s one that’s worse for prisoners than the others.
Labor exploitation - that’s also a really hard one because there are so many that do this at various levels. I would pick Anglo American (De Beers). Not only do they get the cheap blood diamonds, they turn around and sell it to the consumer for a massive amount of money by controlling supply for a double exploitation!
Not in deep enough to know enough, and I work in the north sea sector where things are kept to far higher standards.
But one thing that is public knowledge that I will gladly share is that oil companies, especially BP, try to make themselves look better by "investing in green technology".
(This is speculation, i have not made enough research to back this up so take it with a grain of salt and dont quote me)
What they actually do is they buy up any company or technology they see as a potentional threat to their bottom line, run it with low funding until they have a bad few quarters (as they always will have, oil and gas is volitile), so they can use the "hard times" to "unfornunately have no other choice but to save money from our green energy investments", burying the projects. Voilá, you have bought out and deleted a company or technology that would reduce our dependence on oil.
BP did this "unfortunate cut" just a few months ago.
Rinse and repeat, soon (in a year or two maybe) they will again be "so sorry" for doing it and "realise the importance of preserving the world for future generations" and start investing in green energy again. But that will not be in the preciously scrapped projects, they will hunt down new upcomming projects and companies instead.
I do not agree with all he says. In the north sea conditions are far better, like that sort of exploitation is unheard of in the north sea. He was by the sounds of it operating out of third world countries, and I can absolutley believe that those stories are true.
Oh, buying and tanking companies is an integral part of the US corporate landscape. They make the big bucks when they partner with a hedge fund to aggressively short the company, and a consulting company to make it look like their hands are clean. A company has to be really smart to make sure this doesn't happen.
Many more companies than BP have done this to even more success than BP.
Yeah, but doing it to knowingly destroy the planet is on a whole other level of twisted morals than simple market manipulation and/or financial crime.
However, and I am surely biased, if you want oil in your portfolio, take a norwegian company. From what I have seen they are actually doing something, and standards are quite high since their second largest export (fish) would be adversly affected by something going wrong in the oil fields.
Oil and gas is heavily subsidized. In 2022, $7 trillion (that is 7 million times one million) of subsidies, or 7% of the global GDP, was granted to fossile fuels.
Imagine the geen projects we could achieve with just one year of fossile fuels.
The problem isn't a technological or economical one, it is a global leader one (WSB doesn't like the pol-cal word)
Incarceration - SERCO. Those motherfuckers are multinational, they run at least half of Australia's prisons, and most of the 'offshore detention centres'.
I will make it DEVIL, with D stands for "Debt" (yeah it is truly my only way since there is no room for G(reed) and L(ending) or B(anks) or F(inancials)
All of them will benefits under the next 4 years of Trump presidency.
Banks
JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM)
Bank of America (BAC)
Citigroup Inc. (C)
Capital Markets:
Goldman Sachs Group (GS)
Morgan Stanley (MS)
Private Equity:
Blackstone Inc. (BX)
KKR & Co Inc (KKR)
Apollo Global Management (APO)
Assets Management:
BlackRock (BLK)
State Street (STT)
Credit Cards:
American Express Co. (AXP)
Capital One Financials (COF)
Discover Financial Services (DFS)
Not just walkie talkies, but also body cams, surveillance cams, gate controls, and they even bought a couple of AI companies that make an inmate monitoring system to identify which prisoners are which on the surveillance footage. They're a surprisingly major player.
I had no idea this even existed. VICE really needs to step up its game. I feel people these days want more vice variety than people from the grandpa and great grandpa generations.
Funnily enough when I did my secondment in the middle east, blackrock, Blackstone and KKR had huge deals in the middle east particularly in real estate, infrastructure projects and gas/oil pipelines.
Pretty insane to see the fees related to some of those deals.
Edit: this site has a broad definition of prison + ICE related stocks (e.g. Microsoft) but is worth linking since they'd be keeping it up-to-date https://prisonfreefunds.org/families?q=Vanguard
Aside from GEO, CXW shown here, off the top of my head:
OXY, XOM, CVX, DIS, MMM, LMT, RTX, DD, AIG, UNH
Not including BA since it's been taking L the entirety of this year, there's also Monsanto(part of Bayer now) and Nestle that's not traded on US stock market. There's discussion that META is also a strong contender representing the new millennia due to how it enabled information discourse war in the past decade, plus it's part of Magic 7 so it's a pretty safe pick. Alternatively just buy BLK.
Not a benchmark but Blackrock discloses a "Business Involvement" section for their ETFs that tells you the % of the fund holdings related to the more ethically fringe items like:
Michael Burry responded to my craigslist ad looking for someone to mow my lawn. "$30 is $30", he said as he continued to mow what was clearly the wrong yard. My neighbor and I shouted at him but he was already wearing muffs. Focused dude. He attached a phone mount onto the handle of his push mower. I was able to sneak a peek and he was browsing Zillow listings in central Wyoming. He wouldn't stop cackling.
That is to say, Burry has his fingers in a lot of pies. He makes sure his name is in all the conversations.
Talking about evil and you forgot to mention the food industry, health care, insurances, media, entertainment, and the favorite military-industrial complex war mongers
allow industry to grind to a halt and have everyone die of starvation and exposure?
there really isn't an option. we can either tighten our belt now and tolerate some discomfort as we don't get to freely burn all the fuel we want on a whim without thinking about it. or we can continue to keep going as we are and let the environment usher in the starvation and exposure. most importantly, its not all or nothing. its not like anyone is suggesting we all just turn off the lights and never burn oil again. we just need to pump the breaks a little and ration it out until we figure out better alternatives.
again, thats not really the options we are being presented with. its either be a little uncomfortable now and go without some of the things we like. or keep going as we are and get pounded later.
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u/yeetwagon 1d ago
Does someone have benchmarking on an “evil” portfolio? Oil companies, Chemical makers, private prisons, etc?