Fidelity Investments: Against Genocide to the Minimum Extent Required by Law

[l33tminion]

The current shareholder meeting for Fidelity includes a proposal for the board to implement procedures to avoid investing in companies complicit in genocide. The proposal is pretty straightforward and very minimal:

RESOLVED

Comments

[maniacx]

We don't know each other, but I received the same proposal from Fidelity and wrote a similar blog post regarding this. A friend of mine happened to find your blog entry as well.

I've started contacting my local print and TV media and notified Amnesty International, the Human Rights Watch, and Save Darfur regarding this. I have lower expectations for results from print/TV media, but it's my hope as well that this will gain traction from blogs, Facebook, and similar media. I've contacted several of my more investment-minded friends to let them know about this just in case they hadn't heard.

Thanks for speaking out about this.

[l33tminion]

Any luck with any of those venues? I tried a few leads, but haven't heard much back.

[maniacx]

I have no news on this front, unfortunately. A friend and I started calling local media around five on Friday, which is when they start their evening news cycle. I spoke with the local CBS affiliate and one of Dallas's papers, but since I did so over the weekend I doubt anyone's even read my e-mails yet.

I'm calling Amnesty tomorrow because I'm not entirely sure they have an appropriate e-mail address on their website to handle this.

[l33tminion]

Possibly useful links:

The WSJ has a story on the proposal.

The effort behind the proposal is evidently spearheaded by Investors Against Genocide, I'm going to look into donating.

Evidently, the board of Fidelity tried to block the proposal entirely, but the SEC required them to do a shareholder vote.

[maniacx]

I found that same Investors Against Genocide page through a friend, actually.

I'm speaking with my employer's HR department too, and planning to refer an HR representative to that website. I've considered printing off a batch of flyers and asking some local businesses if I could hang them, but I'm not sure how much good it would do to have less targeted "advertising", for lack of a better word.