Greenpeace wants your money. In any form at all. It accepts cash donations, hopes to be remembered in your will (perhaps via a gift of real estate), and explains how you can transfer stocks, bonds and mutual funds into its coffers.
The latter idea raises some fascinating questions. Greenpeace spends its time targeting corporate entities. From petroleum companies to tuna canners, from candy bar manufacturers to Facebook, it rarely has anything good to say about corporations. In the comic-book world inhabited by youthful Greenpeace activists, corporations are evil-doers out to destroy the planet.
Isn’t it odd, then, that Greenpeace is encouraging people to gift it with corporate stocks? Isn’t it odder still that this 2-page PDF brochure devoted to questions and answers contains no suggestion that there are some stocks it won’t accept.
It appears Greenpeace is happy to receive donations of any stock, from any corporation – no matter how environmentally destructive it considers that corporation to be. Nor does Greenpeace tell potential donors what it does with these stocks once it acquires them.
Does Greenpeace collect dividends from the same corporations it publicly trashes? Can an organization that claims to be independent of corporations nevertheless own a significant stock portfolio? Hmm.
As to how Greenpeace spends the multi-millions it raises, so glad you asked. It builds arks. As in Noah. As in plural. One was on a Turkish mountain. Another was unveiled in downtown Brussels.
