Jamie Dimon, the CEO of banking giant JP Morgan Chase, wants you to believe that his bank is a good corporate citizen, something Dimon widely advertises in interviews and on his corporate website. The truth is that Dimon’s company is one of the largest investors in mountaintop-removal coal mining, funding corporate miscreants like Massey, Arch and International Coal Group — something that no truly conscientious corporate citizen would ever allow.
While Dimon has signed impressive-sounding missives like the Climate Principles and Equator Principles and his bank participates in the Northeast Business Climate Collaborative and the United Nations Environmental Programme Finance Initiative, these documents are just paper. In reality, Dimon and Chase continue to profit from investing in companies like Massey Energy, which has been fined $30 million for violating the Clean Water Act at least 4,500 times while they destroy the Appalachian Mountains — one of the world’s most biodiverse regions — and bury communities in tons of rubble while poisoning their drinking water. Any social and environmental corporate responsibility program worth its salt should not and cannot allow investments of this perverse nature.
The truth is that if Dimon wants to live up to his title as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, he should invest his corporation’s wealth in a clean, safe and renewable future — and leave the coal industry in the dust, where they belong.