State of Florida Owns 1/200 of all British Petroleum Stock!

Have you heard the news? The State of Florida owns 1/200 of all BP stock.

The story was reported by the Palm Beach Post. Last month. See below. I am unable to find this story on the website of the St. Augustine Record. There are few references to it anywhere on the Internet.

Government owning stock in polluters and oligopolists is a stench in the nostrils of our Nation and would have made our Founding Fathers sick at heart.

It's bad enough when government contractors pollute, as we reported they did in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the world's largest mercury pollution event took place in secrecy, by Union Carbide, until our FOIA request got it declassified May 17, 1983. The U.S. Department of Energy (and predecessor agencies) was an accomplice, winking at Union Carbide's dumping 4.2 million pounds of mercury into creeks and groundwater (without warning signs or fences) and into workers' lungs and brains (without respirators, violating the standard of care).

But when governments own stock in corporate criminal enterprises like BP, it's worse than merely contracting with corporate criminal enterprises (like Union Carbide).

What is the answer?

Should governments invest in the stock market, which is a gigantic Ponzi scheme?

Let governments invest safely, e.g., in U.S. Treasury bills, and not in stocks of polluters, price-fixers, monopolists, labor-baiters, union-busters, fraudfeasors and other riffraff like British Petroleum.

Two decades ago, governments were divesting their investments in South Africa.

Today, we need to divest our shares in BP. Or should we?

Or do need to vote that stock for reforms?

With 1/200 of BP owned by the State of Florida, our State could (until divestiture is prudent) draw up and propose shareholder resolutions aimed at transforming a dysfunctional management culture and punishing wrongdoers.

Let one shareholder resolution be about not paying for criminal defense lawyers (like DAN GELBER) to defend BP.

Let another shareholder resolution be about disclosing all documents on lobbying Scottish officials for the release of the convicted murderer found guilty in the 1988 Pan Am 103 Lockerbie bombing.

Let another shareholder resolution be about antitrust conspiracies since the 1928 meeting at Achnacarry Castle, in Scotland.

So Floridians own BP? Might as well make the most of it, until divestiture.