Chevron Meeting — Call for Proxies

I’m a bit late on this, but through Morgan Simon I got a notice from Amazon Watch asking for proxies for tomorrow’s Chevron meeting. I’ll attach the email below.

I expect it’s too late right now to help, but the interesting thing is the increasing ease of getting non-shareholders in the door to make the case on behalf of others. A few activists have suggested that ProxyDemocracy.org start helping with this, so we’re considering it (along with a lot of other initiatives). Let me know if you have any thoughts.

Amazon Watch is coordinating proxies for a large coalition of groups, representing communities on several different continents that have been negatively impacted by Chevron’s operations. We have speakers flying in from around the world to call on Chevron to improve its human rights and environmental commitments and live up to its talk of social responsibility. However, a handful of the proxies we were hoping to use to get these people into the meeting to speak have fallen through for various reasons. We would love your help at this late date if you can provide us with a proxy.

Specifically, we are looking for proxies for:

-Michelle Kinman, of the organization Crude Accountability, representing communities suffering pollution and human rights abuses from Chevron’s operations in Kazakhstan.

-Antonia Juhasz, author of The Tyranny of Oil and most recently the creator of an Alternative Chevron Annual Report, The True Cost of Chevron, which we will be presenting to the company and the media at the shareholder meeting to spotlight Chevron’s problematic operations around the world.

-Kenneth Jerome Davis, and Mayor Gayle McLaughlin, of Richmond, CA, where a proposed expansion to Chevron’s refinery poses a health and safety hazard to many neighboring residents, most of whom are working-class people of color.

The Chevron shareholder meeting is this Wednesday, May 27th. Thus, the situation is last-minute and urgent. The paperwork we would need from you is fairly simple – just 2 documents – but one of them requires contacting the brokerage firm or institution that manages your Chevron shares (if they are not held directly with the company), and you would have to do this first thing on Tuesday, and impress upon them the need to get you the required proxy form quickly (which they should be able to do).

If you will be able to help us with a proxy, please contact Daniel Herriges at daniel@amazonwatch.org , or by phone at 651-233-3034 (cell). (Copy Mitch Anderson at mitch@amazonwatch.org ) We can give you more detailed information about how to obtain and provide us the required forms to lend us your proxy.