Posted on 01/16/2008 7:45:36 AM PST by Seaside
A conservative Christian pastor plans to launch a high-profile campaign Tuesday urging religious followers to load up on Microsoft Corp. stock, in an attempt to force the company to "stop financing ungodly ventures."
The Rev. Ken Hutcherson, who leads Antioch Bible Church in Microsoft's hometown of Redmond, says that he will create a global and powerful group to promote traditional family values, including marriage exclusively between a man and a woman.
Hutcherson, joined by some of the country's most influential Christian leaders, has created a new organization, AGN Financial Network, to finance the effort. The worldwide venture asks people to buy three shares of company stock and donate one to AGN. Its Web site tells visitors, "You have the power to change the world," and contains tips on how to open a brokerage account. Among the listed supporters are Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention and religious pundit Gary Bauer.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattlepi.nwsource.com ...
Seems that buying MSFT would enrich the owners of MSFT.
When you buy common stock, the transaction has nothing to do with the originating company. Unless stock is being freshly issued as in an IPO, stock is bought and sold in a secondary market and the company never sees or knows about the transaction......assuming normal investor-sized blocks of shares or even hundreds and hundreds of ind. investor-sized blocks. Compared to institutional-sized trading and even more so on a giant like MSFT, individuals are not even figurative grains of sand on a beach.
Or boycott PC sellers who offer only systems with MS software preinstalled.
Exactly. Lets’ do the math on this. Microsoft’s market cap is $307 Billion. Assuming a bunch of people following this advice doesn’t drive the stock price higher to get to say 10% ownership would take $30 billion dollars. That’s a lot of scratch. Lets say 1 million Christians sign up for this crusade. That would require them to spend $3,000 each.
I think the pastor needs to get more specific about what his goals, in percnet are. Like a 700 Club telathon. It is possible he could achieve a 10% ownership, have everyone vote him a proxy and get the opportunity to address the board or shareholders meeting.
For about $150 billion he could get control. Probably not enough people. Say he could get 10 million Christians to go along. $15,000 each. Too big, not going to happen.
Seems like he’s trying to create something like a “distributed hedge fund” to control one of the largest companies on the planet.
He’s an idiot.
He’s telling people to invest a relatively large chunk of change toward a goal that has zero chance of success.
How silly and futile.
“stop financing ungodly ventures.”
I know Vista was bad, but WOW!!
Asking his supporters to switch to Linux, then send a letter to MS explaining why, would likely have more effect on the company’s policies.
This was all discussed last week when this story came out (search, people!), and the pastor's real goal is made explicit later in the story:
When asked whether the new initiative is a ploy to make money for his church, Hutcherson said, "Absolutely."
Plus, the children of people who hold such views are going to crash and burn once they hit the workforce: if you are looking for a well paid corporate job – which is predominately and increasingly where the well paid jobs are in this economy – and you have a problem working with homosexuals, you are out the door so fast your head will spin.
It’s just all strange to me — making investments and taking jobs based on sexual orientation of a company or its policies seems a bit odd.
Setting a good example is a lot cheaper and more effective. Genuinely spiritual people don't waste an iota of time trying to "fix" the world. But self-aggrandizing hucksters sure do.
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