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Escape velocity

Drinking alcohol isn't forbidden by Scripture, and neither is smoking or gambling, and yet we can say with some statistical assurance that all three are inclined to bring eventual misery to the adherent, if not more often to family and friends. That's what drives those creedal prohibitions as expressed by Southern Baptists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others. It isn't the direct proscription as cited in Scripture, but the aftermath of bad loyalty, the unintended consequences which would lead us to violate our tradition's prescriptions for a successful walk with God. I propose that, all things being equal, investing in a publicly traded corporation is an act that also has consequences which would lead us into a life not sought for us by Christ.

I have to figure out how to get my TIAA-CREF retirement funds out of stocks and bonds altogether. It's going to be tricky. And how is it even possible when the whole retirement system orbits around the dense star of stock and bond? Stocks are direct investments in a publicly traded company; bonds are IOUs to governments, municipalities, corporations, and the like. As soon as my allocation dollars go into the retirement fund, they get pulled by the gravitational attraction of the corporation. Yesterday I received my CREF 2005 Annual Report with the usual financial statements and summary portfolios of the fund's investments. They still don't have as an option for me any opportunity to move assets within the Social Choice Account to investments in low-income area community development or in social venture capital for companies that pioneer socially responsible products/services.¹ The peace studies fellows at Manchester College are still trying to make changes to TIAA-CREF's choices through their social choice program at Make TIAA-CREF Ethical, but many problems remain with the screening criteria for social choice.

Here's one painful example. McDonald's Corporation is one of TIAA-CREF's social-choice stocks in EATING AND DRINKING PLACES. A good stock investment? No doubt. A good choice for the Social Choice Account? Not at all, especially if you read the results of the six-year Greenpeace study, published on Thursday:

And yet the point isn't the failure of my retirement fund to put my money into a progressive stock, but the failure of our capitalist system to prevent the formation of predatory companies which must be successful as amoral legal beings. Their sole existence is to create profit for shareholders. If we can't grow our investment dollars without feeding these predators, we should be putting our money directly into growing small businesses. I don't yet know of a better way to escape the gravitational pull of the corporation.³

1.  See TIAA-CREF: "The CREF Social Choice Account is a balanced fund, holding stocks, bonds and money market instruments issued by companies included in the Russell 3000® Index that pass two sets of social screens: First, the account excludes companies that derive any revenues from the manufacture of alcohol or tobacco products, or from gambling; companies that derive significant revenues from producing military weapons; and electric utilities with interests in nuclear power plants. Second, the remaining companies are evaluated and selected based on the following: respect for the natural environment; strong charitable giving and employee benefits programs; the presence of women and minorities in leadership positions; quality products and leadership in research and development; and the payment of fair wages and protection of the environment where they operate. Concerns identified in one area will not automatically eliminate the company from the portfolio."
2.  The Greenpeace report is frightening. See "We're Trashin' It: How McDonald's Is Eating up the Amazon," in the Greenpeace Amazon Soya Crime File, April 6, 2006. The longer Greenpeace study, Eating Up the Amazon, reported on April 6, 2006, illustrates the crisis in the soya trade by looking at two key global players, Cargill in the Amazon and McDonald's in Europe: "We document the path taken by soya from illegally cleared farms, sometimes with the use of slave labour, to Cargill and its competitors, through the ports, processors and meat producers of Europe, and finally into the Chicken McNuggets sold under the golden arches across the continent." See also the Greenpeace news release and pertinent news story in the Guardian, April 6, 2006.
3.  James K. Galbraith has a nice essay on "Taming Predatory Capitalism" in the Nation, April 17, 2006.

Related tags: McAmazon, Greenpeace

So it's okay to pay illegal aliens low wages?

At the root of the Bush administration's call for a temporary worker program is the desire on the part of corporate and agribusiness giants to maintain large profits by paying below-minimum-wage, non-living, sub-subsistence wages to their workers. This is really the stuff of outsourcing, and why corporations (such as Wal-Mart, for example) send their labor dollars to countries (Mexico, China, India, Pakistan ...) where people are willing work for these miserable wages, even under miserable working conditions.

Maybe we should call the guest-worker program retrosourcing. It's not the same thing as outsourcing—but its evil twin. Retrosourcing takes the same corrupt idea, shifts the geographic scenario, and puts it smack in the middle of America. It stuffs the illegal sweatshop into the alembic of Congress and out comes a kind of legal sweatshop. And we're actually helping people at the same time! If we can't bring bad pay and bad working conditions to the Mexicans, we'll actually bring the Mexicans here for the bad pay and the bad working conditions!¹

This is not an immigration problem, not an issue that presses for immigration reform, but a real problem artificially created by corporate America's failure to pay workers a living wage.²

1.  Retrosourcing is not the same as "insourcing," in which foreign companies bring their investments and employment to the United States. Over at VDARE, Joe Guzzardi has a tidy essay on a the false hope of cheap labor and some history of California's failed bracero program. See "Cheap Labor" - Fifty Years of Deception.
2.  The living wage is not the same thing as minimum wage. See the Economic Policy Institute's Living Wage Issue Guide, which is also available as a PDF document. See also the President's radio address, March 25, 2006, on the temporary worker program.

New Orleans is slip sliding away

As if things aren't bad enough for Louisiana, Roy Dokka of the Center for GeoInformatics and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, is reporting in the April issue of Geology that New Orleans is quietly sliding off into the Gulf of Mexico.

Beneath the asphalt, cement, and buildings that make up the southern portion of modern Louisiana is just a bed of deposited sediment, a mud cocktail of peat, clay, and sand, all of which is slowly sinking far below the man-made levee system designed to protect this deepening basin from flooding. Running through eastern New Orleans is a geologic fault line called the Michoud Fault, and it's the movement of this fault, says Dokka, that is causing the city not only to sink but also to slide.¹ That's certainly no better news than the report by the Bush administration's Gulf Coast rebuilding coordinator, Don Powell, that a full recovery from Hurricane Katrina may take New Orleans as much as 25 years to achieve.²

1.  Using surveying measurements collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) between 1955 and 2005, Dokka's study reports that tectonic fault movements may account for 73% and 50% of the total subsidence (i.e., sinking) during the intervals 1969-1971 and 1971-1977, respectively. Dokka's abstract is at the Geology website; see also the related abstract at the 2006 UNAVCO Science Workshop. The news story about Dokka's research can be found in Discovery News, March 31, 2006; the Christian Science Monitor, March 31, 2006; and ScienceNOW Daily News, March 28, 2006.
2.  See USA Today, March 30, 2006.