Portland Creates Socially Responsible Investment Committee

– OPB

Portland City Council voted Wednesday to establish a new committee to make sure the city’s investments are socially responsible.

The committee will consider a half-dozen issues when making that decision.  They include labor practices, environmental impacts, health impacts (for example, a weapons producer might have harmful effects on health) corporate ethics, extreme tax avoidance, and disruptive market dominance…

There is concern that limiting the city’s investment choices could reduce earnings on those sums.

We respond & Your Comments

We suggest some questions that these “socially responsible” geniuses on the Portland City Council should consider before proceeding with this harebrained plan:

What’s their mission? To raise money to fund police and pave streets or to ram their personal preferences down citizens’ throats?

Who says what is/isn’t socially responsible? Some think oil companies aren’t. Others believe that the millions of jobs they create and the gas they supply to get people to them makes them responsible;

If returns on their oh-so-pious investments do “reduce earnings”, will they just respond “Yeah, we know we have to close police substations, but we’ll close them and fire 50 cops in a ‘socially responsible’ way”?

If these clowns are investing their own money they’re welcome to put it into Solyndra or generators powered by hamsters on wheels. But they’re not. They’re investing money confiscated from Portlanders who earned it. Their job is simply to legally return the highest possible profits.

Frankly, we doubt they’d recognize “disruptive market dominance” if it bit them on the behind.

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