Jan 19 2009
Divestment
In reading Not on Our Watch by Don Cheadle and John Prendergast, I ran across a new word: divestment. The book is all about how ordinary people can help create political pressure to induce elected U.S. officials to pay more attention and take more against the genocide going on in the Sudan.
Divestment comes into the picture when people take their money out of invested funds that help to support companies doing business with the government of Sudan. I hadn’t thought about this at all as a possible way that I am directly contributing to the death of thousands and millions of people. I have retirement accounts. Well, I don’t have much money in them these days, but, the principle is the same: do I really want my money supporting a regime bent on wiping out people it doesn’t like?
The book lists a website: www.divestment.org that makes it incredibly simple with its screening tool to see if the mutual funds you have your money in are helping to support Sudan’s government. Not knowing much of anything about financial investing, I quickly figured out by looking at my retirement paperwork that I am invested in bonds as well. The bonds are not listed on www.divestment.org , but it refers you to another site that may be able to help. I e-mailed that site about my particular situation. I haven’t heard a response yet, but, hopefully I’ll learn some more information.
Entire public pension systems in California, dozens of universities and cities are divesting from businesses working with the Sudanese government. www.divestment.org spells out that they are careful not to list funds or companies that work to help the civilians of the country, only those that are helping feed money to the government.
Why don’t you take time to contact your financial advisor to see what’s going on with your portfolio?
