Does ‘Laudato Si’ Lead Inevitably to Fossil Fuel Divestment?

The unfortunate fallout of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si continues apace. One wishes the pontiff would’ve released it in four separate installments to avoid misinterpretation and seeming – to this reader, at least – contradictions throughout a somewhat unwieldy 180-some pages in which he alternately praises and disparages human technological improvements over the past two centuries. Continue Reading...

Religious Activists Push Back Against ‘Blunt Instrument’ of Fossil Fuels Divestment

Your faithful correspondent last week exposed the fossil-fuel divestment endgame of religious shareholder activists. As You Sow President Danielle Fugere sees her group’s activities as awareness-raising exercises for climate change, but AYS’s alignment with environmentalist and divestment firebrand Naomi Klein suggests they’d settle for nothing less than nationalizing oil companies. Continue Reading...

ICCR Working Inside Progressive Bubble

“A little older, a little more confused,” the late Dennis Hopper once intoned. One month into 2014, the same could be said for this writer. After all, what could be more confusing than members of the religious community employed as willing conspirators in the great organized labor gambit to stifle corporate political speech? Continue Reading...

ICCR’s 2013 Proxy Follies

As 2013 draws to a close, it’s time to inventory the year’s proxy resolutions introduced by the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. ICCR, a group purportedly acting on religious principles and faith, is actually nothing more than a shareholder activist group engaged in the advancement of leftist causes at the expense of their fellow shareholders and the world’s poorest. Continue Reading...

‘Dark Money’ – A Shaggy Dog Story

“Dark money” sounds menacing and foreboding – a financial nomenclature suggestive of gothic masterpieces like “The Raven” and “The Black Cat.” Whereas Poe’s tales actually contain sinister elements, the phrase dark money is employed by activist shareholders much like the villains of countless “Scooby Doo” cartoons devised illusory ghosts, werewolves and vampires. Continue Reading...

ICCR Shareholders vs. World Hunger

Finding solutions for feeding the world’s poorest is about as non-controversial a mission as you could imagine for someone pursuing a religious vocation. Yet, the investors belonging to the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility put politicized science ahead of that mission in their opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Continue Reading...

How Far Does Faith-Based ‘Shareholder Right to Know’ Go?

On January 31, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility issued a press release, announcing the organization’s “2013 Proxy Resolutions and Voting Guide.” A quick read of the release and ancillary materials, however, reveals that these resolutions have very little to do with issues of religious faith and everything to do with the progressive political agenda. Continue Reading...