The Devil’s Company
I’ve invested my retirement monies in several mutual funds. I have a fairly balanced, diversified portfolio and I believe (hope?) that I have accumulated enough for an eventual retirement. I spent a considerable amount of time choosing the funds, looking for the right mix of safety and growth.
I may have looked at the individual holdings within each fund at the time of my initial investment, but I really don’t remember the specifics. Once I made the choices, I stopped studying them. I looked at them generally to see how well each was doing, but I no longer reviewed them in great detail. I am a long-range investor and am not terribly interested in daily blips, whether up or down.
I did, however, recently take a closer look at the annual report from one of the funds. It listed each of the investments in the fund. To my surprise, I discovered that I am an owner of Halliburton!
Granted, I don’t own much. I have some shares in a mutual fund which has some shares in Halliburton. It is a multi-billion dollar company, so my ownership is infinitesimal.
Still, I am more than a bit distressed to learn this. Halliburton is one of those companies I knew little, if anything about, until the 2000 presidential election. Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton until he resigned to run for vice-president. Dick Cheney is, I believe, the devil.
I’ve heard a lot about Halliburton since the election and I don’t like anything that I’ve heard. The company has a long history of gouging American taxpayers. It is making a fortune in Iraq, which may very well be why we went to war in the first place.
Check out The World According to Halliburton and Haliburton Watch. Halliburton’s is a world of no-bid government contracts, federal subsidies, tax havens, corporate welfare and war profiteering. It was a supplier to Saddam Hussein in Iraq when Cheney was CEO. These are not just left wing musings, but the findings of Pentagon reports and federal audits. (2019 update: I no longer have a link to The World According to Halliburton, but corruption information is easy to find.)
Our vice president continues to receive compensation from Halliburton. His 2004 income tax return, released on April 15th, declared $194,852 in deferred compensation from Haliburton. We can make a reasonable guess as to who will run Halliburton when his term of office is over.
The discovery that I own, at least indirectly, shares in Halliburton is a bit distressing. On the one hand, I need to build a safe, secure and healthy retirement fund. There are many things I want to be doing in my 60s, 70s and beyond, and working is not one of them.
On the other hand, how can I in good conscious invest in Halliburton? Shouldn’t I put my money where my mouth is (and where my heart is)? Am I going to be part of the problem or part of the solution?
The answer might be SRI, which stands for socially responsible investments. There is a growing movement in SRI. Unfortunately, the rates of return are not yet up to par with some “socially irresponsible investments”, but that may not be true in the future.
So what to do? I asked the Café’s financial editor to take a look at SRIs, particularly “green” mutual funds – those which invest in environmentally friendly companies. Our editor found a fair amount of information on the subject, some good and some bad. This will be the focus of a future Café edition.