This interview with Charles Sandmel, a veteran of the municipal bond market, gives us some insights into current trends in the ethical investing movement. Some key points: The leading market sectors over the last few years are in areas that “most of them [ethical investors] avoid, such as energy.”Ethical investors don’t buy “Big Oil because of the pollution problems.”Examples of ethical investments: wind turbine farms and facilities.Examples of unethical investments: government bonds for nations with standing armies.Sandmel likes bond funds...

In between dire warnings from the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) about the evil neo-liberal economic order and calls for more money from its member denominations, this gem arrived today via Ecumenical News International: Church bank says its loans are at forefront of anti-poverty fight Utrecht (ENI). Thirty years after its launch, a church-backed international development bank says it has e a world leader in providing resources for small loans for poor people to set up in business. The...

Rosa Parks Cicle is a small park in the middle of downtown Grand Rapids. It is often used as a public music venue in the summertime, and an ice skating rink in the winter. Unfortunately, this year it was scheduled to remain closed (like so many parks facilities and pools in the area) due to a citywide budget crunch. Here is where businesses and private individuals step up and take the baton where the local government fails. Two businesses (LaSalle...

A man’s home is his castle, unless of course government officials need his property for a new strip mall or a hotel. Since June, when the U.S. Supreme Court dramatically expanded government’s eminent domain powers, some three dozen states have formulated measures to protect property owners from the Kelo v. New London ruling. Sam Gregg looks at the potential Kelo has to “violate basic norms of justice concerning property.” Read the mentary here. ...

Acton President Rev. Robert A. Sirico appeared yesterday on Your World with Neil Cavuto on the Fox News Channel and discussed the president’s nomination of Harriet Miers to replace Sandra Day O’Connor as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. If you didn’t have a chance to catch the interview live, you can watch it below. ...

Any predictions on how this will turn out? All eyes should be watching Japan, whose legislature just approved the privatization of their postal service. (It is important to note that the Japanese postal service is markedly different from ours here in the States.) It is also a state-owned savings bank with more than $3 trillion (਱.7 trillion) in assets, making it by some measures the largest financial institution in the world, and the largest provider of life insurance in the...

For a succinct article on governmental processes versus private processes, see this nice little report by Bill Steigerwald. It focuses on responses to Hurricane Katrina by panies and by the city, state, and federal governments. Stories like these need to be circulated more widely. ...

An article appeared in Wired News today on the unintended consequences of wind farms. One of these consequences — among many others, I’m sure — is “an astronomical level of bird kills.” Thousands of aging turbines stud the brown rolling hills of the Altamont Pass on I-580 east of San Francisco Bay, a testament to one of the nation’s oldest and best-known experiments in green energy. Next month, hundreds of those blades will spin to a stop, in what appears...

I can’t vouch for the validity of any of the claims made in this new book from Laissez-faire Books, but I confess its publicity material piqued my interest. It argues that inordinate fear of radiation leads to unnecessary and even counterproductive energy policy. As one none-too-keen on radiation in general (stand away from that microwave!), I’m nonetheless intrigued by this book’s argument. ...

Economic reality is finally catching up with the big American automakers and their suppliers, as noted by Thomas Bray in Wednesday’s Detroit News: Around Detroit, the bankruptcy of giant auto parts maker Delphi Corp. is seen as a precursor of what’s in store for the entire American auto industry. More fundamentally, it confirms the bankruptcy of the industrial welfare state. The powers of denial ensure it may be some time before our politicians, unions and even corporate leaders catch up...

On the heels of a proposed city-wide tax on quickservice restaurants in Detroit, a state bill has been introduced in the Michigan House to implement a 2% tax on fast-food establishments. The “Fast-Food Restaurant and Food Service Tax Act” (HB 4804) would apply only to cities with a population over 750,000…and to the best of my knowledge the city of Detroit is the only one in the state that meets that criterion. A key provision of the bill in its...

We’ve discussed textual interpretation a bit on this blog here before. Paul Ricœur, who is famous for his “attempt bine phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation,” passed away earlier this year. One of Ricœur’s important contributions involved an observation about the nature of textual interpretation in distinction to personal dialogue. He writes, for example in his book Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Dialogue is an exchange of questions and answers; there is no exchange of this sort between the writer and...