Bad Companies, Pensions, SS reform

As Oregon public employees know, the public retirement system took a nasty hit when fraudulent giants Enron and Worldcom fell. Why our public retirement fund was so heavily invested in such short-term, quick-buck companies baffles me, but none less, I really can’t expect to depend on the public retirement system if they continue to invest in bad companies.

But what are bad companies, and who are they? I suppose for starters you could look for companies that do business with rogue nations. I’m not sure how I feel about the branding, but if we as a country decide that it is illegal to do business with these folks, then we should sure as hell make sure that companies like Haliburton, General Electric, and Phillips-Conoco either stop doing business with them, or suffer the financial consequences.

A recent CBS News article looks at these companies, and points out the almost seamless connection between these companies and projects that undermine both the security of our country and breaks our own laws. I suppose the mail does get routed through an office in the Cayman Islands, but that still doesn’t make for a very sound long term investment.

And speaking of sound, long term investments, Social Security won’t work for us either. A friend of mine has been showing me regression curves and calculated returns on our SS payments, and it looks grim. Neither of us expect that Social Security will do anything for us but cost. And we’re mostly OK with that. Chris would understandably like to invest that money elsewhere. And Pres. Bush would like him to be able to do that too. And I’m not totally opposed to it either. In theory, the return would be greater if invested elsewhere, which would help pay for all those old people, and allow us to look forward to somethign. But I have these irrational fears that investing SS money elsewhere could be dangerous. Why? Because of bad companies.

Supposedly there have been crackdowns on being a bad company. Even Haliburton is under scrutiny for the time during Veep Cheney’s tenure. Something ought to come of all this because we’ll be in even worse of a pickle if we start spreading the money around and companies behave the same as they have lately. Heck – we’d be in the same shape as my public retirement fund.