Kentucky’s state auditor has joined the Republican crusade of craziness aimed at stamping out every last shred of decency in the land.
The role model for baseless meanness remains Donald Trump, with his recent shameless stunt of blaming the horrible National Airport crash on some mysterious mix of ethnicity and disability.
Allison Ball’s effort to get on board came in a January 31 commentary in the Courier-Journal. In her online essay she bragged about browbeating financial institutions into abandoning efforts to help people.
Ball’s twist on the celebration of nonsense is to go after two favorite right-wing targets at once – basic human decency AND reducing pollution.
Right-wing attacks on the free market
Once upon a time she’d be shunned by conservatives for such ill-informed interference in the free market. Now it’s a prerequisite for getting your wristband to the celebration of thoughtless cruelty.
Claiming to be protecting the pensions of Kentuckians, Ball writes that she is actively opposing private sector policies that place a value on a clean environment and expanded labor pools that might include immigrants and people with different abilities and backgrounds.
She implies an unsupported criticism that socially responsible policies hurt investment performance. There is no evidence of that anywhere. None. Nada. Zilch.
The lack of facts for her claims that doing the right thing is financially risky reveals that Ball is not interested in the welfare of Kentuckians – it’s all about the symbolism.
Decency is a good investment
Socially Responsible Investing — yes, SRI is a thing — has long-time and worldwide organizational support. It’s an investment strategy that takes into consideration social justice, corporate ethics, and environmental sustainability IN ADDITION TO, NOT INSTEAD OF, profits. (Emphasis added for Allison Ball’s benefit.)
SRI is well-studied, and it does no harm to investment returns. Some studies actually show a benefit. That’s because the future is not in tough-sounding talk, but in sustainability and integrity. I’ve told my financial advisor I want to lean toward Socially Responsible Investing, and I’m doing just fine.
Ball boasts that in addition to standing up for financial security, she’s also helping protect Kentucky’s energy industry. Coal has been very important to Kentucky. But smart investors don’t ignore the future. The solar energy industry has been growing at a rapid clip in the U.S. for years. Here in Kentucky there’s a network of electric vehicle jobs, including ones provided by two large battery plants under construction bringing more than 10,000, good-paying full-time jobs. Even the Kentucky Coal Museum has solar panels on its roof.
Oh, and all that socially responsible investing might even help ease the climate change-related floods and wildfires that jeopardize our children’s standard of living.
The Kentucky legislature has hobbled the growth of electric cars and solar power. It’s propped up coal mining against the recommendations even of the state’s electric utilities. And now the state’s auditor has joined it in looking to the past and pushing back against the future.
Justice, ethics, and the environment are not risky long-term investment strategies. They’re smart and sound. The nation, Kentucky, and our state auditor need to quit putting sloganeering over financial security.
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