Divestment

CREDIT Where Credit Is Due Dept.: City Controller Alan Butkovitz should be commended for convincing the city's pension board to divest funds in companies doing business in Sudan. Sudan is Africa's largest country, and a campaign of genocide in the Darfur region has caused the deaths of 400,000 people and the displacement of millions more. It's been called one of the worst nightmares in recent history. The divesture involves $145 million in pension funds to be diverted to other investments.

A member of the University of Pennsylvania board of trustees said yesterday he believes his colleagues will vote tomorrow to begin a plan for limited divestment of South Africa-related stocks. Members of Penn's Trustee Committee on University Responsibility, which has been studying the issue and polling the Penn community on divestment, is spending today preparing its recommendation to the full 66-member board tomorrow. Committee chairman Richard Brown said he could not comment on the issue until then.

Although the action may not have a major impact on apartheid, the University of Pennsylvania should sell its $110 million in South Africa- related investments because it is the morally right thing to do, Bishop Desmond Tutu told a group of university and corporate leaders yesterday. Several participants at the meeting, a private breakfast at the home of Penn President Sheldon Hackney, said Bishop Tutu did not bring up the issue of divestment but made the statement in answer to a question.

Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania have set a firm deadline for withdrawing investments from South Africa if "substantive progress" in dismantling apartheid is not made by June 30, 1987. If progess is not made in the next 12 months, the university will give companies in which it has investments until June 30, 1988, to pull out of South Africa, or Penn will sell its holdings in those firms. The trustees voted unanimously to modify a Jan. 17 decision that had set an 18-month timetable before the university would consider divesting its stock and other holdings, worth $92 million.

Supporters of a proposed Pennsylvania law that would require state government, cities and public retirement funds to shed all investments in South Africa said yesterday that they have two new advantages this year. One is that Gov. Casey favors broad divestiture of holdings in South Africa. His predecessor, Dick Thornburgh, called for limited divestiture and waited until the last of his eight years as governor to do so. Another advantage, said House Speaker K. Leroy Irvis (D., Allegheny)

The city wouldn't be able to buy Oreo cookies or IBM computers, and replacements for City Council's fleet of Fords would be taboo under a South African divestment bill approved yesterday by Council's Rules Committee. The bill, introduced almost three years ago by City Councilman David Cohen, prohibits city agencies from buying products or services from companies that do business or have investments in South Africa. The restrictions also apply to companies that trade with neighboring Namibia (South West Africa)

Legislation that would ban the city from doing any business with companies linked to South Africa is morally right but too hard to carry out, a Goode administration official told City Council yesterday. "On the one hand, it makes a strong moral statement," city Procurement Commissioner Angela Dowd-Burton said at a Council hearing on the bill. "On the other hand, it may do so in a way that is cumbersome to enforce and costly in its application. " Council's Rules Commitee, chaired by Councilman David Cohen, is considering the Cohen-sponsored bill, which would make the city's anti-apartheid policies among the toughest in the nation.

Five University of Pennsylvania students and four campus organizations yesterday filed suit, seeking to set aside the Jan. 17 vote by Penn trustees to wait 18 months before considering whether to sell $92 million in investments in companies doing business in South Africa. The suit filed in the Orphan's Court Division of Common Pleas Court sought to void the trustees' Jan. 17 vote, alleging violations of the Pennsylvania Open Meeting Law and conflicts of interests among some trustees.

University of Pennsylvania trustees agreed yesterday to divest by June 1988 Penn's holdings in firms doing business in South Africa if no substantive progress has been made in dismantling apartheid. But the move did little to satisfy student leaders of Penn's Anti-Apartheid Coalition. Chanting slogans that mocked the university's position, about 20 students briefly disrupted the trustees' meeting at the Furness Building on Penn's campus. " 'We abhor apartheid, but we're not going to do anything about it' - that's how we feel the trustees react toward apartheid," Polly Farnum, a leader of the coalition, said afterward.

A hearing on whether the city should rid itself of all economic ties to South Africa is expected Tuesday, when a City Council committee is scheduled to consider a sweeping divestment bill. The mainstream business community, including the Chamber of Commerce, is lining up against the bill, saying it would be too expensive and too disruptive, especially at a time when the city budget is in the red. Supporters, including Councilman David Cohen, say the measure is the moral thing to do. Cohen said the bill, which he introduced, would cause minimal expense, if any, and he offered to amend it if proved wrong.

I APPRECIATE Stu Bykofsky's anger and frustration at the apparent hypocrisy of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement against Israeli interests. One must seriously question whether this group and its aims are in anyone's best interests. Still, his argument is flawed at a number of levels. First, the fact that there have been a few Arab citizens like Miss Israel Rana Raslan, of Haifa, who have risen above their second-class status does not belie the fact that the Arab citizens of Israel do not enjoy "full rights" equal to those of their fellow Jews as he suggests.

President Obama recently announced that Iran has been secretly constructing a nuclear facility south of Tehran. Sadly, this revelation was not surprising, given that the Iranian regime has spent years lying about its nuclear program, sponsoring terrorism, and oppressing its own citizens. Whatever one thinks about the prospects of diplomacy, it's time for tougher measures to constrain the regime's ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction before it's too late. One promising approach is targeted divestment from Iran's energy sector.

THE Beijing Olympics have triggered an impressive amount of outrage among human-rights activists and everyone else who has a bone to pick with China. Critics have taken advantage of this golden opportunity to prick the conscience of the West, invoking the ghosts of Tianamen Square and Mao's Cultural Revolution. They've urged President Bush to engage in a diplomatic boycott reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's Moscow mistake, and have even gone so far as to demand that athletes who've spent their entire lives training for this irreplaceable moment stay home.

In the fall, a month after he opened the Mount Airy Casino Resort and while he was the focus of a grand-jury investigation, Louis A. DeNaples began making preparations to transfer ownership of Pennsylvania's first stand-alone slots parlor to family members. The Scranton millionaire asked the state Gaming Control Board on Nov. 13 for permission to transfer 98 percent of the Poconos casino to trusts for his children and grandchildren. The board, which suspended DeNaples' license Wednesday hours after he was charged with four counts of perjury, did not act on the request and will not while the suspension is in place, said Richard McGarvey, a board spokesman.

A prominent Democratic fund-raiser with a criminal past surrendered to California authorities yesterday as nearly every politician he has helped rushed to disavow him - except Gov. Rendell. The governor said he would wait to see if Norman Hsu's 1991 fraud conviction was upheld before divesting nearly $40,000 in campaign cash the apparel executive raised for him. "I think this whole thing stinks," Rendell said in a telephone interview. "If this conviction stands I will give the money back, but this idea of making him out to be some sort of major criminal is absurd.

New York City has not only proposed to limit trans fat in restaurants, it also proposed requiring menu labeling in some restaurants. Half of chain restaurants don't provide any nutrition information to their customers. Those that do provide it on hard-to-find pamphlets or inconvenient Web sites. Like New Yorkers, Philadelphians are increasingly relying on restaurants to feed themselves and their families. Today, adults and children eat, on average, about a third of their calories from restaurants and other food-service establishments.

CREDIT Where Credit Is Due Dept.: City Controller Alan Butkovitz should be commended for convincing the city's pension board to divest funds in companies doing business in Sudan. Sudan is Africa's largest country, and a campaign of genocide in the Darfur region has caused the deaths of 400,000 people and the displacement of millions more. It's been called one of the worst nightmares in recent history. The divesture involves $145 million in pension funds to be diverted to other investments.

A Newark assemblyman tore into state Treasurer John E. McCormac yesterday for posturing against a bill requiring the state to divest itself of investments in companies doing business in Sudan. In the midst of a budget hearing on updated state revenue figures, Assemblyman William D. Payne assailed McCormac for suggesting that it would be fiscally irresponsible to pull the plug on an estimated $7 billion in state investments. "The money that we're earning is dripping in blood," Payne said.

With tensions between their communities on the rise, about 175 Jews and Presbyterians attended a two-day, closed-door convocation ending yesterday to "reexamine and strengthen" their interfaith ties. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) infuriated many American Jews this summer when it began exploring selective divestment from companies doing business in Israel and the occupied territories. That followed a controversial decision by the Presbytery of Philadelphia last year to set up Congregation Avodat Yisrael, a church for Messianic Jews, who believe Jesus is the messiah.

In the harsh midday chill of the cold spell that will not end, two small groups with opposing but equally passionate views milled about the heart of the Rutgers University campus yesterday, not letting the mercury deter them from their missions. For one group, the aim was to protest Israeli policy toward the Palestinans by encouraging an end to Rutgers' investments in Israel and in American corporations doing business there. The other group wanted to show that Israel was the only viable democracy in the troubled Mideast.