Divest Iran

NY Times:

It is the kind of political movement that fits handily on a bumper sticker: Divest Iran.

Over the past year, one state, Missouri, has opted to do just that, while several others, including New Jersey, have also begun to write or to consider legislation to divest.

But the nascent movement took on decidedly more weight last week with the preliminary success of a bill in the California Legislature. The measure would force two of the nation’s largest pension funds — devoted to the state’s public employees and its teachers, with combined holdings of nearly $400 billion — to remove their money from any foreign company doing business in Iran. American companies are already barred from such dealings.

The author, Assemblyman Joel Anderson, a Republican from San Diego County, said the bill was meant to protect the $24 billion he estimates the two funds currently have invested in international companies with ties to Iran. Mr. Anderson said his concern was Iran’s potential economic instability, not its current standoff with the West.

“They’ve got a president that is talking one day about having nuclear bombs and saying he’s not the next day, and taking hostages,” he said on Friday, referring to the Iranian capture of 15 British sailors and marines. “I’m not saying that we should take a foreign policy stance; I’m saying it’s not a good place to invest our money.”

Mr. Anderson’s language was notably more heated when he introduced the bill in January, raising the specter of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and calling money “the mother’s milk of terrorism.” Last week, Mr. Anderson said he had toned down the terrorism angle in part because of legal concerns regarding divestment bills, which came into vogue in the 1980s as part of a movement to force pensions and money out of South African interests in protest of apartheid. More recently, divestment has been used to voice displeasure with tobacco companies and the atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan.

States are not the only entities trying to put pressure on Iran. On March 24, the United Nations Security Council imposed new, more stringent sanctions in an effort to stop the country’s uranium enrichment program and to try to force it to rejoin negotiations. In Congress, Representative Tom Lantos, a Democrat from the San Francisco Bay Area, introduced legislation last month to impose additional economic sanctions on Iran. Mr. Lantos cited denials of the Holocaust by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and his comments that Israel should be “wiped off the map.”

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Some divestment bills have also been challenged in court. In February, a federal judge struck down an Illinois law that called for Sudanese divestment, saying it interfered with the federal government’s ability to conduct foreign policy.

William A. Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, with offices in New York and Washington, which filed suit against the Illinois law, said divestment bills — while morally laudable — could sabotage diplomatic efforts to isolate Iran.

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Diplomacy has been pretty much of a failure in dealing with the true believers of an evil regime in Iran. It is hard to point to many diplomatic achievements with this evil bunch since 1979. If the companies are concerned about the ability to raise capitol, then they should be concerned about doing business with the genocidal religious bigots of Iran.