Woman to Woman

Commentary

By Shaunti Feldhahn

• Shaunti Feldhahn

At first glance, companies practicing Muslim Sharia look like a conservative investor’s dream - and establishments that family-oriented consumers would want to support. Companies following Sharia avoid gambling, porn and alcoholic businesses, will not charge interest and will not try to produce extreme profits. One giant Bahrain-based financial holding company that follows Sharia, once named the First Islamic Investment Bank (now called Arcapita), is the largest Middle-East based investment firm in the U.S.. Caribou Coffee, PODS, and Church’s Chicken are just three of their many holdings.

The problem comes when you realize that Sharia is an all-encompassing ideology that many adherents believe should not and cannot be limited just to business. In many countries its personal application leads to terrible human rights violations, such as men being allowed to beat and subjugate their wives, authorities cutting off hands for stealing, and so on.

Oil-cash rich Middle-Eastern companies are investing in the U.S. and elsewhere at a record pace. Many practice the business form of Sharia… but when you and I patronize those businesses, where do our dollars actually go?

Arcapita’s website forthrightly explains that 81 percent of the organization “is held by over 255 prominent individuals and institutions mostly from the Arabian Gulf region.” This means that a huge percentage of the profit of this massive company go to 200 wealthy Middle-Eastern influencers. And history has shown that they aren’t always people with human rights or American interests at heart. In 2002, an Arcapita power-broker, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, defended the bloody acts of Palestinian terrorists, commending “our brothers and children in Al-Aqsa and the blessed land of Palestine generously sacrificing their blood, giving their souls willingly in the way of Allah.” He later stepped down.

I have always loved Caribou Coffee, but as I walked by one recently I hesitated to go in. I’m really not sure that the Middle-Eastern investors who own most of it have our national values or interests at heart; and if they fervently support business Sharia, it seems highly likely that some of them use their wealth and influence to spread family Sharia as well. When there is a choice of coffee shops, do I really want to support all that with my money?

Commentary

By Andrea Cornell Sarvady

• Andrea Cornell Sarvady

Though this summer has been dominated by legendary swimmers and gymnasts, there’s another “sport” looking at lifetime achievement gold: the dirty political trick.

Judges, who makes the Dream Team?

Karl Rove leaps to mind, followed quickly by the late Lee Atwater, Newt Gingrich and a host of other Republican politicos. Even now, in a year when the Democratic campaign seems poised to stick the landing, they still lag behind when it comes to offering up strong competition in the Take-No-Prisoners Olympics.

“The job is to win,” former GOP operative Allen Raymond recently told the Washington Post. Raymond isn’t as famous as the rest of the championship team, only the most forthcoming, perhaps because he actually did prison time for his Republican National Committee smear campaigns. “…You have an obligation to do the best job you can to get the outcome your clients want, which is to win.”

This all-important obligation propels self-proclaimed proponents of God and country to behave in a consistently immoral and unpatriotic manner. The patently false “Obama is a Muslim With terrorist ties” campaign follows quite a greatest-hits series: Atwater’s 1988 “Willie Horton” ad that put Michael Dukakis in cahoots with a murderer, the 2004 “Swift Boat” ad that turned John Kerry’s Vietnam bravery into something traitorous. Saving the worst for last: the Bush team’s hideous 2000 South Carolina “poll” that encouraged voters to assume McCain’s adopted daughter from Bangladesh was an “illegitimate black child.” Republican strategists go after their own with such vengeance it makes the Hillary Clinton / Barack Obama sniping look like a schoolyard spat.

Democrats are not above dirty tactics and both major parties have self-serving windbags on television and writers penning tell-alls that read like middle-school “slam books.” Yet we’re not debating media coverage here, despite the Right’s incessant efforts to deflect its thuggery by whining about the “liberal media”.

No, when it comes to in-house campaign conniving, the gold goes to GOP operatives, blithely unconcerned if families are destroyed and reputations shattered. Forget all their noise about God and country, and remember: for the Republican strategist, this is about serving the client, no matter the collateral damage.

As for serving the USA? I guess that’s just for Beijing.

Commentary

By Shaunti Feldhahn

• Shaunti Feldhahn

Companies should not only be allowed to provide certain types of political education to employees, but they have a responsibility to do so when certain election results will directly affect those employees’ jobs.

Corporate America got an alarming wake-up call last year with the near-approval of the deceptively named Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). With EFCA’s Senate sponsor Barack Obama running for president against a vocal EFCA opponent, it is no wonder that companies are scrambling to educate employees about the likely impact of this election.

The EFCA would radically change America’s union landscape by eliminating regulated secret ballots as the method of unionizing a work force. Instead, union organizers could spend months personally collecting signatures for union membership, and as soon as they got over the 50 percent mark, the work force would automatically be unionized without giving opponents a vote. The Service Employees International Union estimates that it could then organize 1 million workers a year, rather than its current rate of 100,000 a year.

There’s a reason union membership has declined by half in the last 25 years, why we’ve largely moved to a post-union economy, and why major employers like Wal-Mart need to educate their employees about the ramifications of this election. Unionization comes with massive costs that will put many businesses in financial difficulty and lose many employees their jobs.

Cintas Corporation, a corporate supply company, has made Fortune Magazine’s “Most Admired Company” list eight years in a row, and has also been recognized as one of the best employers to work for. In an email interview, public relations manager Heather Trainer said “Cintas believes individuals have the right to say yes, and the freedom to say no, to unionization,” but also that “Cintas feels it’s important that our employee-partners fully understand the implications that Employee Free Choice Act could have on their work environment and benefits.”

Here we have an award-winning company in Ohio that could change almost overnight if Barack Obama wins the race in November. Employers cannot tell employees how to vote, but they can and should give them this pertinent information. Then employees can vote their conscience in secret. Which is more than they’ll be able to do if union organizers get their way.

Commentary

By Andrea Cornell Sarvady

• Andrea Cornell Sarvady

Remember your incredulity when some shoppers first started buying bottled water? “We’re buying water now?” we’d say to ourselves, laughing at the amount of H20 some people were heaving into their trunks. In no time at all, most of us got into the habit as well. Now, however, the whole bottled-water phenomenon has become hard to swallow.

Most people buy bottled water either because they think it tastes better and or because it’s safer. Yet in blind taste tests, consumers can’t tell the difference between bottled water and tap, (and a few minutes in the fridge improves the taste even more). Various studies also show that bottled water is on average no healthier for you than tap. What’s more, 40 percent of bottled water comes from the same source as tap water. It is simply packaged prettily and sold back to you at up to 4,000 times the cost.

Just making all those bottles we drink takes more than 17 million barrels of oil in a year. That’s enough to fuel more than a million cars annually, and all for a product we can get in our kitchen or workplaces. The current economy requires some painful belt-tightening, but I found it relatively easy to let go of this expensive, wasteful habit. A cheap filter and a chemically safe, reusable plastic or aluminum bottle is enough to keep me hydrated, saving my summer survival funds for beach and lake water instead.

Gigi Kellett, director of Corporate Accountability International’s Think Outside the Bottle campaign, recently spoke to me about encouraging consumers to go back to the tap. She acknowledges that some communities have inferior water supplies but urges them to fight for improved systems, rather than relying on a short-term fix of bottled water. Thinking outside the bottle, Kellett declares, is simply “more sustainable, better for the environment, better for our pocketbooks and better for our public water systems.”

Here’s my favorite reason for turning on the faucet: I no longer wonder if some modern day version of a snake oil salesman has his hand in my pocket. Now as I head to the gym to work out, refreshing bottle of tap water in hand, I feel like I’m exercising common sense as well.

Commentary

By Shaunti Feldhahn

• Shaunti Feldhahn

Barack Obama has been trying to reach religious voters - but is caught in a quandary of his party’s own making. Since the 1980s, the Democrats have unfortunately made the “religious right” a bogeyman, a scapegoat for America’s problems. Not surprisingly, secularists have flocked to the Democrats’ banner and religious folks (with the exception of black churchgoers) have left it. And as the Democrats’ constituency became less religious, the party naturally began to champion more social policies that ran counter to traditional religious values. Which only fed the cycle. As a result, in each election since 1992 if you were a white Protestant who regularly went to church, and you voted Democratic, you were in a small and lonely minority (about one out of five in 2004).

In the 1992 Clinton-Bush election, among those rarely or never attending religious services, three of four supported Clinton - the same ratio supporting Kerry 12 years later. According to a July Gallup poll, those who don’t identify with a religion and feel it isn’t important support Obama overJohn McCain 65 percent to 26 percent — a ratio of 2.5 to 1.

Studies show that ardent secularists have become as large and loyal a Democratic voting bloc as organized labor. In a report by Baruch College/CUNY Professors Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio, in the 2000 Bush-Gore election both unions and secularists “comprised about 16 percent of the white electorate, and both backed Gore with two-thirds of their votes.”

The problem - and the reason for Obama’s dilemma — is that many in this voting bloc are what political scientists call “anti-fundamentalists:” their political motivation is intense resentment of the religious right. In their eye-opening report, “Prejudice for the Thinking Classes: Media Exposure, Political Sophistication, and the Anti-Christian Fundamentalist,” Bolce and De Maio show that nearly one in five white non-evangelicals “hold intensely antagonistic feelings toward Christian fundamentalists” and conclude, “one has to reach back to pre-New Deal America[‘s] political divisions between Catholics and Protestants … to find a period when voting behavior was influenced by this degree of antipathy toward a religious group.”

With such unfortunate perceptions embedded in a core constituency and its trajectory of anti-religious policies, the Democratic Party has an uphill battle to make people of faith feel welcome.