Does Tennessee's State Pension Fund Help Fund Terror?

http://billhobbs.com/hobbsonline/004367.html ^ | August 16, 2004 | Bill Hobbs

[Bill Hobbs]

Does the state of Tennessee unwittingly help fund terrorist-supporting nations through the investments made by its public-employee retirement system's pension plan? The answer is, we don' t know - but it's a good bet the answer is yes.

We don't know for certain, however, because officials with the Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System refused to provide researchers with a Washington D.C. think tank, the Center for Security Policy, with any information about how it has invested Tennessee taxpayers' funds.

A little background: The Center for Security Policy recently completed an extensive study, Terrorism Investments of the 50 States, which is the first national security-based statistical analysis of the investment patterns of America's public pension funds. This report - available here in a 115-page PDF file - proves empirically that our country's largest and most prominent public pension systems tend to be heavily invested in global publicly traded companies that have business activities in terrorist-sponsoring states.

For example, the pension system of tiny Rhode Island has close to $400 million invested in 41 companies that actively doing business in terrorist-sponsoring countries. America's largest public pension system - the California Public Employees Retirement System - has more $17 billion invested in 201 such companies.

In fact, according to the study:

On average, America's Top 100 pension systems invest between 15 and 23 percent of their portfolio in companies that do business in terrorist-sponsoring states.

[Bill Hobbs]

The Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System refused to provide the information to the Center for Security Policy even though, on page 44 of the TCRS' latest annual report, it says, "A complete portfolio listing is available upon request." So, I have requested one, and will post details about it on my blog and here at FreeRepublic when it is provided to me.