Pages tagged "Economics"

An interview with Paula Palmer

This year I retired from a quarter century of teaching college geoscience. A major challenge accompanying this new venture has been making investment decisions I have little experience with. In doing so, I must, of course, protect our family “nest egg,” so we can continue to pay the bills, take care of emergencies, and help with the extended family.

Dear Editor: I am so delighted that Western Friend published the 2017 IMYM keynote talk on finances (September/October 2017). Financial management is a spiritual practice, at least as taught by my teacher, Jesus of Nazareth. Citizens of the United States are profligate wasters of world resources. One of the reasons for this is rank ignorance.

A friend told me a story about a woman with limited English proficiency who makes and sells tamales. She did not understand when customers asked her if the tamales were gluten free, so she asked her daughter what gluten free meant. The daughter said, “That’s something rich people won’t eat.”

Dear Editor: I read with interest the article “Quakers, Climate, and Money” in the May/June 2015 issue of Western Friend. I am always happy when Friends concern themselves as individuals with the future that climate change will bring, and take action. I would like your readers to know, however, that in deciding how to handle invested assets, they may find useful information by reading about the movement for divestment from fossil fuel companies that is going on worldwide. The Friend who wrote the article may find additional information that could change his opinion about the values of shareholder activism vs. divestment.

Simplicity runs in opposition to modern life.  Thousands of people, and potentially hundreds of companies, are involved in the production, distribution, and sale of something as simple as a pencil or a cup of coffee – to say nothing of a pair of sneakers, a movie, or a car, or providing a service like a mutual fund or a night in a hotel room. 

Dear Friends: I want like to share with you an item I read in The Advocate (New Orleans newspaper) and my own mathematical reflections on it.  On November 19, 2015, the Advocate reported that the U.S. drops an average of 2,228 bombs a month in Syria and Iraq, at a cost of $11.1 million a day.

I learned about the power of nonviolence and nonviolent action in the spring of 1960, while participating in sit-ins at lunch counters in Maryland and Virginia with African American fellow students at Howard University. Most Saturdays we would go to a People’s Drug store, sit down at a lunch counter, get arrested, and then sing freedom songs in our jail cells all weekend.

Dear Friends: Crimes against humanity are being committed by our government in our name and with our tax dollars: We are bombing people in seven primarily Muslim countries. We are killing tens of thousands of people in the Middle East (most of them civilians) and creating millions of refugees. We are spending one trillion dollars a year on wars and preparations for wars while cutting funds for almost everything else. We are spending one trillion dollars for modernizing our nuclear weapons and the missiles that carry them. We are threatening nuclear wars with Russia and Korea.