LDS Church’s Investment Manager — Learning to Love the Bomb?

A quick note to share our latest two collaborations with the Salt Lake City Weekly on the Mormon Church’s investment manager and worker deaths at Northrop Grumman.

Hi, everyone,

I’m thrilled that the Salt Lake City Weekly invited us to take part in their “year in review” issue, on newsstands now. We recapped what (hasn’t) happened since we copublished an exposé in June about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, i.e., the Mormon Church, holding tens of millions of dollars in stock in nuclear weapons contractors via its secretive investment manager. Doing so is a no-no for many mainline Christian churches that have long instituted “sin screens” against such investments and at odds with the Mormon church’s own remarkable dissent against the Cold War-era MX missile. (“It is ironic, and a denial of the very essence of that gospel, that in this same general area there should be constructed a mammoth weapons system potentially capable of destroying much of civilization” — you can read more about what led up to that statement of dissent in our June piece here.)

Cracks in the Sin Screen: The Link Between Mormon Tithes and Nuclear Weapons

Did our cover story and an August protest at the fund’s office sway those investors? No signs of soul-searching yet. We checked their latest Securities and Exchange Commission filings, which show that the investment manager, Ensign Peak, continues to hold more than one million shares of the top 11 companies identified by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Those stocks are worth, according to the SEC, about $289,430,858.

If you’re in Utah and get your hands on the issue, please also read the year-end piece by Inkstick friend Mary Dickson, an advocate for “downwinders” in Utah who is part of a nationwide grassroots lobbying effort for the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), to compensate survivors of nuclear weapons testing for cancers and other debilitating health impacts. As Dickson reports in her piece, Utah was the most heavily impacted state and Utahns have filed the most claims for compensation — but nonetheless the state’s Republican congressional delegation are the key holdouts whose refusal to support the bill is preventing it from moving forward.

We’ll also be back in the City Weekly’s pages in January for Utahns to get a chance to read our deep-dive into how Utah’s workplace safety agency quietly downgraded the charges Northrop Grumman faced for the deaths of two workers at a missile plant south of Salt Lake City.

Inkstick at Outrider Foundation’s Nuclear Reporting Summit

I was sincerely surprised how many reporters and attendees signed up for my morning training session at the Outrider Foundation’s Nuclear Reporting Summit earlier this month in DC. It was about public records, including state, local, and financial ones, that I use to investigate nuclear weapons contractors. It was the early morning session of the conference’s last day, and I was pleased to see how many local reporters took part in it. Thank you Outrider for the invitation! If you’d like my cheat-sheet for records or a video of the presentation, send me a note at tbarnes@inkstickmedia.com

Photo courtesy of Outrider Foundation

Last days of Newsmatch

If you support this work, a reminder: We recently brought two new reporting fellows from Connecticut and Missouri onto this beat, and we’re eager to keep diving into the people and places tied up in the United States soon-to-be $1 trillion defense budget. If you’d like to support their work and mine, we’re part of Newsmatch for the rest of the year — all donations to Inkstick are doubled by the Institute for Nonprofit News through the end of the year.

What makes us different from the rest of the national security press? Well, for one, we are a nonprofit that, as a matter of policy, refuses any funding from defense contractors that could color our views — a big rarity on this beat where, for example, mainstream outlets are chock full of ads for Lockheed Martin or literally sponsored by Northrop Grumman.